Archive for: July 6, 2009

By Andrew Liszewski As the story goes, Paul Wessel noticed that his diabetic son Luke was always misplacing his blood glucose meter, though he never had any trouble finding his Game Boy. So Paul worked with pharmaceutical giant Bayer to develop the Didget which is a blood glucose meter that connects to the Nintendo DS and DS Lite systems. (It requires the slot 2 port so unfortunately it’s not DSi-friendly.) It works like a standard blood glucose meter, you prick your finger and then insert the blood-soaked paper strip into the reader, but the test results are converted into reward points that kids can use to unlock new levels and items inside the Didget NDS game. The basic idea is to reward kids who regularly check their blood sugar levels which hopefully helps them develop good testing habits in the future. According to the Didget website , the device will sell for about $50, though since it’s actually a UK-based site, there’s no word on if or when this will be available in North America. [ Bayer Didget ] VIA [ Boing Boing ]

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Didget Blood Glucose Meter Works With The Nintendo DS

By Andrew Liszewski Designed by Il-Gu Cha, the ‘Trace of Time’ clock is made from stainless steel with a glass face that allows you to jot down meetings and other important events when they’re supposed to happen. But the single hour/minute hand actually features an integrated eraser which cleans the clock’s face as it sweeps around over a 24 hour period. So while the clock’s useful for planning out your day, you can forget about jotting down things you’ll need to remember later in the week, since they’ll be gone by tomorrow. [ Trace of Time ] VIA [ MAKE: Blog ]

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Trace Of Time Whiteboard-Esque Clock Erases Itself Over Time

By Andrew Liszewski At some point along the way the development of GPS devices split into two distinct paths. On one side you’ve got complicated touchscreen devices with maps of every road on the continent that can plan out the easiest route from point A to point B, and on the other side they’ve actually been simplified to what are essentially glorified compasses, like the GD-101 from GlobalSat. It forgoes the colorful touchscreen for a simple monochrome LCD display that features a digital arrow capable of pointing in one of 16 different directions. The idea is to set a destination you’d like to remember, like where you parked your car, and the GD-101 will easily guide you back, complete with detailed info on how far away you are. And it’s not that I think these types of devices are a bad idea or anything, I just think they could benefit from a price tag of around $30-40, instead of the roughly $80 they’re currently selling for online. [ GlobalSat GD-101 ] VIA [ The Red Ferret Journal ]

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GlobalSat GD-101 Is Another Glorified Compass

By Chris Scott Barr I can’t honestly count the number of times I’ve dealt with a dead car battery. Most occasions were when I was younger, since my first car didn’t make a noise if you left the light on. However, it’s something that happens to everyone at some time or another. It’s not a hard problem to fix, you can just get a jump from another car, or from one of those cool portable batteries. Either way, you’re going to have to lift the hood and hook up a pair of jumper cables. There are some people out there who are deathly afraid of doing anything under the hood of a car. For those people, there is the Easy Quick Jumper. This works off of the same idea as a set of jumper cables, only you plug each end into the cigarette adapter of the two cars. Turn on the car with a good battery, wait 5-10 minutes and you should be set. Honestly, this would be a lot easier to store than bulky jumper cables, and quicker to get into place. If you’ve ever had a car battery die in the dead of winter, you’ll appreciate it. Just $26 gets you this handy gadget. (An extra $20 gets you a better version that eliminates the need for another car.) [ VAT19 ] VIA [ RedFerret ]

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Jump Your Car Via Cigarette Adapter

By Andrew Liszewski So not only are video games destroying our minds, our physiques and the fabric of moral society, but now it turns out they’re not so great for our wrists either. Well at least the standard game controllers aren’t. That’s why a company called Smartfish, known for their ergonomic peripherals , have developed the PRO:Motion Game Controller. Since everyone’s hands and wrists aren’t the same, the PRO:Motion gamepad can actually bend and rotate in the middle to create a more comfortable and ergonomically friendly controller for every user. But here’s the really cool part. Using the company’s DPC or ‘Dynamic Positioning Controller’ system, the PRO:Motion will actually study your “usage pattern” and make periodic but nearly imperceptible adjustments to the controller via a set of tiny onboard motors. So in other words, you don’t have to futz around with it to find the perfect angles, it will do it for you automatically. Unfortunately pricing info doesn’t seem to be readily available at this time, and from what I can tell the PRO:Motion is only designed to work with PC games, and not with any of the major consoles on the market. [ Smartfish PRO:Motion Game Controller ] VIA [ Everything USB ]

