You’d be surprised how many requests we get for more gadgets that help our readers celebrate their love of the Caribbean culture and music. Luckily for us, the kids at Vat19 are now hawking a mini steel drum set that seems like it just might do the trick (that is, if the ‘trick’ can be ‘done’ by putting more red, yellow, and green-colored crap on your desk). By all accounts, this thing is pretty unexceptional — it’ll let you bang out an 8 note major scale, let you record your performance, and that’s about it. Hell, it doesn’t even really sound like steel drums! But the distributor did manage to get it to play Just A Friend by the incomparable Biz Markie — and in our eyes, that’s definitely worth a mention. All the same, we’re rather have the Stylophone Beatbox. Yours for $18.95. Video after the break.

[Via Engadget German]

Continue reading Pocket steel drums aren’t made of steel, aren’t really drums (video)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Pocket steel drums aren’t made of steel, aren’t really drums (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It wasn’t that long ago that a water closet scale was the only gadget you needed to track weight loss. Today even videogame consoles, once the bane of the fitness industry, are trying to help you recycle that spare tire, and of course there’s no shortage of specialty doo-dads getting in on the action. The Fitbit is one of those, a tiny accelerometer that pledges to keep an eye on what you do so that you can just go ahead and do it, reporting back at the end of the day on how well you did at staying active. It sounds nice, but it’s not quite that self-sufficient. Read on to see if it’s worth the commitment.

Continue reading Fitbit review

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Wearables

Fitbit review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s the ideal technology to use to track people who like to wander off? You might be inclined to state GPS, but stagger into a cave or basement (or, sometimes, a city street) and suddenly you’re off the grid, man. Not with Ekahau’s T301W wristband: it uses Wi-Fi to beam location information. Yes, we know that your average cave doesn’t have Wi-Fi, but Ekahau has a range of beacons available that’ll fix that, and when in the presence of those beacons (or any other configured Wi-Fi network) a wristband can be located to within a few feet. It’s the latest of a variety of similar devices from Ekahau, but the first small enough and waterproof enough to be wearable, which has the company envisioning everyone from cruise ship captains to secret service agents slapping these on their visitors. At $60 a pop, though, we’re not sure how many organizations will be able to afford that many.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Wireless

Ekahau’s T301W Wi-Fi wristband wirelessly tracks children, wandering grandparents originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPod Family, World wide web Tools, iPhone, App Review

We’re a pretty AIM-based blog around these parts. The fact that Weblogs, Inc. is owned by AOL may or might not play a role in that. Regardless, we TUAWians spend a lot of time in AIM chat rooms. The App Store’s lack of AOL chat room support has been a real burden when we’re out on the road with iPhones.

I was delighted when a current tweet put me in contact with Bj

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The King of Fighters XII Patch Update Details - TeamXbox
Today SNK PLAYMORE released a new online update patch for the award-winning The King of Fighters XII that fully addresses previously known issues to help optimize on the internet gameplay on the Xbox 360® Video Game and Entertainment System from Microsoft

DiManno: Fear trumps fatigue in flu line - Toronto Star
T he wailing babies, the flame-cheeked toddlers stuffed into too-warm winter clothing, the harassed and exasperated mums, the zombie-faced seniors and the amazingly cheerful nurses: This was Toronto coping with a feared pandemic on Thursday at North

‘Uncharted 2: Among Thieves’ (PS3) Gets Title Update, Double Cash - WorthPlaying.com
Down on his luck, Drake is lured back into the treacherous world of thieves and mercenary treasure seekers he had sought to leave behind. When a mysterious artefact propels Drake on an expedition to find the legendary Himalayan valley of Shambhala

Sony (NYSE: SNE) Reports Quarterly Loss, Beats Expectations - Transworld News
Sony (NYSE: SNE) reported a smaller-than-expected 26.3 billion yen ($289 million) quarterly loss as cost cuts combined with healthy sales of PlayStation 3 game consoles and Michael Jackson hits helped it inch toward recovery, according to Associated

Friday October 30th: Listener ideas on “How IndyCar can increase the - 1070 The Fan - Indianapolis
Here again are the emails received in the last week in their entirety (hopefully the system can hold the length of this post J ). - IndyCars in the $0.99 Hot Wheels bin at Wal-Mart. You know – the one they put out in the aisle that you can

