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newVideoPlayer(”/Beijing_Olympics_Fireworks.flv”, 475, 376,”"); Today is August 8, 2008: 8/8/8. A special day in history because of many reasons, starting with today’s opening of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China. I’ve been watching the ceremony live all morning here in Sweden, and it has been truly amazing at moments, like when the whole city lighted up with the biggest display of fireworks I’ve ever seen. And apart from the fact that the date itself looks cool, in the technology world, 8/8/8 is also special for other reasons:

1876 - Thomas Edison receives a patent for his mimeograph, a precursor of the photocopier.
1908. Wilbur Wright makes his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France. It’s the Wright Brothers’ first public flight and the French public goes wild.
1910 - The US Army installs the first tricycle landing gear on the Army’s Wright Flyer.
1929 - The German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight.
1946 - First flight of the Convair B-36. The B-36 was the largest mass-produced piston engined aircraft ever made and the biggest wingspan combat aircraft ever built.
1974 - Watergate scandal: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces his resignation, effective the next day.
1989 - Space Shuttle program: STS-28 Mission - Space Shuttle Columbia takes off on a secret five-day military mission.

[Wikipedia, Gawker 2008 Olympics Coverage]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

Original post by jesusdiaz

Original post by Jesus Diaz

newVideoPlayer(”tankusb_gizmodo.flv”, 494, 390,”");
Incrudo makes water-proof, shock-proof, scratch-proof, and apparently T-72B tank-proof USB flash drives out of pure titanium. And to prove it, the crazy Ivans pitted the key—which also has a special metal-ceramics composite on the front and back panels, as well as a real ruby that illuminates from the inside—against the legendary tank. Sure, the test is on the mud, but that’s 49.1 tonnes of tank. A Soviet tank. If there’s something cooler than that, I don’t know what is. [Incrudo]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

newVideoPlayer(”instinctiphone_gizmodo.flv”, 494, 390,”");
Sprint has released the rest of its iPhone bashing ads, part of the Instinct $100 million campaign attacking the old iPhone just when Apple is about to release a new version with only-Jobs-knows how many new features. This time, however, on top of the Internet connection and the GPS location, the other features may not be available in the next iPhone. What may be the score card next month?

• Live TV: knowing Apple’s aversion to television, this one will probably not make it to iPhone 2.0.
• Internet speed: For sure, 3G on the iPhone 99.9%
• GPS: High probabilities of GPS making it to the iPhone 2.0, given the standard integration in last-generation chipsets, the low-power consumption, and Apple’s recent focus on geographic location.
• Video capture: Also very high probabilities. The current iPhone can capture video already, and Apple was most probably saving it for the next generation, to both make it right, and as a sales bullet point.
• Music store anywhere: The current iPhone limitation of iTunes Music Store access only through Wi-Fi will most probably disappear in the 3G version as well.

So yes, our verdict remains the same: those $100 million are going down the drain. [Sprint]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

I swear that when I did the image for Variety’s report on HD DVD defections I never saw this hilarious version of Der Untergang, subtitled with very funny dialog about the last minutes of HD DVD in the bunker, the inevitable end of the war. The best part: probably when everyone leaves the room and the premonitory—and obvious—dig at Paramount and Universal. [Thanks Lukas]

Original post by ShoppingBlog.com

newVideoPlayer(”vecstar_gawker.flv”, 475, 376);
Here’s an exclusive video of the classic Star Wars arcade running on an oscilloscope thanks to a sound card and a specially patched version of MAME. We talked with James Brown—the author of this hack, not the Godfather of Soul—about how he did it and the possibilities for his hack. Among them: connect it to a real laser cannon. Full interview and details after the jump.

Jesus Diaz: Stunning hack, James. First question: can you run Asteroids on this?
James Brown: It should run any of the vector games that MAME handles. I’ve only tried it with Star Wars and Asteroids though. I have a poor quality video of Asteroids running on it:

JD: Did it require patching the MAME source?
JB: It did involve patching MAME —in fact that’s all it requires. I modified MAME’s vector rendering code so that instead of rasterizing the image for display on a conventional monitor, it does pretty much what the original hardware was doing.

Since there’s no input on the scope for varying the brightness of the beam, I vary the speed of it to produce the same effect. The scanning signal is output using the soundcard, and the scope connected to the left and right channels in XY mode.

