Archive for the 'Gadgets' Category
E3 2005: Wow Wee Roboraptor
Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 11:26 am in Gadgets
Wow Wee also is at the E3 2005 and Jack held a video interview with them. UK gadget magazine T3 also just runs a story about Wow Wee featuring glimpses of the Robosapien of the Future.
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Toto toilet ad
Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 1:48 pm in GadgetsThese Japanese guys, they know how to sell you toilets!
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[ via We make money not art ]
PS3 latest game trailers and screenshot
Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 10:25 am in Gadgets, Addicting Games.gif)
We’re in the process of getting the Sony press conference edited up to give you the very best of this two hour event.
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PS3 Specs
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 5:18 pm in Gadgets, Addicting GamesSummary Specifications:
-Blu-Ray media support with 6x today’s DVD storage
-Support for CD-ROM, CDR+W, DVD, DVD-ROM, DVD-R, DVD+R
-Backwards compatibility to PS2 and PS1 (touche Xbox 360)
-Memory Stick Duo, SD, and Compact Flash memory slots
-Detachable 2.5 inch hard-drive
-Support for 7 Bluetooth controllers
-6 USB slots (4 in front, 2 in the back
-3.2 Ghz Cell processor with 2.18 teraflops of performance
-255mb XDR RAM at 3.2ghz, 256mb GDDR VRAM at 700mhz
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PS3 Secret Features Reveal
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 5:02 pm in Funny Junks, Gadgets, Addicting Games
Cooking BBQ lol
E3: Sony to Launch PlayStation 3 in Spring 2006
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 2:37 pm in Gadgets, Addicting GamesTake a first look at the new Playstation 3
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Personal Nuclear Power: New Battery Lasts 12 Years
Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 1:15 pm in Gadgets
A new type of battery based on the radioactive decay of nuclear material is 10 times more powerful than similar prototypes and should last a decade or more without a charge, scientists announced this week.
The longevity would make the battery ideal for use in pacemakers or other surgically implanted devices, developers say, or it might power spacecraft or deep-sea probes.
You might also find these nuclear batteries running sensors and other small devices in your home in a few years. Such devices “don’t consume much power,” said University of Rochester electrical engineer Philippe Fauchet, “and yet having to replace the battery every so often is a real pain in the neck.”
Fauchet told LiveScience the batteries could last a dozen years. They’re being developed at Rochester and the technology has been licensed by BetaBatt Inc.
How it works
The technology is called betavoltaics. It uses a silicon wafer to capture electrons emitted by a radioactive gas, such as tritium. It is similar to the mechanics of converting sunlight into electricity in a solar panel.
Until now, betavoltaics has been unable to match solar-cell efficiency. The reason is simple: When the gas decays, its electrons shoot out in all directions. Many of them are lost.
“For 50 years, people have been investigating converting simple nuclear decay into usable energy, but the yields were always too low,” Fauchet explained. “We’ve found a way to make the interaction much more efficient, and we hope these findings will lead to a new kind of battery that can pump out energy for years.”
Fauchet’s team took the flat silicon surface, where the electrons are captured and converted to a current, and turned it into a three-dimensional surface by adding deep pits.
Each pit is about one micron wide. That’s four ten-thousandths of an inch. They’re more than 40 microns deep.
Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen. Mixed with chemicals that emit light, it is used to illuminate exit signs without electricity — the sort commonly found in schools and other public buildings.
“It is safe and can be implanted in the body,” Fauchet said. “The energetic particles emitted by tritium do not penetrate inside the skin.”
Tritium emits only low energy particles “that can be shielded by very thin materials, such as a sheet of paper,” said Gadeken of BetaBatt. “The hermetically-sealed, metallic BetaBattery cases will encapsulate the entire radioactive energy source, just like a normal battery contains its chemical source so it cannot escape.”
The device is detailed in today’s issue of Advanced Materials.
Improvements needed
The manufacturing process is standard to the semiconductor industry, so no other technology breakthroughs are needed to bring the batteries to market. Still, don’t expect anything on the store shelves for at least two years, Fauchet said. His team is now working to improve the manufacturing process, aiming for batteries many times more efficient than those announced today.
“If we are as successful as we think we may be, it will take less than five years before this technology is adopted,” he said.
Graduate student Wei Sun of the University of Toronto was lead author on the paper describing the work, which was supported by the National Science Foundation.
[ via livescience ]
Star Wars Force FX Lightsabers
Sunday, May 15th, 2005 at 2:33 am in Gadgets, Cool Stuff, Movies & TV
This isn’t a toy for your six year old cousin (he probably doesn’t even know what planet Wookies live on). This is an official reproduction of real Lightsabers from Star Wars. “Real lightsabers?”, you might be thinking, “Star Wars isn’t real!”.
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