Gadgets

In a blatant attempt to capture the hearts and minds of the You Tube generation, Sony has unveiled its "net-sharing cam." The NSC-GC1 camcorder can record in QVGA for easily uploadable 15fps videos or DVD-quality VGA at 30fps. Your cinematic work is stored on Sony’s Memory Stick DUO memory card and can be painlessly posted to the social networking site of your choice with the integrated software. The NSC-GC1 also features a 5-megapixel still camera with flash. It’ll hit stores in September and preorders are being taken now.

Yamaha is touting its BODiBeat DAP ($300) as the "first music playback device that synchronizes your music to the movement of your workout." What that means is it monitors your pulse via a wired ear clip and your speed with an accelerometer and selects music that matches the pace of your exercise. (We suggest interval training to really play havoc with those tempos.) The BODiBeat features 512MB of flash memory, 12 hours of battery life and records your stats so you can transfer them to your PC and evaluate your training progress. 

From the Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?!? Dept. comes word of Radar, a new software widget designed to let parents monitor how their kids use their cell phone. Designed mainly to protect kids from electronic bullying, or so they say, the program automaticaly texts parents with an alert when their kid takes or makes a call to or from someone not on the call list approved by Mom and Dad.

Still in the the testing phase, the $10-a-month software initially works only with BlackBerries, but Radar is working on deals with Verizon and Motorola. We’ll leave it to actual parents to judge whether this is sensible protection from real dangers or another example of milk carton paranoia.

David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, has offered a U.S.-style copyright extention term to the media industry in return for an agreement to self-censor itself.

In a speech to the British Phonographic Industry group, he said that his party would work to the extend the copyright term to 70 years and make new laws to fight piracy. Labels, however, would agree no longer to sell products which gloriy misbehavior and immorality.

Naturally, no details were offered. Cameron’s chance to beat Gordon Brown’s government at the polls will likely come in 2009 or 2010.

A close reading of speech itself reveals it to be somewhat empty of meaning, however, as it is packed with marketing buzzwords, bizarre non-sequiturs (“Copyright is the way artists are rewarded”) and long-debunked myths along the lines of “every copied song is a lost sale.” Everyone in the room will have understood the nature of such political theater; just as they will have understood that however much the industry wants this extension, it doesn’t want it bad enough to agree to censorship in the world’s second-largest market for English-language media.

These two illustrations, taken from patent applications 20070152983, for a “Touch pad with symbols,” and 20070152966, for a “Mouse with optical sensing surface,” tell the whole story: Multitouch mousing and a new clickwheel that’s like one of those faux-rotary button phones from the 1980s.

Maker Curiouslee has fashioned a microscope from his shiny new iPhone. The picture above is a Powerbook Keycap, lit from behind with a flashlight, and taken with an iPhone camera. Curiouslee noticed that the super smooth fit and finish of the iPhone lends itself well to this hack. The flush camera lens is easily covered with an $8 Radio Shack magnifier. The image above is resized to fit on the blog. The original is of higher quality.

I’ll admit it: the main reason I bought this was for the novelty of using a “crack hoe” in the front of the neighbors. Purchased from garden specialist Lee Valley Tools, my pruning obsessed spouse and I had high hopes that the weeder would allow us to quickly and thoroughly neaten our driveway. Alas, about the only thing the device has been reliably useful for is the thrill of yelling, "Are you out there again with that no-good crack hoe?" The sickle-like blade proves useful only for removing thick clumps of grass between bricks or sidewalk sections. Dandelions and other green nuisances require almost super-human finesse to remove, and even then the tool only cut away the tops— it never touches the roots.  —David Becker

WIRED Easily digs out long grassy weeds from tight nooks and crannies. Safe—curved blade design makes it hard to accidentally hack off unsuspecting toes.

Printer makers, whose business model continues to depend on forcing you to buy their overpriced ink refills, are enlisting a new ally in their fight against third-party ink cartridges and home-brew refills. Cryptography Research of San Francisco says it’s working on a new chip that will make it harder to use off-brand cartridges.

Certain printer makers have long employed other types of chips to prevent use of refilled cartridges, although hackers quickly figured out ways to counteract such measures. Cryptography Research says its chip will be more hacker-proof because large portions "will have no decipherable structure," making it harder to reverse engineer.

There are more than 200 people in line now outside the SOHO store, according to photographer Tim Rielly, who sent the following shots into Wired via a smartphone. Cheers, Tom!

“What’s so interesting is everyone is on their Blackberries, Treo, Blackjacks, etc., working or chatting with friends and wondering what happens to all those phones,” Tim reports. “Everyone in line has a smart phone.”

Mini Ping Pong helps while away the long hours.