JD: Amazing. So how much time did it take you to do this?
JB: It took a couple of hours to get it up and running.

JD: Is electronics related to your profession or just a hobby?
JB: I work for Lumen Digital creating interactive exhibits. It’s mostly software, but I do a little hardware prototyping too. This hack didn’t involve any electronics; I just happened to have a scope lying around and wanted to play with it.

Lumen Digital Show Reel

JD: It’s hard to believe that no special electronics are needed for a dumbass like me.
JB: Well, there’s not much to say on the project technically. It uses no special hardware—just an oscilloscope connected to the sound card line out.

Early ’80s vector games don’t have a huge amount of detail in them—in game, Star Wars is generally using fewer than 1,000 lines (including repositioning the beam and drawing the starfield). This is easily achievable within the audio bandwidth.

There’s no direct control over beam intensity on my oscilloscope, so instead I vary the speed of the beam. If you turn the brightness right up on the scope, you can see the beam moving from one line to another. To play the game, you turn down the brightness so that only the slowly drawn lines are visible.

JD: So only a soundcard is needed…
JB: Soundcards output an AC signal—any DC component gets cancelled out. What this means when controlling a vector display is that if you have a lot of lines on the left side of the screen, the display will drift to the right to keep it centred. To get around this, the code tracks where the beam is spending its time during each frame, and then draws little dots at the corners of the display to make it balance. You can see these dots flickering on and off in the video as the action changes on screen.

JD: Are you planning to release the patched code back to the community?
JB: It’s tempting to make the code available, but there’s a big difference between a quick proof-of-concept hack, and clean code that can be rolled into MAME and that has a reasonable chance of running on anybody else’s hardware. If there’s enough interest I’ll probably do it, but there’s not too many people with access to an oscilloscope.

JD: Yeah, well, but I have a friend who has a friend with a laser cannon… imagine Star Wars on an entire building…
JB: Yeah, I too want to run it on a laser projector. I built an XY scanner using a couple of speakers with mirrors on them, but it didn’t have the frequency response to display a game. I suspect it can’t be done without closed-loop feedback.

JD: Well, hopefully someone will drop a package with one for you to play. Thank you very much for your time, James. And again, amazing work.
JB: Thank you!

[Star Wars disco-sci-fi theme by legendary group The Bordens]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

newVideoPlayer(”wilsononnbc_gawker.flv”, 475, 376);
Here’s our one and only Wilson Rothman getting all Tom-Cruis-eyed with the weekend Today Show presenter. In theory he’s showing what’s hot for purchase in the gadget world these Holidays, which looks like last year’s options. He says something about the Wii, then something about the DS, then some more about the Sling (”Sling takes your TV and slings it out into the world”??? —he’s so going to pay for that) but in reality, you can see he’s all like “Oh you Ms. Weekend Today Show Hostess, you look so makey-outy today. Rowr!” And he’s oh-so-right. [Today Show]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

newVideoPlayer(”kaossilator_gawker.flv”, 475, 376);
The Korg Kaossilator is a dynamic phrase synthesizer, “a new pocket sized instrument that packs Korg’s world-renowned synth sounds along with innovative performance features into an ultra-compact unit.” Whatever. Didn’t make sense to me until it hit Japan last week and some guys started to post amazing demos online, and not only disco stuff but even blues:

According to Korg, this synthesizer is not only for beginners but for professionals alike. The Kaossilator comes loaded with 100 sound programs, effects and the multi-touch pad KAOSS, which allows you to modify note/pitch by moving your fingers horizontally. Vertically, you can assign different functions, like feedback or modulation depth.

As you can see in the videos, the results could be absolutely crazy. And that means both bad crazy and good crazy. In any case, I want one. [Korg via Music Thing]

Original post by Jesus Diaz

newVideoPlayer(”artsypsp_gawker.flv”, 475, 286);
Still groggy from a kickass pre-holiday kickoff weekend, at first we thought this trailer for the newer and slimmer Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) was part of a bad fever dream we were having. But no, this longish (4:15) piece of video art made us laugh, made us cry, it was better than Cats. While we probably would have picked different theme music, this animated tour de force shows a tremendous amount of creativity. If this is a sign of things to come from Sony’s marketing flacks, it looks like the company’s finally onto something. [Techeblog]

Original post by Charlie White