Gadgets Mobile

I’ve been thinking about the George Foreman Grill a lot lately. Why did it become so popular? It seemed like everyone I knew became an advocate for the thing a few years ago. It was like they suddenly discovered that they could cook food. Couldn’t we always grill food on our stove before? Yes we could. So why did we forget it? One word:

Microwave

Back in the seventies and eighties, we became obsessed with the microwave. It was SO easy and quick to heat up food. We tried to cook EVERYTHING in the microwave. We even were willing to bake cakes in the microwave, as shown in this commercial from Pillsbury:

As silly as it sounds, those microwave cakes tasted alright. I remember another commercial when I was a child in which a woman was demonstrating a microwave and a curmudgeon in the back of the audience kept asking, “But does it brown?” None of our microwaves browned food (except the miracle microwave in that commercial), but browning is something we gladly gave up for the convenience of speed.

After ten or fifteen years of eating soggy microwaved food, grilled food sounded pretty good. Food that was grilled on both sides at the same time was innovative and made the grilling time quicker. That, coupled with the infomercial world that we found ourselves in was a phenomenon.

Do I like my George Foreman Grill? Yes, I own the red one pictured here.

I’ve never used the other three plates that have come with it, but I keep thinking that I’ll make some waffles with it someday. Huge waffles for an army of angry football players who are REALLY hungry. Until then, I’ll just keep grilling my pork chops, hamburgers and steaks. It’s an awkward and bulky appliance sitting on my precious counter space when I could just as easily grill on my stove with a pan, but I still love the thing.

What can I say? I’m a child of the microwave generation.

A new web 2.0 service dubbed Tagcow has sprung out of nowhere a couple of days ago. Tagcow, so far has managed to create quite a stir and although Tagcow maybe a cool and useful application, some are questioning the new service, emphasizing on the accuracy of tagging, its usefulness and the never ending question on privacy statements.

In brief, Tagcow is a photo tagging service that automatically assigns descriptive tags to photos that users upload into Tagcow. The service identifies the objects in a given photo, and then assigns generic descriptive tags based on photos subject.

At first glance, it would seem a great tool, a work of magic even. For how can an automated system identify the objects in a given photo to come up with identifier tags for those objects? Some questions that came out were who does the tagging, human or some automatic algorithms? And based on the current flow of tag request that come into Tagcow, it would seem that humans maybe tagging the photos after all. The influx of request caused the site to disable the tagging feature for the moment. The human taggers probably could not cope up with the influx of request. 

But whether Tagcow used automatic taggers or human taggers is not the point of all this, but on the accuracy of tagging photos. From the owner’s point of view, would they rely on others to tag your photos their photos? Isn’t it more useful and efficient if photo owners are the one who’s going to assign descriptive tags into their photos?

Despite of these questions, Tagcow in itself is a pretty cool and useful service. Some minor tweaking on its TOS and privacy statements must be done first.  Plus a more detailed explanation of how Tagcow “really” works would be a welcome addition in understanding the service clearly.

Read [Tagcow] Via [Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection] Via [TechCrunch]

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Posted Mar 31st 2008 5:10AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Digital Cameras, Peripherals
While it may look like an overhead projector without any hints to the scale, you’re actually looking at HP’s (relatively) tiny Elite Auto Focus Webcam. Compatible with all the major PC-based, video chat solutions out there (Yahoo, Skype, MS Messenger, AIM), the USB 2.0 cam clips onto your monitor and features a 3 megapixel CMOS camera capable of shooting video ranging from 640 x 480 pixels at 30fps quality on down to 1,600 x 1,200 at a stuttering 5fps. It also brings a built-in stereo microphone, face tracking and Magic-i video effects software, 3 programmable buttons, and a sliding “privacy cover” which lets your date know that the camera really is, off.

Now is this a wacky idea or what - we’ve seen Oxygen Bars for humans, but an Oxygen Doghouse? Yes, your pooch no longer has to feel left out smelling foul odors such as sweaty feet, moldy shoes, and turd from a rival pooch among others from knee level downwards. Just plop him/her into the Oxygen Doghouse to gain a fresh experience.. The Oxygen Doghouse is best used for a really sick dog as a higher content of oxygen in the air has been proven to aid recovery from illnesses.

Dean Kamen, creator of the Segway and robotic arms, continues to pop out innovations like Hollywood stars adopt foreign babies. The latest creations are designed for the developing world and deal with the two of the three of life’s essentials: clean water and electricity (the third is, obviously, free WiFi).

The Slingshot is a water purifier which uses vapor compression distillation to pull water out of anything remotely wet. It does this using just 2% of the power of alternatives, and can supply 1,000 liters of fresh water a day from nothing more than ditchwater and piss.

The companion power generator is equally scatological, and will runs on anything that burns, including cow dung. Again, high efficiency is the name of the game, and Kamen’s generator is based on a Stirling Engine, one of the most efficient around, and in this case produces a constant output of one Kilowatt, enough to power 70 light bulbs or one high-end gaming PC.

Segway creator unveils his next act [CNN via Red Ferret]

Colbert and Kamen Solve the World’s Water Problems [Wired Science]

Posted Mar 31st 2008 1:20AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio, Robots
Sony just turned out the Rolly music player in black. A surprise blown by the FCC just last week. At least we can wonder at the colorful end-caps at a cost of ¥1,500 (about $15) per. Of course, if you scoffed at the original Rolly, then the April 19th, Japanese release of the new ¥40,000 (about $400) dancing-speaker bot won’t likely tug at your pawnshopped heartstrings either.

[Via Impress]

CanSecWest has claimed its second victim. After last week’s pwnage of a macbook air, there were two notebook computers left to win by hacking them: one running Widows Vista and one running Ubuntu Linux. The Linux box remained uncracked, but hacker Shane Macaulay successfully compromised a fully patched Vista system using a Flash exploit.

According to The Register, the attack took a good deal longer than Charlie Miller’s two-minute subjugation of the MacBook Air. Macaulay’s attack was initially neutralized by Windows Vista Service Pack One, but after some more work he and his accomplice Alex Sotirov managed to route around it with a little javascript.

The perpetrators get to keep the Fujitsu U810 and $5,000 as a prize. Might we suggest that the first things they do is to wipe the Windows install and load it up with Hardy Heron.

Only Ubuntu left standing, as Flash vuln fells Vista in Pwn2Own hacking contest [The Register]

The Palm Centro was already highly affordable when released, but Best Buy is offering a killer deal this weekend for AT&T’s Palm Centro, going as low as $40 for new AT&T customers while existing ones can pick it up for a mere $80. If that isn’t low enough already for a device of the Centro’s calibre, I don’t know what is.

The Vintage Tin Robot Concept Watch is a joy to behold, featuring user-friendly functions despite looking more complicated than taking a car apart and putting it back together again. The left eye is the hour register, while the right eye features GMT indication. As for the nose region joint with the mouth region, you get seconds and retrograde minutes placements respectively. The Mr. Roboto watch is powered by automatic winding movement, boasting 25 jewels to get your bling factor up whenever you enter a swanky venue. You will be able to pick up the Mr. Roboto watch this September as long as you have at least $4,800 lying in your bank account.

Apple is currently searching the job market for a Handwriting Recognition Engineer, at least since August 11th, 2005. This position in Apple’s Handwriting Recognition team will probably be responsible for Mac OS X’s Inkwell technology. For those who are not in the know, Inkwell technology was based on handwriting technology developed in-house by Apple for the Newton handheld computer in the 90s. Since the Newton’s fall in the last decade, Inkwell has found very little or no use at all, but this position could bring about the promise of the fabled Apple Tablet.