Category Archives: Gadgets

Galaxy watch with Digital Tube LED

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My midlife crisis has taken a turn toward consumerism: I did need a watch, and I found a brilliant one from TokyoFlash (mine is the discontinued Jackpot, which you can still find at Overstock.com). TF’s watches are a must for Escape from New York fans, or anyone who likes the feel of a chunky, retro-meets-dystopian future kind of thing. — mb

Galaxy watch with Digital Tube LED
The cryptic looking display is deceptively easy to read; one touch of the upper button initiates a programmed animation of light, and then presents the time. Twelve yellow bars represent hours in a clock wise direction, eleven red bars represent groups of five minutes and four green bars show single minutes. Pressing the lower button presents the time immediately. No ordinary design, Galaxy has a modern look with futuristic style.

RFID scare? Blame the media

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Journalists “screw up” health story… trust business to fix the problem, says business blogger.

http://flickr.com/photos/daubentonia/ Creative Commons agreement: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/deed.en

(RFID tags didn’t cause his heart attack. But arphids can make matters worse. Photo: Daubentonia)

from Mark

Widespread reports this week that RFID signals could kill you in the hospital are false, a technology business blogger is claiming.

The blogger, at the technology website ZNDet, makes this bogus assertion: that hundreds of news outlets are twisting the results of a disturbing Dutch finding (published by the Journal of the American Medical Association): that RFID tags and readers can cause livesaving equipment to switch off.

In fact, Vrije University researchers reported total switch-offs and other severe malfunctions in its tests of pacemakers, dialysis machines and ventilators, operated within about ten feet of RFID tags.

The ZDNet blogger, Dana Blankenhorn, employing a condescending “now let’s set the record straight” voice, ignores the central findings of the Dutch study.  Instead, Blankenhorn says that hundreds of news reports, based on the JAMA report, “screw up” those facts.

Blankenhorn says a tweak in RFID standards — a process that could take nearly a decade, as today’s standards did (something he does not note) — is all that is needed to fix the EM interference problem.

But the RFID horse is already out of the gate: The tags are becoming as ubiquitous in hospital wards and operating rooms as they are on the street. (Click here for my Boston Globe report on RFID tags in hospitals.)

Lack of RFID standards leads to media panic | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com
There is a problem with RFID in hospitals. There is no standard that will tell hospitals what frequencies the tags are using. Thus they can’t tell when the frequencies being used by the tags might interfere with other gear.

This problem is very easy to fix. The industry gets together on an RFID medical standard, which specifies which frequency is to be used. My choice would be the upper range of 802.11, around 5.8 MHz. Medical devices don’t run there.

Why just help a neighbor…

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…when you can take his money, too?

Zilok.com, a new service launched today, is not only a stupid idea for anyone who owns a home (granted, it might help apartment dwellers in a pinch), it is a depressing sign of hard economic times.

The service suggests that — instead of sharing your lightly-used weed whacker with a neighbor, for example — you can charge him for it.

The car safety seat pictured here, for example, is available for rent in the San Francisco State University area for eight bucks per day, which makes no economic sense whatsoever.

Zilok also says (natch) that you will be doing right by the environment, because your customers will be buying less stuff. (One reason: By renting everything, and never owning anything, they will stay poor.)

No Boston-area items were available for rent as of noon today. — mb

Zilok Official USA Launch!
Keep it local and be a green hero
By simply renting things you aren’t using to people in your area, you cut down on conspicuous consumption and encourage the reuse of everyday household items and electronics. With Zilok you help save on the natural resources needed to produce more stuff.

“Inspired by conservation and green movements in Europe, Zilok is the fun way to tackle over-consumption while expanding everyone’s access to the things they want and need—whether that is a scooter or Wii, a ratchet set or a tuxedo” offered Gary Cige, Cofounder and CEO of Zilok.

Headsets getting some cachet

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From my Boston Globe column last week: Smaller, better-looking video eyewear (for watching vids, checking in on your Second Life, etc.),

Headsets getting some cachet – The Boston Globe
By Mark Baard
May 12, 2008

digital eyewear
Digital eyewear is slowly becoming suitable for public viewing. In other words, headsets such as the Myvu Crystal are slim and colorful enough that they might be taken for a pair of over-the-top Gaultier frames instead of an assistive device.
more stories like this

The ear buds hanging from the arms of the Crystal are a dead giveaway that something “smart” is going on behind those shades.

Like the original, less sexy looking Myvu models, the Crystal (about $300 at myvu.com, starting next week) creates a single image you can see inside the translucent lenses.

SL + 3D – hardware = total inworld immersion (TIA)

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Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut today demonstrated a camera-based motion recog system that controls your avatar’s movements in Second Life. Looks good on the video, below…

With a 3D viewing headset (such as the augmented reality headset imagined here), you would have your own at-home 3DVR “cave” for exploring the metaverse.

Incredibly, we are just years, perhaps only months, away from very discreet (i.e., they won’t take over your livingroom), immersive experiences, at home.

And it will cost a fraction of what 3DVR caves, such as the one at Brown University (an elaborate mix of multiple projectors, hand and head tracking devices, and a stack of Linux servers).

Of course, the more seamless metaversal interfaces become, the more likely people will start forgetting where they really are.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t52gkAwJq8&eurl=http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/11/mitch-kapor-unveils-sl-navigation-via-3d-camera/]

[digg=http://digg.com/hardware/SL_3D_hardware_near_complete_immersion]

Vintage-looking scoreboard to track MLB scores

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Get the count at your desk.

 

My buddy Andy, a lifelong Mets fan, might like this one: the LiveBoard (about $300) comes with a USB wireless adapter and software CD. There are no subscription fees. It’s only for PCs at the moment, but Vroop plans a Mac version.

Link and excerpt, below, to my Boston Globe column this week…

clipped from www.boston.com

PERSONAL TECH
Board skims scores off the Net

By Mark Baard | June 4, 2007

I played two seasons of Little League in Queens under a cigar-chomping manager named Morty Silver. My sole distinction was winning a trophy for Best Sport, which Morty gave me for crying the least after striking out. The only other thing I remember were the scoreboards at the better fields: They were all bulbs in the days before monster television screens.
The Attleboro technology firm Vroop hopes to tap our nostalgia for old scoreboards with its 4.2- by 7-inch LED LiveBoard (myliveboard.com), a Bluetooth device that skims sports scores off the Internet and displays them in real time.

Now Artoo can ride on your laptop

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For serious collectors only. Flash drives dressed for rebellion

Boston-based design house Mimoco last week released limited edition USB flash drives that look like Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Storm Trooper, and R2-D2. More characters are in the pipeline, according to Mimoco.

Chewie is my favorite. Having his face on a USB flash drive should help me to form an attachment to my data, thus making it a bit harder to lose.

Link to my Boston Globe column, and excerpt, below.

clipped from www.boston.com

PERSONAL TECH | PERSONAL TECH

Chewbacca as a USB drive

By Mark Baard | May 7, 2007

The Boston-based designer toy studio Mimoco (mimoco.com and starwarsshop.com) has just released the cutest little USB flash drives you are likely to find. They are a line of inch-long “Star Wars” toys with lots of artful details (Chewbacca’s belt, Artoo’s input panels, and so on), which hold up to 4 gigabytes in their bellies.