Remember IBM’s ThinkPad 701 with the butterfly keyboard? This isn’t it, it’s better…

The rest is here: 
Kohjinsha’s dual-sceen DZ Series laptop now for sale

A bristlebot consists of a small vibrating motor mounted with a battery on the head of a toothbrush. These micro-robots buzz around randomly, and he attempted to tame them. He used a platform of twin bristlebots and added an optical sensor from a laser mouse and an ATtiny13. The optical sensor is used to determine the relative motion of the robot, so that the motors can be adjusted accordingly. He also has a video of the bot using the sensor to find a mark on the floor and stay within bounds. Although it isn’t as accurate, it acts like a traditional line-following robot.

Read: http://hackaday.com/2009/06/16/controllable-bristlebot/

For all those cool Tetris gamers and Tetris fans, showcasing your love for the game is as easy as wearing a necklace or using it as a wall hanging, a keychain, or using it and making your very own fashion accessory.

Artists Acetonxfree and Tetris-gollum bring you two Tetris necklaces, the one above by Acetonxfree, as shown in the picture is made of chains, connecting the bricks together, and gives it a cool look,  while the one below by Tetris-gollum, is made of polymer clay and cord, and gives it more of a natural and easy to wear feel.

After the Tetris Bearbrick toy, the Tetris shoes knockoff and the Tetris bracelet craft, we have mentioned in our earlier posts, this completes the all new Tetris look that you would want to pull off at a theme party or at a fancy dress competition for the kid at school. All in all an array of great collectibles for all Tetris fans!

http://www.walyou.com/blog/2009/06/06/tetris-necklaces/

The design behind Conan O’Brien during the monologue is looking all Mushroom Kingdom. Check out the images below:

animated gif:

http://seriouslunch.blogspot.com/2009/06/conans-new-stage-looks-like-super-mario.html

Marc Weber Tobias can pick, crack, or bump any lock. Now he wants to teach the world how to break into military facilities and corporate headquarters.
Illustration: Tetsuya Nagato

Email Transcript: Medeco Objects to “Tobias Attack” Test Conditions

Remember Pearl Harbor? Lock Breaker Does

Tobias is laughing. And laughing. The effect is disconcerting. It’s a bwa-ha-ha kind of evil mastermind laugh—appropriate if you’ve just sacked Constantinople, checkmated Deep Blue, or handed Superman a Dixie cup of kryptonite Kool-Aid, but downright scary in a midtown Manhattan restaurant during the early-bird special.

Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn’t notice and wouldn’t care anyway. He’s as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a tinfoil hat. It goes on for a solid 20 seconds.

But Tobias isn’t crazy. Far from it. He’s a professional lock breaker, a man obsessively—perhaps compulsively—dedicated to cracking physical security systems. He doesn’t play games, he rarely sees movies, he doesn’t attend to plants or pets or, currently, a girlfriend. Tobias hacks locks. Then he teaches the public how to hack them, too.

Like many exceedingly bright people, Tobias has the exhausted air of a know-it-all. Over dozens of dinners, he has walked me through how to pick simple locks (”Uh, is there something wrong with your hands?”) and bypass combination dials (”A brain-damaged monkey could do it faster”). He has described how to outwit security technologies like motion detectors (”Duh”), face-recognition software (”It’s stupid, even if you think about it!”), fingerprint scans (”What child came up with that?”), and heat sensors (”You can get this one—maybe”).

We’ve covered key card hotel locks over seafood, in-room credit card safes over sandwiches. While we ate a decent steak dinner, Tobias used the house crayons to diagram one of the largest jewel robberies in history; over dessert, he showed me how a person less honest than himself would pull the heist again.

Thinking like a criminal is Tobias’ idea of fun. It makes him laugh. It has also made him money and earned him a reputation as something of the Rain Man of lock-breaking. Even if you’ve never heard of Tobias, you may know his work: He’s the guy who figured out how to steal your bike, unlock your front door, crack your gun lock, blow up your airplane, and hijack your mail. Marc Weber Tobias has a name for the headache he inflicts on his targets: the Marc Weber Tobias problem.

Lock-breaking is equal parts art and science. So is the ability to royally piss people off. Tobias is a veritable da Vinci at both endeavors. His Web site’s streaming video of prepubescent kids gleefully opening gun locks has won him no points with mothers or locksmiths, and his ideas about how to smuggle liquid explosive reagents onto commercial airlines spookily presaged the Transportation Security Administration’s prohibitions against carry-on liquids. Over the past 20 years, Tobias has been threatened by casinos, banned from hotel chains, and bullied by legions of corporate lawyers. And enjoyed every minute of it.

But to Tobias, pissing off The Man isn’t the point, not entirely. Nor is it, entirely, to make himself famous or rich—not that he’s allergic to either outcome. The point, he says, is to “make shit better.” Tobias thinks of himself as a humble public servant. When he attacks the Kryptonite bike lock or the Club (or those in-room safes at Holiday Inn or Caesars Palace), he’s not a bad guy—he’s just Ralph Nader with a slim jim, protecting consumers by exposing locks, safes, and security systems that aren’t actually locked, safe, or secure. At least, not from people like him.

The problem, if you’re a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn’t just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.

But forget bike locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals.

