Tokyoflash Kisai Night Vision Wood LED Watch: Burn After Reading

Posted on 07/05/2014 by Range

Apparently, anything that’s made out of wood is good. This is also true of Tokyoflash’s new watch, which appears to be encased completely in wood. It’s all rustic, and ready to go camping!

The Tokyoflash Kisai Night Vision Wood LED Watch has no hands, and looks completely blank when turned off. Its LCD screen is concealed beneath its wooden surface. They shine through to display the time. It has all of the usual functions, with a light-up animation. You can choose between dark sandalwood or maple, and blue, red, or green LEDs.

Reading the time is surprisingly straightforward. The hour is highlighted by its absence from the LED circle, while the minutes are actually displayed in stylized numbers. The watch is easy to read, once you get the system.

The $109 (USD) launch price for the Kisai Night Vision watch is good until just 10pm Eastern Time tonight, after which point its price will go up to its normal retail price.

[via Tokyoflash]

Lunecase iPhone Case Works Notification Magic

Posted on 01/05/2014 by Range

Discreet mobile notifications are definitely the way of the future. Having the ability to mute yours and to quickly assess what you missed can make you productive. The Lunecase aims to improve the iPhone notification process by displaying alerts on the case itself. It debuted as a prototype at CES and is designed for iPhone 5s, and it uses the electromagnetic waves emitted by your phone to display notifications. That sounds like science-fiction, or is it?

Calls and messages arrive on your handset at different wavelengths, and the case is supposed to be able to detect which wavelengths are being received, as well as display the correct notification icon on the back of the case. In fact, it’s supposed to allow the case to notify you shortly before the actual notifications are shown on your phone. For now, it only works with phone calls and text messages. However, there could be hacks down the road which display other sorts of alerts.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Lunecase is that it requires no batteries. It uses the electromagnetic energy released from the communication process to illuminate the LED notification icons.

The Lunecase project was recently launched on Kickstarter, where a pledge of at least $39(USD) will get you one of the cases.

[via bgr]

MIT Undergrads to Receive Bitcoins: College Currency

Posted on 01/05/2014 by Range

Starting next fall, new MIT undergrads will each be receiving $100 worth of bitcoins. This is thanks to the efforts of the MIT Bitcoin club, which wanted to jumpstart a Bitcoin ecosystem.

bitcoin mit

The project was started by Jeremy Rubin and Daniel Elitzer, who have raised more than $500,000 for their endeavor. Most of this money comes from Alexander Morcos, an MIT alum working in high-frequency trading in New York.

The cryptocurrency is still trying to gain legitimacy in some circles, while it’s accepted in others. This project could boost the infrastructure of the currency, making it more widely accepted. Bitcoin values go up and down quite significantly, so we’ll have to see how well this project does next semester at MIT, and what impact if any it has on its value.

[via The Guardian]

OK, Google Everywhere: Big Google Brother Is Listening

Posted on 27/04/2014 by Range

It’s not a myth that everyone uses Google all of the time. If you’re constantly using Google, then you’ll like the fact that it might soon be possible to access the “OK, Google” voice assistant feature from anywhere on your Android phone.

The OK, Google functionality is handy, but you currently have to be on your home screen or in the Google Search app for it to work. It allows you to perform searches, set reminders, set alarms, and more. New rumors indicate that it might be making its way into apps, providing app-specific voice commands. Your phone would be constantly listening to you for this activation phrase, and then could provide contextual commands inside individual apps. What’s not clear is if the already existing commands would also be available from within apps, or just app-specific commands.

[via Android Police via gigaOM]

World’s Smallest Magazine Cover

Posted on 27/04/2014 by Range

While there’s no shrink ray in existence as of yet, scientists are hard at work at making magazines available for us, just in case we ever get down to the micrometer scale. In fact, a laboratory in Switzerland has managed to print an image so small that you could fit over 2,000 of them onto a single grain of salt. If they were to do this, the title of this article would be called “4,000 pandas on a grain of salt.”

The scientists from IBM Research carved a miniscule 11×14-micrometer image of a recent cover of National Geographic KIDS Magazine onto a polymer. The process they used is akin to 3D printing, but on a smaller scale. They used a heatable silicon tip that was 100,000 times smaller than the tip of a pencil point to chisel the image. While it certainly took years of development to create such a machine, the actual magazine cover was output in less than two minutes.

Be sure to watch the video below to see how the team created this incredibly tiny magazine cover:

It’s definitely interesting to see how small things can get. At least we’ll have stuff to read if we ever get shrunk down to this size.

[via Flickr and Reuters]

Xplore XC6 Rugged Tablet: It Will Last Longer Than You

Posted on 24/04/2014 by Range

I’m usually good about keeping my gear out of harm’s way, but in the last month, I smashed two smartphone screens. I guess it caught up with me, which is probably one of the reasons why a ruggedized tablet makes sense, if you’re always taking yours out and about.

