Just connect to your garden hose to fill the base to its 8-liter capacity. In less than 2 hours of sunlight, the water reaches 140°F! Use the mixing valve to blend heated water in the base with cold water from your hose to a pleasant 86-90°. You and your family can take several showers consecutively before the tank needs to reheat. It’s a great energy-saver and a must-have ‘green’ product. It harnesses the power from sunlight to–
Wait, what’s that? You were too busy looking at the product image. : /
CRISTAL, or “Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces,” is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface in that it is controlled by touch-based gestures on a coffee table surface. It is one of the coolest concept devices I have seen put to use. CRISTAL allows you to control and manipulate various things in your living room space including TV, speakers, lights, a vacuum cleaner, and a digital picture frame. The interface displayed on the table is a digital projection of your living room; it couldn’t be made any simpler. To interact with your lights, for example, you can turn them on and off or even dim them with a sliding gesture on the table over the projected image of your actual lamp. You can access your movie collection from a media server on the table. You simply drag and drop a movie from the collection list to the table’s main interface; from there you can view the movie on the table itself, or–get this–you can drag the movie from the center of the table to the projected image of your TV and it will immediately play on your actual TV in your living room! With photos, you can view and resize them directly on the table, and you can drag them to your TV or digital picture frame to view them on those devices. And here’s my favorite feature: you can tell your miniature vacuum exactly where to go to clean up a mess by drawing a line from the vacuum to the messy destination. Neat, huh?
Stacey Scott, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, member of the project: “We wanted a social aspect to activities such as choosing what to watch on TV and we wanted to make the process easy and intuitive. “Every time you get a new device into the living room, you get a new remote with it. And instead of difficult programmable universal remotes, this offers intuitive mapping of the different devices and home.” Christian Müller-Tomfelde, an Australian table-top display researcher: “It is a clever use of the tabletop as a ‘world-in-miniature’ interface to control room elements.”
Müller-Tomfelde commented that it could take five to ten years before we see something like this be manufactured and made available for the general public. As we have witnessed with Microsoft Surface, it can be very difficult to create and promote a table-top device with a steep price tag. Scott approximated that if CRISTOL was put on the market today it would cost somewhere between $10,000-$15,000. Today’s digital living room is packed with multiple devices that all perform different tasks. A device like CRISTOL that can put the control of all those devices onto one central table-top with a user-friendly interface would be a very helpful and exciting addition to homes all around the world.
Computer-maker HP, musical genius Dr. Dre, and Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine have announced a joint collaboration to make audio sound better, from what you hear on your computer to the earbuds or headphones you use on the go.
Iovine to CNET News: “We have to fix the entire chain. Our position is to go to all the sources and try to improve sound and educate people…We can’t put anything weak in the line. Whoever puts out things that sound bad shouldn’t be as cool as something that sounds great.” Iovine added: “I just want our product to sound better. The record business committed many, many mistakes in the last 10 years, and I’m right in there. One of them was letting its product get degraded. It’s one thing to let it get stolen, it’s another to allow it to be degraded because then you really don’t have a chance…video games and TV quality are getting better and the quality of our work is getting lower. If that happens, then music will become disposable. That’s something we can fix.”
This is very interesting news for the music industry. In today’s digital age of the MP3 format, iPods, and computers, it is very important that the sound of music quality does not disintegrate. The iPod earbuds that ship with every iPod, for example, do not produce good enough sound for the listener. Also, many computers are not constructed with speakers than can boast the proper bass and sound required for MP3s to be played at their potential. In the end, it is all about music being played the way they were meant to be heard and I believe that this alliance between HP, Dre, and Interscope will lead the way in incorporating premium sound capability in all mediums from MP3 players to PC laptops. Sources spilled to CNET News that “HP will release premium-priced laptops, headsets, and software featuring the “Beats by Dr. Dre” brand sometime this fall.”
“What happens when the doctor becomes the patient?”
The two-hour Season 6 premiere of House premiere on September 21 at 8:00PM on FOX. Look after the break for interview videos with the main cast including Hugh Laurie (House), Robert Sean Leonard (Wilson), Omar Epps (Foreman), and David Shore (creator). They discuss the repurcussions of Season 5’s brilliant finale. FYI, the song used in the trailer is “Grounds For Divorce” by Elbow.
DISTRICT 9. Presented by Peter Jackson, directed by Neill Blomkamp. A masterpiece. A true work of art. Emotions, build up. Edge-of-your-seat action, suspense. Humans, aliens. Peace, war, racism, segregation, gangs, slums. Super-powerful weapons. Gore, violence. Strength, weakness. Friendship, betrayal. Father, son. Fight or flight. Team-work. Flaw. Rebirth. Transformation. Terror, fear, angst. Power, manipulation, money, rations. Dark humor. Grounded. Documentary-style. Shaky-cam, angles. CGI, RED camera, gorgeous scenery. Perfect, stunning mix of reality (humans, surroundings) and CGI fantasy (aliens, mothership, weapons). Sharlto Copley as Wikus Van De Merwe — raw talent. Brilliant. Superb. Best movie of the summer. Most original storyline, best sci-fi movie in recent memory. SATISFYING.
Alternative-rock band Fall Out Boy will be releasing the first issue of their comic book called Fall Out Toy Works on September 2. The comic is a collaborative effort between the band and Dr. Romanelli, a partner they befriended in the past to make custom jackets. According to Hypebeast, this joint venture will introduce not only a comic book series but also “other creations” which are still under wraps. Head over to the official website for future information: FallOutToyWorks. Peek after the break for the comic book plot setup, and see the gallery below for some of the comic art panels.