Between stabs at his salad, Tobias hands me his latest idea of fun: nearly 300 pages of self-published hacker-porn detailing his attack on the allegedly uncrackable Medeco high-security lock. “Trust me, this will cause a goddamned riot!” he says, dabbing at tears of joy with a paper napkin. “Oh yeah, this is way, way bigger than the liquid explosives thing!” And he’s right, it is bigger—and with way, way bigger consequences.

Some Marc Weber Tobias problems rattle companies. Others end as consulting contracts or dropped lawsuits or forcibly improved design. But all Tobias problems, like all hacker stories, start with a nerdy kid in a basement workshop, taking things apart.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/ff_keymaster

Though this New York Times report doesn’t mention the local connection, both TechFlash and Slate have previously plumbed two-year-old Seattle company Pet Holdings. Run by former journalist Ben Huh, the company owns and runs the famously popular, viral I Can Has Cheezburger site, which is now venturing into book publishing, as the Times reports.

The books come mostly from reader-generated content, since it’s we citizen Web surfers who upload our favorite krazy kat photos and kaptions to Huh’s site; then he gets to profit from the book. Though the Web site itself, which now carries a fair amount of advertising, is clearly driving the revenue train. Huh told John Cook at TechFlash that his family of sites (which includes Fail Blog) attracts five million page views a day. (For this reason, Seattle Weekly is considering its own SeelyCats feature, based on the cats of our managing editor, Mike Seely.) Huh bought the LOLcat site for $2 million last year from Hawaiians Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami; see the Honolulu Star-Bulletin account. The two compiled the first Cheezburger book, which sold 100,000 copies.

And Huh’s money quote to the Times: “We’re turning user-generated content into editorial content.” He tells the paper he estimates that his company will generate half a million dollars in revenue from its book deals alone. Smart guy. Smart enough, too, to get out of journalism.

REDWOOD CITY, California — Sims plus iPhone? I should have seen the warning signs.

With The Sims 3 right around the corner, the unholy union of two of the greatest threats to our nation’s collective productivity was probably inevitable. But when I recently made the trek to Electronic Arts’ campus to see the iPhone game in action, I was nevertheless caught off-guard by the faithfulness of the mobile version.

Egregious fashion choices, incomprehensible chatter, the inexplicable joy of carrying out mundane life tasks in a virtual environment — it’s all here. The edges have been trimmed back a bit from the high-end PC version, the features pared down to make the gameplay work on a mobile device. But when Sims hits Apple’s App Store on June 2, it’ll be well worth the price of admission.

The PC version of Sims 3 has a seamless open world. On the iPhone, it’s not so seamless. While you can still roam about town, once you’ve selected a place to visit, a loading screen interrupts the action before you’re dropped into the new location. The town is smaller, but features many of the home version’s prominent locations, like the fish pond, town hall and a few stores for your Sim to pick up goods or find work.

You’ll be able to create up to three characters, who will live in three separate instances of your town. They won’t be able to meet one another, but when you’re sampling some of the new traits and personas that have been added to the character-creation process, having three separate towns to experiment with might come in handy.

The character-customization options have also been pared down, which might disappoint someone expecting the full Sims 3 experience. The expansive color wheel has been replaced with a few preselected options, and there are fewer hairstyles and outfits from which to choose.

The gameplay still centers on meeting a particular Sim’s “lifetime wish,” and while there are fewer to choose from than in the PC version, you’ll still have the opportunity to raise the your ideal, maladjusted misfit and wreak havoc. Or fall in love. Or couch-surf.

Image courtesy Electronic Arts

There’s an impressive amount of detail in the graphics, from the shadows cast on the sidewalk as Sims pass under streetlights, to the full facial animations as they chat with one another. The camera is controlled by your thumbs, and is pretty easy to use — not as precise as a mouse, but handy when you’d like to zoom in on the action.

Sims 3 makes extensive use of the iPhone’s hardware features, with mini-games that use the touchscreen and accelerometer. Fishing, for example, involves tilting the device to guide the lure into the jaws of your unwary prey. I also played the cooking mini-game, where I had to cool down pots on a stove by tapping and shaking them.

As you play, you’ll be able to spice up your home with new decorations and furniture, and eventually unlock new rooms. You won’t be able to build any expansions of your own, however. This is unfortunate, as one of the biggest draws of the Sims experience has always been designing and decorating your ideal bungalow.

There’s a lot to like about Sims 3 on iPhone, but, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed by the lack of interaction with the PC version of the game. The ability to continue my PC character’s progress while riding the train would have taken this from pleasant diversion to killer app.

EA says we can expect the price to be in the same range as other premium EA games on the App Store, which currently top out at $10.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/hands-on-sims-3-iphone/

Located in the heart of Texas, the city of Austin is known for many things. Nicknamed Silicon Hills, the state capital accommodates an army of tech companies including the one and only Advanced Micro Devices, better known as AMD. From May 20th to the 22nd, AMD brought in some of the biggest names in the extreme overclocking scene with the goal of breaking world records. Armed with AMD’s latest Black Edition processor, the Phenom II X4 955, a steady flow of liquid nitrogen (LN2), and several vats of liquid helium (LHe), the stage was set for one of the most impressive overclocking exhibitions of recent memory.

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