Category: The Outdated Archive

All my super old but still amazing blog posts \(^-^)/

Bank Company Santander Employs ROBOTS?!

Turns out that there’s a financial center in Madrid, Spain which is so damn big and confusing to navigate that you’ll desperately need these multilingual robots to guide you around. Here’s how it works—in-action video and all:

You stroll up to where the mechanical swarm is waiting, tip-tap your way through a menu on a robot’s touchscreen to select your preferred language, pick a destination, and off you go.

The robots are about knee-high and zip back and forth through the Santander Group’s financial complex in Madrid. They’re clever enough to avoid running into people, other robots, or any of the LED panel covered columns around the complex while promptly getting you to your destination.

Now if only I could ask them to find the nearest ice cream shop instead of a stuffy office, I’d be a happy boy!

APPLES iPHONE OS 4 oficially released!

its here its great(er) and it has tons of new features. i cant name them all, mainly because im lazy and theres other posts to post, but heres a few of the cool ones:

• Multitasking: It’s here, finally. It’s handled with a simple task switcher: double click your home button, and you get a list of running apps. Select, switch, done. Multitasking is limited to audio streaming, VoIP and GPS apps, as well as a few other allowances: they can finish specific, important tasks in the background, for example. As far as non-music/nav/VoIP apps, those can be suspended in the background, but not left running. (See below.) Full details here.

• Fast app switching: With iPhone 4’s multitasking, most apps aren’t actually running in the background—just certain functions of the app, like an audio stream or a GPS lock. But! All apps can now be frozen, in full, so that when you reopen them, they’re restored to exactly the state they were in when they were closed.

• Local notifications: Notifications can be sent between apps on the phone, not just from remote servers. In other words, if something important happens in an app you’ve opened and moved away from, a notification will pop up in whatever app you’re using at the time, effectively saying “switch back to me!” It’s a fairly clever way to keep track of multiple apps without the need for a start bar or dock-type interface. From Apple’s dev guidelines:

New Casio G-Shock wrist watches go for X-Large

G-Shock X-Large Combi (aka GA 100) family of digital wrist watches boast a 5.0 x 51.2 x 16.9 mm of case. Other key features include shock resistance, 200 M water resistance, magnetic resistance, Auto LED Light with Afterglow, 48 City World Time, 1/100 Second Chronograph, 4 Daily Alarms and 1 Snooze Alarm, and an Hourly Time Signal. Their design detail includes a riveted dial ring and embossed index to create a 3D effect on the watch face.

Offred in three hues sentinel black (GA100-1A4), crisp white (GA100A-7A), and hazard yellow (GA100A-9A), they come at $99.

Courier – The MicroSoft Secret Tablet


Shout out to my boy Peshi for showing me about this one. now the apple iPad is awesome, no one can deny that, but DAMN! you just cant count Microsoft out of the game! check this vid out!

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

HD Quality Video Watch

I’m pretty tired of all the supposed ’spy’ gear on the market because to be perfectly honest, if it wasn’t developed by the CIA or MI6, it ends up being pretty crappy. But I’m cautiously optimistic that this video-capable covert watch might actually not suck that much. The design is surprisingly something that most people would wear, so it doesn’t look like there’s a video camera stashed inside, and instead of capturing sub-webcam quality 640×480 clips, it’s actually able to record pseudo-HD quality 1280×960 VGA videos at 30 fps.

The watch is only water and dust resistant so you won’t be capturing any spectacular underwater footage, but a little rain shouldn’t put it out of commission either. A subtle light indicator lets you know when the recording function has been activated, but it only remains on briefly so others don’t realize why you’re awkwardly pointing your watch face at them, and all videos are stamped with the date and time for later analysis. Somewhere on the watch you’ll find a miniUSB connection for charging the watch and transferring videos to your PC, and the ~$450 price tag from Spycatcher makes me think this might actually be more than just an expensive novelty.

the kettle that recieves tweets?

Ok. I love me some tea, show me a londoner that doesnt, and i also love me some twitter, but even i have to admit this is a bit of a stretch.

This smartly-designed kettle which tweets via Wi-Fi will alert you when it’s boiling.
Designed by Ben Perman and Murat Multu, it also records details on how many times it boils each week, and just how much water you’ve boiled up!

Use Vaseline To Make Scratched CDs Work Again

Rubbing Vaseline on scratched CDs to make them readable again is a new one to me, but Instructables has a DIY project up claiming it works perfectly. Mind you, they also say peanut butter works a charm too.

Using a piece of cloth, the Vaseline can be slicked onto the scratched CD, and then rubbed off with some rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball, leaving the Vaseline in the scratches, filling them in. It won’t remove the scratches completely—that would be a miracle—but it sounds like it does a nice job of filling them in to make the disc work again.

Universal Wrist Charger

The Universal Wrist Charger($35) from thinkgeek.
Instead, the Universal Wrist Charger is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack with a mini-USB output and 1,500mAh capacity. the charger comes bundled with nine chargers, from the PSP and the DSi to the iPhone and both Nokia adapters. Wristband battery charger will charge your device while you use it! Unfortunately the Universal Wrist Charger has not a motion-powered generator to charge up your its battery from the movements of your wrist.

Buy it HERE