The Windows-based Xplore XC6 DMSR Rugged Tablet will resist drops of seven feet while it’s working, and can be submerged for up to 30 minutes in 3.3 feet of water. The tablet has multiple shock and drop resistances (military spec, no less). You can even operate it when it’s wet or when you’re wearing gloves. Here are just a few of its impressive environmental specs:

MIL-STD-810G-810G and IP67 Tested
Hazardous Location Certified
Submersion-Resistant, Dust-Tight
Operating Temperature: -30° F – 140° F (-34° C To 60° C)
Cold Start: -4°F (-20°C)
Storage Temperature: -60° F To 160° F (-51° C To 71° C)
Humidity: 3% – 95% Non-Condensing
Thermal Shock: -60° F To 160° F (-51° C To 71° C)
Blowing Rain: 4”/Hr (101.6 mm/Hr), 40 Mph Wind, 30 Min. Per Side
Blowing Sand And Dust: 30 MPH Wind Source, 30 Min.
Vibration: Minimum Integrity, Vehicle Vibration, US Highway Truck Vibration
Salt Fog: 5% Saline Exposure, 48 Hr Exposure
Altitude: 50,000 Ft (15240 M) Operating
Other Tests: Functional And Crash Shock, Contamination by Fluids, Fungus and Solar Radiation
Transit Drop – Operating: 4’ (1.22 M) Drop Direct to Concrete While System Is Operating, 26 Drops
Transit Drop – Operating: 7’ (2.13 M) Drop Direct to Plywood Over Concrete While System Is Operating, 26 Drops

The sunlight-readable tablet has a magnesium alloy chassis which resists torsion, shear and impact damage. It comes with a Intel Core i5-4300U processor and has a 128GB SSD, which you can upgrade to 256GB. Battery life is rated a 8.5 hours.

Clearly, these tablets are designed for industrial and military usage, but if you’re prone to breaking your gadgets, you might want to look into one too.

[via Ubergizmo]

Dot View Case Hack for HTC One M8: Awesomesauce!

Posted on 23/04/2014 by Range

I’m all for retro gadgets, so I just love the Dot View Cover for the HTC One M8. It’s got a bunch of rows and columns of tiny dots through which notifications can be seen, in a retro 8-bit fashion – while also protecting the phone’s screen.

Out of the box, the Dot View cover allows you to check the time, weather, and some other basic notifications. A hacker named Shen Ye, was able to change his cover to display other notifications, such as the number of tweets he has received, or even bring up music player controls. However, he hasn’t released the exact nature of his hack. It’s likely that it requires root access, a hacked APK file, or something along those lines. He did say that since HTC’s Sense UI already had access to your social networking APIs, it wasn’t hard to make them appear on the cover though.

That’s pretty awesome. I wouldn’t mind having this on another phone, like a Sony Z2!

[via androidguys]

Lytro Illum Camera Refocuses on the High End

Posted on 22/04/2014 by Range

When the first Lytro camera was announced, it looked pretty cute, but it was impractical because of its limited options. It was basically just a plaything. Now, however, Lytro wants to change this with the release of a camera designed for professional and prosumer shooters.

The Lytro Illum captures photos as an interactive window, instead of just a static cross-section of reality. It comes with a 40-”megaray” light field sensor, almost four times the resolution of the original Lytro. Below is a sample of some interactive images shot with the camera. Be sure to click around to see how the refocusing feature works:

The new camera has also got a 30-250mm 8x optical zoom lens, a constant f/2.0 aperture, and a high-speed shutter, which is capable of freezing motion under a variety of different circumstances. Sounds intriguing.

After capture, you can adjust aspects of images that are usually fixed, like focus, tilt, perspective shift, and depth of field. The Illum will be launched this July for $1,599(USD), and you can pre-order one now over on the Lytro website at an introductory price of $1,499, with just $250 down.

The guys at VentureBeat spent some time with Lytro CEO Dr. Ren Ng to get a demonstration of the Lytro Illum, and shared this video of the interview:

[via FStoppers]

Ultimeyes App Aims to Give You Hawkeye Vision

Posted on 22/04/2014 by Range

It’s a fact that staring at screens of all kind will strain your vision. However, there’s a new app that’s available for iOS and Android, which is supposed to help improve it. Fact or fiction?

The Ultimeyes app was released for computers before it was launched for mobile devices. The app is a game that’s supposed to work on improving your visual acuity. In the game, you end up trying to track down blobs on the screen that are shifting around. This is supposed to improve your eyesight over time, by playing in 25 to 30 minute intervals.

You’ll have to shell out $5.99 on iTunes or Google Play to try it out for your googly eyes.

[via Ubergizmo]

Nike FuelBand About to Be Nixed?

Posted on 21/04/2014 by Range

Over the last few days, there have been reports indicating that Nike’s Digital Sports Division had laid off most of its staff. The division is responsible for the FuelBand, which seemed to be doing quite well, but in fact, apparently hasn’t really taken off.

Nike has reassured customers that the FuelBand won’t go away, and that they will continue supporting it, though that might be tricky without its development staff. The revelation makes me wonder if the staff might be picked up by Apple to work on a potential “iWatch” system, or if Nike has entered some sort of strategic partnership with Apple which prevents them from making a competitive device.

It’s certainly possible this is a move by Nike to get out of the wearable electronics game, and let Apple take over, especially since Apple CEO Tim Cook sits on the Nike Board of Directors. While there are plenty of smartwatches available, from Samsung to Sony, none of them are close to perfect, and many consumers have waited to jump into the game until the see what Apple has up its sleeve.

[via Mashable]

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