It doesn’t look like it would exercise more than one arm at a time, but I can imagine playing on this thing for hours as a kid. Just imagine… a fair ride that’s free!
I have a couple of questions about this action toy, though:
Can you play with it all by yourself?
As a child, there were lots of playground toys that were useless to me. The teeter totter was one example. It’s impossible to play alone. It’s impossible to play with your sister who is five years younger. You have to find a kid who is about the same weight as you to play. Is that how this thing would work?
Does it only exercise your left arm?
It doesn’t look like you can switch arms, so you would end up with one sore arm after a day’s play with it. If you can’t switch arms, that’s a major design flaw.
This looks like a fun idea, but not quite up to exergaming standards. Heck, even the Wii exercises BOTH of your arms…
Sure, robotic parking structures are cool, but this device allows for parking sixty-seven cars in a space that would usually only hold twenty-four. In cities where land is the limited resource, the cost of a robotic parking structure actually makes sense. In Salt Lake City, we just knock down an unused old building and put a new parking structure in its place. They have these in Europe and Japan, but the U.S. finally has one in where? New York, of course. If you would like to know more, Popular Mechanics has the full story here:
Watching this video sparks an innate fear of technology that comes from watching too many 1950’s sci-fi movies and 1980’s action flicks. This could be the scene of science gone terribly wrong or a horribly gory fight sequence.
I’ve known about the Hipster PDA for a while. It’s just bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. It’s light, you can write using an object you are already familiar with (a pen), and there is no plasticy keyboards or stylii (yuck!). The only problem with the Hipster PDA is that there is no music capabilities.
PostSecret’s beneficiary is the National Hopeline Network. It is a
24-hour hotline (1 (800) SUICIDE) for anyone who is thinking about suicide or knows someone who is considering it.
Using a wi-fi sniffer from Errata Security, anyone can see what you are doing while you are using that unsecured wireless network at the coffee shop or airport.
Are you at risk? What about at home? Should you make sure your home wi-fi is encrypted to protect yourself. The article isn’t really clear. It has one good piece of advice:
“In general, experts advise against using wireless networks to connect to sensitive Web sites such as online banking. However, it is risky to use any online service that requires a password.â€
The truth of the matter is: wi-fi IS vulnerable. We all are vulnerable. Think of it this way: at any time, a person could walk into a gas station, buy a five gallon container of gasoline and a lighter and use them to set your house on fire. The technology is available, but people never really worry that someone is going to set their homes on fire unless there is an arson on the loose.
Articles like these are more about paranoia than reality. Every day we are at risk in a thousand different ways. We could spend our days worrying about all the ways that someone could harm us. Are there hackers out there? Yeah. How can we protect ourselves?
Use a password protection on your home wi-fi connection.
Use encryption on your home wi-fi connection.
Don’t access sensitive websites at public wi-fi spots.
Right now, that’s about it. As wi-fi gains in popularity, more security will be built-in, but right now, we ARE at risk. Just be careful out there and be on the lookout for people with canisters of gasoline and lighters.
If you have had a hard time figuring out how to get the television shows that come through your cable TV onto your iPod, you’re not alone. There’s a reason why iTunes is making a ton of money selling television shows that you can get for free. It’s more convenient. The iLuv i182 Digital Recording Dock makes getting your television on your iPod that much easier. It’s not available yet, but it soon will be.
It’s not like a Tivo. It won’t record all the episodes of Friends that play on every channel at all times of the day. You have to tell it specific times and dates for what you want recorded. It’s more like a VCR for your iPod than a Tivo for your iPod. Even still, being able to tell it to record House every week and automatically put it onto your iPod is a great leap forward in technology.
Another cool thing about it is that this is no ordinary iPod accessory. It can record to a Sony PSP, SD cards, Memory Stick, a USB device and a bunch of other card formats. I love that they have made it capable of saving my shows so I can watch them on my Treo if I want.
My only wish is that Apple would come out with something like this for me. I would willingly watch local commercials so that I can easily record television shows to my iPod.
So many of those year-end articles sound really dated when you give them a couple of months to ferment. How did this New York Times article age over the last two months?
