The Demo Site

Tokyo’s Gundam lives! Hit the jump for a video and photo gallery.

Pink Tentacle via Danny Choo

Our buddy Phil Torrone built one of these Walker Bots using a laser cutter and some servos. The sound it makes as it comes at you is truly creepy and you can be assured the robots will use this noise as a method to terrorize the populace as they begin their first assault. They may be small but those feet are very sharp and I blame Phil for encouraging the growth and evolution of these monsters.

May God help us all.

The 18.4-inch D1100 from Averatec showed up at my house recently and I thought, hey, lazy Saturday — let’s set it up. I had forgotten the specs, the price, and all the relevant details but when I had gotten everything together (a process which took less than ten minutes) I can tell you that I’m impressed by how nice the computer looks.

Especially since — surprise! — it only costs $599.

The body is a nice, shiny black color, with the 18.4-inch screen resting on a chrome neck that adjusts up and down in order to reach a comfortable viewing angle. The LCD panel can be laid flat and pushed down to rest atop the machine’s body should you need to move the computer to another room.

Unfortunately, the screen doesn’t swivel from side to side — just up and down. And the wired mouse and keyboard kind of detract from the whole all-in-one idea. They just kind of look out of place with their cords running to the back of the machine. Again, though, this thing barely costs as much as a high-end netbook.

Internally, you’ve got a 64-bit AMD dual-core 3250e CPU, 250GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, DVD burner, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, built-in 1.3-megapixel camera and, of course, the 18.4-inch screen, which features a native resolution of 16480×945 (so no 1080p, sorry) and is powered by an ATI Radeon HD 3200-series GPU.

The machine comes preloaded with Windows Vista Home Premium, which returns an Experience Index score of 3.0 — the lowest subscore being in the graphics department. Everything seems relatively snappy so far, but I haven’t really loaded anything onto the computer yet, aside from replacing IE with Google Chrome and uninstalling Norton Antivirus because it asked too many questions and wouldn’t let me close out of it without resorting to the Task Manager.

And, of course, the question on everyone’s mind: How does Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 (that’s right, 06) play on it? It plays wonderfully. The graphics only top out at 1024×768, but everything looks nice and fluid. The sound from the tiny speakers is pretty tinny, though. Tin-like, that is.

Full review coming up once I put this thing through the paces. Here are some photos:

Averatec D1100 Series [ShopAveratec.com]

Archosfans has a fairly long video showing off the Archos 10S netbook, a $399 netbook. I honestl hadn’t heard much about it and Archos doesn’t sell much here. Writes charbax:

It is probably one of
the best values at 399 dollars for a slim netbook designs (only 22mm)
thanks to their super optimized Magnesium case design. They have a
cool maximum sized keyboard and a nice 10.2″ matte screen. They also
are the first I a heard to include 1 year of Microsoft Office use for
free in the Windows 7 version and a 100 euro/dollar free credit to use
for 1.99 euro/dollar or 2.99 euro/dollar per movie to stream in DVD or
HD quality from the Archos Movie portal.

Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter is prognosticating that the price of the Nintendo Wii will drop to $199 in time for the holidays, pointing out that the console’s supply has finally eclipsed its demand. Meanwhile, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recently said that his company plans to introduce great games instead of lowering the price of the little white box.

No offense to Nintendo, but its announcement of games at E3 wasn’t anything earth shattering. The two new Mario games will do well, Metroid: Other M will likely be a hit, and MotionPlus does indeed make the experience more enjoyable. But the Wii will have cost $249 for three entire years by the time the holidays roll around.

While I’m not sure that Nintendo would drop the price by $50, we may see them adding more stuff to the base package. Perhaps an extra Wii-mote and Nunchuck or a couple greatest hits-type games here and there.

If a console price drop was indeed in order, I’d imagine it’d drop to perhaps $229 or even $219. We’ll have to keep an eye on what Sony and Microsoft do as well. If those two introduce relatively aggressive price cuts, then Nintendo might not have any choice.

[via Edge]

This small device is a Roland tuner - chromatic, guitar, and bass - with a needle pointed and pitch verification as well as a monitor. This means you can tune your electric instrument and then run it through this box to listen to how things sound on your headphones. It also supports effects pedals chained from the guitar the the monitor and includes a built-in metronome.