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Smartfish PRO:Motion Auto-Adjusting Game Controller

blueTunes , a streaming music site that lets you stream your music library from the cloud to any computer, is launching a new desktop app tonight that looks to make the service an even more compelling alternative to other online music sites and possibly even iTunes. For those who aren’t familiar with the service, blueTunes lets you scan your hard drive for music files and upload them to the site’s servers, which you can then stream from wherever you are. This process would take a very long time (and quite a bit of bandwidth) were it not for a shortcut the site is employing: while you still have to prove that you own your music (the site uses a Java app to check through you music folders), the site only makes you upload songs that aren’t already in its database. In other words, unless you’ve got a really eclectic collection, you’ll be able to transfer your library to the cloud without having to move many files. The benefits of a desktop client for this kind of music service are fairly obvious. When you’re using a site like MySpace Music, you generally have to keep a browser tab open at all times, and when tabs are grouped together in the browser it can be tricky to figure out which one is actually controlling the music coming out of your speakers. And there’s always the possibility that your browser will freeze as you peruse another site, taking down your tunes with it. Using blueTunes through a desktop app, you don’t have to deal with these problems. It’s a welcome addition to the service, and it’s nice to see that the startup is still chugging along without having to come up against any legal hurdles. As we noted when we last covered ...

By Andrew Liszewski The scale and complexity of massive particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider allows them to make amazing scientific discoveries, but not every researcher has $2.2 billion lying around to build and fund one of their own. And that’s exactly what scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are hoping to overcome with their BELLA or Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. In 2006 they showed that lasers could be used to accelerate electrons to very high energies in distances measured in centimeters instead of hundreds of meters using a technique described below: Project leader Wim Leemans has spent much of his nearly 18 years at Berkeley Lab building lasers and working with laser accelerators. Collaborating with Simon Hooker of the University of Oxford, he and members of his group achieved a major breakthrough in 2006 when they broke the world record for laser-wakefield acceleration, a technique in which particles are accelerated by waves in plasma generated by intense pulses of laser light. In the wake of the laser pulse, electrons surf the waves of the ionized gas. Leemans and coworkers used this concept to accelerate electron beams to energies of more than 1 GeV in a distance of just 3.3 centimeters. Compare that to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or SLAC, which takes 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) to boost electrons to 50 GeV. And while BELLA may never be as powerful as accelerators like the LHC or the SLAC, the scientists at Berkeley Lab are confident that the same techniques can be used to accelerate an electron to energies exceeding 10 GeV in a distance of just one meter. So in theory, one day you might actually be able to buy a rather capable particle accelerator that’s just a bit larger than your office’s photocopier. But since ...

By Andrew Liszewski You know what I like most about this wifi-detecting baseball cap that’s powered by a couple of CR2032 batteries and displays the strength of any 802.11b or g networks in your vicinity? The fact that it’s pretty much completely useless to the person actually wearing it! I mean the whole point of a wifi detector is so you can find an available hotspot and get yourself some free wireless internet, but unless you’re taking this thing off every 5 minutes to check the light-up panel on the front, you’ll be oblivious as to when you actually find a network. At least it’s just $21 from Thumbs Up . [ Thumbs Up Wifi Cap ]

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Wifi Detecting Baseball Cap

By Andrew Liszewski For some people, taking a sports car like a Lamborghini Reventón for a test drive is the ultimate dream, but I’m sure there are others who are more thrilled at the prospect of watching Searching For Bobby Fischer or seeing Garry Kasparov challenge IBM’s Deep Blue again. And oddly enough, Lamborghini has just the thing for that latter group as well. This silver chess set by Tonino Lamborghini (son of Ferruccio Lamborghini) comes packaged in a well-appointed wooden case complete with protective storage slots for the pieces that are actually differentiated on either side of the board by their high-polish or matte finishes. And given the Reventón’s $1.6 million price tag, $395 for this chess set seems like quite the deal. [ Tonino Lamborghini Silver Chess Set ] VIA [ Cool Material ]