The SanDisk Ultra II SD Plus card: It’s an SD card with a USB jack built right in. For those of you with computers without card readers, this is a great choice, but is it worth the extra cost? Since this 512MB card costs as much as a normal 2GB card, I doubt it. Card readers are cheap and easily add into your computer tower or plug into a USB port. This one is a cool idea, but not worth the extra bucks.
The Palm Treo 700W cellphone: For those of you too absentminded to remember which number deletes the voicemail and which number saves it, Palm created an on-screen voicemail with buttons that are like a VCR. Just a warning, this is a Windows Mobile Palm device, so if you already have a Palm, none of your software will work on this cellphone.
Hewlett-Packard’s latest microdisplay (rear projection) TV: Instead of attaching all your gadgets to your television at the back, HP has created an illuminated panel at the front. The article is unclear about how the cords are hidden or if they just sit there, out in the open. I like to imagine that in the future, there will be one gadget that records your television shows, plays your DVDs and entertains you with games, so that the connection to the television is one, simple cord. Why they didn’t choose the HP Media PC instead of the HP TV with the “cord monitor†is beyond me.
Canon Powershot S80 8MP Digital Camera: They made a good choice with this one. They liked this camera because it can shoot video at 1024 x 768 pixels (instead of 640 by 480 pixels, like most cameras that have video built in). This means you can crop a single frame from your video and use it as a really good photo. The only problem with this is that it’s NOT a video camera, so you don’t have the control like you would with real video and your storage media can fill up mighty fast at 1024 x 768 pixels. I would have chosen the anti-shake technology in the Panasonic digital cameras because it opens up photography to a large group of people and occasions (such as trying to take a picture on a vibrating motor boat).
The Video iPod: To be able to watch your favorite television shows whenever you want and wherever you want is a great freedom. Apple and their video iPod brought that to the world in 2005 and the New York Times was right, it is a great idea. The video iPod would have been useless if Apple hadn’t set up the ability to download television to it, however. Kudos to Apple for waiting to add the video playback ability to their iPods until they were able to support it properly.
The outer button on flip phones: This one is the most confusing of them all. I had an outer button on my StarTac flip phone from Motorola where I could answer or dismiss a call without opening the flip all the way back in 2000. I didn’t have a cool LCD screen on the front to see who was calling, but this “new†idea of 2005 isn’t even new. Bad call, New York Times…
So, what do you think? Two months after they first posted this list, do these ideas really seem all that great? Some of them are. I would have chosen differently on others. Of course, you can get twenty people together and you would have twenty different lists for the greatest gadget ideas of the year. What would you choose?
The first iPhone commercial showed during the Oscars. It’s a brilliant tribute to both the movies and the telephone. “Hello†was the first thing that the Mac said to the world. Now, we’ll be saying it to the iPhone. Cool…
Parabolic microphones have been the tools of spy novels, private detectives and paranoids, but they have been appropriated by a quieter class of people: birdwatchers:
“Birdwatchers have long headed into the woods with little more equipment than binoculars and a notebook. But when Laura Erickson sets out on a birding trip, she now brings along two digital cameras, a Palm device with a bird-species database and an iPod loaded with bird songs.â€
Instead of that bulky Audobon book in your pocket EVERY bird on the planet can fit in your Treo. Instead of a sketch pad and waterproof ink, a camera can capture the bird far better. Instead of memory and stealth, you can listen to the bird calls from far away.
Sounds like birdwatching has gotten a whole lot more interesting…
I like his comments on the “plasticy†keyboard:
“Slide out keyboard. This is a pretty cool feature, however some options aren’t accessible when using the keyboard. I still have to use the stylus to get to some features. But the trade off is having a fuller size keyboard when I am typing email, texting or editing office documents.â€
I am excited that the Smartphone industry is really picking up. Personally, I’ve found that the “plasticy†keyboard on my Treo is VERY useable. I’m wondering if Steve Jobs might have made a mistake. How can a virtual keyboard compete with the tactile response of the buttons on a keyboard? I guess we’ll have to see.