Finally, you can mix in outside audio for practice, allowing you to play along to your favorite songs in the quiet comfort of your living room. Because it makes no audible sound you won’t wake up the parents after you get your first real six string at the five-and-dime and you play until your fingers bleed while planning how you and some guys from school will have a band and try real hard but you should know that Jimmy will quit and Jody will get married and you probably won’t get far although that summer will seem to last forever and if you had the choice you’d just want to stay there because those are the best days of your life and there’s no use in complaining when there’s a job to do perhaps at the drive-in where you met her (or him) and you’re on Mama’s porch and she/he told you that they’d wait forever and held your hand because, as you know, it was now or never because those were the best days of your life back in the summer of sixty-nine.

Avialable now.

Have you ever driven down the highway when there’s construction work going on and wondered who makes all the money from selling the orange barrels used to block off lanes? That’s a lot of barrels. So many barrels, in fact, that a student at NC State in Raleigh, North Carolina helped himself to three of them and constructed this most-excellent Barrel Monster.

The construction company he stole the barrels from wasn’t amused and 21-year-old Joseph Carnevale (even his name is fun!) was arrested.

According to The Smoking Gun, “Police estimated that Carnevale’s artwork caused $360 in damages to Hamlett Associates, the North Carolina construction company that owned the barrels.” So those barrels cost $120 each? I’m in the wrong business. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

[via Jalopnik]

This display, smaller than a dime, has 600×480 resolution, ensuring that when our species branches into the elfoid form we will be able to create an iPod Touch for our miniature brethren. You could also chain a number of these together to create a 1080p smaller than a postage stamp, potentially creating a 2048 x 2048 pixel display the size of a matchbook.

Exciting, if currently impractical.

via Giz

Start up the rumor engine, ladies and gentlemen. 1UP.com is reporting that Microsoft’s Project Natal may actually be shipping integrated into a new console next fall. From the sounds of it, though, the console won’t be new as in different but new as in improved slightly. That is, new games would apparently work on both the current Xbox 360 console and “Xbox Natal” as it’s being unofficially called.

Says 1UP:

“Yes, there will be a new Xbox console next fall.

However, the new console won’t just be an Xbox 360 with a camera, though — we’ve heard it will be considered a new platform and carry a new name (Xbox Natal?). It’s not clear what sort of upgrades we might see, but some have suggested it will be an slight upgrade of the current Xbox 360 technology. Current Xbox 360 games would be playable on it, but future games would be able to take advantage of the added muscle. Similar to what we see in the PC space, games played on the more advanced Xbox would look or perform better, but publishers will still be able to support owners of both systems.”

That seems like kind of a slippery slope for Microsoft but I suppose if you’re going to integrate something directly into a console, you might as well bump the console’s specs a bit while you’re at it to help potential customers justify such a purchase. Let’s not forget that Natal will be sold separately for those of us who don’t want to buy an all-new Xbox 360.

[1UP via Kotaku]

Spinal injuries aside, weep for America.

See also…

via BBG

If you had a camera that could shoot a million frames per second (that’s 1000 times slower motion than an Exilim EX-FC100 and five times slower than a Typhoon HD4), what would you try to capture? Probably a bullet impacting on some incredibly hard surface, right? Good news, friend! Someone does have a camera that shoots a million FPS, and they did capture a bullet impacting on some hard surface.

The video above is just one of several, and re-encoded at that; watch the originals here and get more information on the Shimadzu HPV 1, the camera used on these shots. Unfortunately not only is it not available for personal use, it’s also completely impractical: it only stores 100 frames at a time, meaning that at a million frames per second you’re looking at a whopping 1/10,000th of a second of recording time.

Think of it this way: if you wanted to slap your friend in slow motion, consider that the time on camera would consist of… the impulse from your brain travelling to the muscle in your arm, and that’s it. Still, this is totally awesome.

[via Reddit]

The scanner-cam we posted on Tuesday was pretty impressive, but it was far from clear just what was going on behind the lens, despite a video of the contraption in action. Well, the creator has posted some extra info and pictures of how it’s put together, so if this unorthodox imaging device piqued your curiosity, here’s a little more of it to check out.

Here’s what he has to say in his explanatory blog entry:

i’m not a professional. just for fun. please understand.

i think the Most important thing for making this camera is a brave of to disassemble a unknown new $100 scanner :)

Sounds good to me. I may look up a few of my craftier friends and see what we can do about putting together something like this with one of the scanners moldering in my my parents’ basement.

[via Hack A Day]