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Tonino Lamborghini Silver Chess Set

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks) Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and co-founder of Opsware, and Ben Horowitz, also co-founder of Opsware, are launching on Monday a new venture fund, cleverly named Andreessen Horowitz ( previous story ). The fund’s mission is financially broad but technologically narrow. Andreessen told me the $300 million fund will invest from $50,000 to $5 million in start-ups, which means it’s part angel fund and part typical venture capital firm. Technologically, Andreessen is keeping things in one wheelhouse: his. “We’re ruling out products we don’t understand,” he says. So no clean tech, no energy start-ups, no green companies, biotech, life sciences, car companies, content, or space vehicles (Andreessen must know that I have a profile of Steve Jurvetson upcoming). Good technologies for the fund include consumer Internet companies, cloud computing, and Web infrastructure plays. Andreessen Horowitz will headquarter on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, Calif., and will invest in “almost nothing” outside of Silicon Valley. The firm will invest in what Andreessen calls “technical founders,” those entrepreneurs who get their hands dirty when developing products, and not business wonks who tend to hire developers to implement their vision. “We love it when founders want to be CEOs,” Andreessen says. The fund has made no investments yet, but privately Andreessen has experience as an angel investor. He has put his own money in Twitter, LinkedIn, Aliph, Digg, and Delicious (which was acquired by Yahoo). What Andreessen knows I told Andreessen that I thought it was an awkward time to launch a new venture fund. Many of the funds launched during the last bubble (1999) are, by any metric, failing. Andreessen, in fact, quotes stats that show that only about 10 to 20 of the approximately 700 extant funds deliver good returns. With money tightening, there’s simply ...

Q: I am in deep trouble! I purchased Driver Detective and ran a scan of my system. It indicated I had 22 old or obsolete drivers! So I downloaded the drivers they recommended and it indicated that I had to uninstall the previous obsolete driver which was ATI 9600 graphics card. When I did my monitor went all haywire and everything was distorted and VERY LARGE. So I played around and installed the new driver (was it the right one? I don't know?). To make a long story short I now have everything small but legible! How do I get back to normal size text and content? Please help me as my spouse is having a fit because she needs to wear glasses to do the banking etc. - Ron Pro.

A: It sounds like you have the correct ATI driver back in place, but now things aren't sized right on-screen. That should be fixable. There are two things you can tweak, the screen resolution and the DPI setting.

To change the screen resolution in XP, right-click the Desktop and choose Properties, then click the Settings tab. In Vista, right-click the desktop, choose Personalize and then click the Display settings link on the resulting page. In Windows 7, right-click the desktop and choose Screen Resolution. (Looks like Microsoft still hasn't settled on the best way to access this feature).

There's a slider here that controls the screen resolution - that is, the width and height of the screen in pixels. In XP and Vista it's a horizontal slider right in the dialog. In Windows 7 it's a vertical slider that appears when you click on the ...

Q: I was recently working in contact manager and the program froze. I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del and use Task Manager to shut it down. Now, whenever I try to work in Outlook contacts, a dialog box pops up: "Business contact manager in Outlook could not complete you last action or actions, please try again". Everything seems to be working after I click OK to this annoying box. I would appreciate any ideas. - John Spann.

A: When an Outlook element or add-on crashes Outlook will sometimes disable it in self-defense. Assuming the crash that occurred was a fluke, not an ongoing problem, you can just re-enable the item. Select Disabled Items from the Help menu and see if there's an entry in the list that refers to the problem component. If so, select it, click the Enable button, and click the Close button. You will probably need to shut down and restart Outlook at this point.

Most likely you've fixed it. If the problem persists, select Office Diagnostics from the Help menu. Run the diagnostics and take whatever advice they offer. The diagnostic test routines can take 10-15 minutes, so start it when you're about to take a break. - Neil J. Rubenking.