Tag: rubbish
CES 2009: Sansa slotRadio – 1000 "hand-picked" songs, you'll hate 95% of em
I’m developing a bit of a love/hate relationship with Sandisk. They swing wildly from releasing great, innovative stuff, to wasting plastic on awful products. Unfortunately slotRadio falls into the latter category.
Sansa slotRadio is an MP3 player that comes with 1000 songs pre-loaded. It’s essentially a music player for people who’ve got absolutely no interest in what music playing, as long as there’s something in the background. The songs come on a Sandisk microSD card, but they’re tied to the card with DRM, so you can’t do anything else with them. If you work your way through the thousand, then you can buy 1,000 more for $40 (£26).
My advice? Save your cash and stick to Last.fm. In the meantime, go check out our other CES coverage here.
(via PC Mag)
Bomb-proof info-bins to hit London
Since the IRA’s bomb attacks in the 80s, there have been remarkably few bins around railway and tube stations in the UK – the fear being that terrorists might stick a bomb in one. Well, now bins are back. A company called Media Metrica has designed BIN 2.0. It’s bombproof, has recycling sections, and feature screens with news, travel, and weather info on them.
It’s been tested in the New Mexico desert over the past five years, and costs £15,000 to produce and £3,000 to install. It’s hoped that costs will be recouped by local businesses sponsoring a bin. In the event of an attack, the bins can be changed to display emergency information, directing people away from danger areas.
(via The Inquirer)
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Minox DigitalSpyCam – neither surreptitious, nor sneaky
Pictured to the right is the Minox DigitalSpyCam. It’s small, but that’s pretty much the only thing going in its favour. It’s just 3.2 megapixel, meaning that your phone can probably take better photos. It comes with a flash, but that’s even bigger than the camera, so although it’s still portable, it’s not exactly handy…
Carbon Hero – track your carbon footprint on your phone, no guitars in sight
Carbon footprints are difficult. They’ve received a lot of attention in the press, and they’re firmly stamped (no pun intended) on the public psyche, but they’re not actually very accurate. Given the complexity of power generation in modern life, it’s something that’s incredibly difficult to calculate, and very easy to underestimate.
This device, the Carbon Hero, was designed by an art graduate named Andreas Zachariah. It tracks your phone signal, and if you’re moving at train-ish speed, on a train track, then it assumes you’re on a train, works out the distance you travel, and gives you a number for your carbon footprint. Simple, right? Well, there’s about a billion things wrong with the idea…
Steve Jobs: "MobileMe wasn't good enough" to ship alongside iPhone 3G
Showing the sort of honesty that important company bosses only ever display well after a product launch, Steve Jobs has criticised the iPhone 3G’s MobileMe synching app, saying it’s, well, a bit rubbish.
In the internal email to Apple staff, leaked to tech blog Ars Somethingorother, Steve said “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same…
SUCK UK cardboard mini arcade: pinnacle of modern engineering
Keeping in tune with today’s DIY theme, new from SUCK UK (home of the drumstick pencil and the wooden postcard) is the flatpack Mini Arcade. This incredibly useful piece of folded cardboard arranges into a mini co-op cabinet, with a space where the screen would be, upon which you can perch your PSP.
Hitachi unveils your future desk mate
Meet EMIEW 2. EMIEW stands for Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate, which is a nightmare for the poor thing to type in every morning when it logs onto the network, so EMIEW 2 it is.
EMIEW is an office worker robot, which was recently demonstrated at Hitachi’s Research Lab. It has the ability to (brace yourself) guide visitors…
