A clever modder on the Ben Heck forums managed to cram an Xbox 360 controller into the shell of a PS3 Dual Shock controller. What resulted is an unholy union of the two consoles, bringing a controller for people with smaller hands to Microsoft’s great grey beast. There’s no headphone jack, although it may be added in the next go-around, but it looks pretty awesome to me. [Ben Heck Forums]
We reported in our massive feature on the SDK and App Store’s shortcomings that Apple didn’t even tell devs how many times their app is downloaded. I guess they realized devs might wanna know, ’cause now they’re offering daily download statistics to registered devs. One brick at a time. [Mac Rumors]
Filed under: Wearables
Automatic movement? Sweeping hands? Pish posh. Casio’s looking to impress a few watch aficionados itself with the all new Tough Movement. Designed to slip inside its Oceanus and G-Shock series of timepieces, the new movement “features a high shock resistance and a hand position correction function using LED.” During the 55th minute of each hour, the movement receives time calibration signals from six bases located throughout the world; if the hands are off at all, it automatically corrects things to ensure that you’re never a moment off. Reportedly, the first wristwatch to utilize the technology will be the GS-1200, which is currently slated to hit Japan this September for a stiff ¥42,000 ($390).
[Via OhGizmo]
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A California Supreme Court judge has just ruled that early termination fees from cellphone companies violates California state law and are illegal. What’s this mean to you? Sprint Nextel has been ordered to pay $18.2 million in reimbursements to customers who already paid their ETF, and to stop trying to collect $54.7 million from customers who canceled and refused to pay. But if ETF fees are illegal, does that mean 2-year contracts—which in turn give you subsidized price on your cellphones—will be a thing of the past? Tough to say, but we’re headed towards some change. [Mercury News via Yahoo]
Filed under: Wearables
We’re not even going to front — some seriously bizarre air conditioning-related gizmos have emerged from the great nation of Japan. The latest concoction to deal with heat wave side effects actually has nothing to do with keeping folks cool; rather, AOKI’s deodorant suits are designed to keep businessmen suffering from Hyperhidrosis adequately fresh. Most of the details are lost in (machine) translation, but all you need to know is that these outfits “suck out the smell of sweat using a silver ion.” Yeah, that’s totally worth the ¥61,950 ($575) asking price.
[Via CrunchGear, image courtesy of ListVerse]
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Hey, I love pleasing scents as much the next person, but I don’t think people are quite ready for an MP3 player that pumps odors through your earbuds. Nonetheless, a group of designers has come up with that very idea and dubbed it “Sweet Honey.” I highly doubt that you will see something like this on store shelves anytime soon, but there are plenty of crazy stupid aromatherapy gadgets out there already—so you never know. [Yanko]
For those of you who’ve finally repressed Frucci’s homoerotic slow-mo watergun facial montage, we’d like to offer a piece of apparel to commemorate the occasion (and bring back painful memories). By ReThink clothing, the Super Soaker t-shirt gives a metallic sheen to the classic water weapon, putting it on aesthetic par with something far more deadly. Like a Super Soaker 2000, or something. [ReThink via Tcritic]
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
It looks like a team of UC Berkeley researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang (pictured) have found a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever though possible, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers, and optical computers. The key to this new technique, it seems, is the use of a “hybrid” optical fiber consisting of a very thin semiconductor wire placed close to a smooth sheet of silver, which effectively acts as a capacitor that traps the light waves in the gap between the wire and the metal sheet and lets it slip though spaces as tiny as 10 nanometers (or more than 100 times thinner than current optical fibers). That’s apparently as opposed to previous attempts that relied on surface plasmonics, in which light binds to electrons and allows it to travel along the surface of metal, which only proved effective over short distances. While all of this is still in the theoretical stage, the researchers seem to think they’re on to something big, with research associate Rupert Olten saying that this new development “means we can potentially do some things we have never done before.
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You would have thought that the only way a police officer could have made a drunk driving arrest on a Segway was if the car jumped onto the sidewalk and slammed into one. However, an officer actually managed to chase down a drunken 18-year-old woman in a not-so-hot pursuit down the streets of Jackson, Michigan recently.
It seems that the officer spotted the woman driving erratically down the road at around 40 mph but, instead of simply waiting for backup like any other wuss cop on a Segway, this brave soul decided to chase after her at a breakneck 12 mph. When she stopped her car, the officer caught up and made the arrest. So when they say “stopped” do they really mean “passed out” or “slammed into a telephone pole?” [Yahoo]
One of the more eyebrow-raising rumors in the scramble of them about Apple’s upcoming MacBooks is that they will switch from Intel chipsets to someone else’s. It seemed odd on its face, since Intel and Apple are fairly tight, and there’s not a very apparent reason to switch. Jon at Ars lays out a fairly solid case for why Apple is sticking with Intel though.
Namely, Intel’s upcoming Nehalem chips would require them to switch right back to Intel, since no one else has the license for their QuickPath interconnect. And the pros for moving to Nvidia (PC Perspective makes a good case why it would be them) are mostly about better graphics performance, ultimately. So this seems to fall in the unlikely column, for now. [Ars]
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