Lorcan Coyle's Home on Tinterweb

For those of us who grew up playing with the Commodore 64 before shifting to big PC boxes it felt like a step backward from a aesthetics perspective to move from a PC encased in a keyboard to a (not-much-smaller) keyboard attached to a big ugly box that sat under the desk. KC has been talking for years about the inevitability of a shift backward to flatter computers in keyboards and for a while it looked like everyone was simply content to down-shift to a laptop. I have to say, Asus have revealed something that should satisfy everyone. It's a fabulously flat keyboard that has everything you'd need to connect to a larger screen. Oh, and it also has a 5 inch touch screen on it too, just in case you're on the road (or if you don't need the larger screen space)! Engadget has a story here with sexy photos, well worth a look. Needless to say, I want!
(Thanks Richie)

Infosthetics posted during the week about a Google vanity ring (there's a video here)... It's a little ring with an LCD display that shows how many hits the wearer gets on a Google vanity search... Is this the ultimate yuppy nerd toy? A nice spin-off that I know many academic-types would love would be a publish or perish citation count ring... ;-)

So doomsday came and went and nothing happened. You know, Stoern's Orbo technology, it was going to change everything. Well, unfortunately for all, and unsurprisingly for some, there were some problems and Stoern had to postpone their much anticipated demo. The machinist is running a wonderful piece of schadenfreude on Stoern's problems. I mean over-heating... it's as if there is more energy coming out than is being put in. That's just impossible, right?

I've been a fan of xkcd's webcomics for some time now. They had a nice comic out last week that should serve to remind us all about the need for extreme vigilance over all forms of new technology:

The neoLuddite Resistance Army are fighting back against rogue technology over at the Register's Rise of the Machine (RotM) series. It seems that they've come to similar conclusions as Paul McNamara over at Network World's Net Buzz column regarding Toto's extreme clean bidet toilets.

I blogged before on the difficulties of "walking" up stairs. It seems that if you want machinery to climb the stairs you need to control it yourself. Here's a cool video of the WL-16IV (the originating website is here, but it's not in english):

The Segway looked great when it came out, but it's just too expensive (and slow). There's a cool line-up of alternatives on hackedgadgets.com. My favourites are the Skatanova, previewed by Hackaday a few weeks back and the balancing one-wheeled scooter. The Skatanova is powered with a pair of cordless drills. There are lots of implementation details on its creator, Tony Ozrelic's site. Here's a video of the balancing one-wheeled scooter from ben.jellybaby.net (lots of implementation details on the website):

A Canadian company, XYZ Imaging, have developed a way of printing large production ready holograms from purely digital media. They have some very nice videos here and a short video with examples here:

There was an interesting article about this in the Ottawa Citizen back in November. There's something incredibly cool about storing 6 seconds of real-time motion in a poster. Expect to see many more of these in the future. (Thanks gordon.)