PlayStation Home “Not A Priority” - TheSixthAxis
Speaking to Edge at the London Games Conference, Sony’s Pete Edwards has admitted that PlayStation Home no longer has “priority” status, saying that the firm has proved that there’s a market for the on the internet community and no longer sees its

LEGO Rock Band Trailer Stars LEGO Dinosaur - Shacknews
Remember when LEGO Rock Band was announced and publisher MTV stated the music game would embrace the “imaginative settings that the LEGO world offers?” Might I present to you the intro video for LEGO Rock Band. It’s out on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii

Warren Spector Already Has Epic Mickey Sequels Sketched In His Mind - G4 TV
“I don’t do anything that isn’t extensible,” he said. “And I will certainly feel like that I’ve not done my job if we can’t make other games in this world with these characters. In my head, I’ve got two more planned. In the business world of

Here are those DJ Hero DLC mixes in action - DESTRUCTOID
The two mixes — “All Of Me” by 50 Cent featuring Mary J. Blige vs. “Radio Ga Ga” by Queen and “DARE” by Gorillaz vs. “Can’t Truss It” Performed by Public Enemy — will cost you $5.99 for the pack. You can’t buy the songs

But PlayStation Home Is A Priority Now, States SCEA Exec - Kotaku.com
This is from Jack Buser, director of PlayStation Home in the U.S. in response to my query about Sony Computer Entertainment of America’s take on the comment from the Sony exec in Europe who was quoted as saying Home was “not a priority”: Hi Stephen

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Epson’s PictureMate line is one with a long-standing history, but as with most everything else in consumer electronics, the latest in the lineup seems to have shrunk. The appropriately named PictureMate Charm is a kinda-sorta portable printing solution, delivering 4- x 6-inch color prints in as little as 37 seconds. The mini printer also boasts a 2.5-inch LCD, a multicard reader, optional Bluetooth support (via a separate adapter) and room for either 150 glossy sheets or 100 matte sheets of 4- x 6-inch paper. It’ll ship next week a buck-fifty, but the replacement ink and sheet packs will probably drive you into bankruptcy.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Epson’s PictureMate Charm is the cutest pic printer we ever did see originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s always fun to see what massive tech companies think the future will be like, and for Fujitsu the future is Frame Zero. It’s basically a system of bezel-free devices that can all wirelessly connect and share information, not at all unlike Microsoft’s Mobile Device Collaboration patent application we took a gander at last year. The concept video below shows both a sort of tiny mobile PC joining forces with an eminently breakable looking cellphone to share information cross-screens. But, it goes further, with speak of the bigger of the two acting as a sort of alarm clock that, when you swat at it in the morning, checks your body temperature to determine how well you slept before barraging you with e-mails and financial reports. Just what you need first-thing in the morning.

Continue reading Fujitsu’s Frame Zero concept knows no boundaries, no bezels

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Tablet PCs, Wireless

Fujitsu’s Frame Zero concept knows no boundaries, no bezels originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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People have been trying to sell us 3D this and 3D that for ages, but for the most part it’s always been the same flat surface we’re looking at and poking with our fingers. Some restless souls in Japan, however — including Engadget’s very own Kentaro Fukuchi — have begun developing a way for personal to recognize a person’s interactions with real objects and to respond accordingly. The essence of this new technique is to use translucent rubbery objects, whose diffraction of specially polarized light is picked up by a camera. Thus, relatively subtle actions like squeezing and stretching can be picked up by the different light results produced. Still in the early stages of design, the system is hoped to aid in surgery training, though we’ve got video of its more fun potential uses after the break.

[via New Scientist]

Continue reading Tangible 3D UI being developed in Japan (video)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals

Tangible 3D UI being developed in Japan (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now this is kind of astounding. Remember those Intel “rock star” ads — featuring the co-creator of USB, Ajay Bhatt? Of course you do. What you might not know is that the Ajay Bhatt in those commercials is actually an actor. Apparently, Conan O’Brien made this discovery and felt compelled to sit down with the actual Ajay and pick his brain about technology… and, er, other things. Just watch the video after the break — you’ll thank us later.

[Thanks, Carter]

Continue reading Conan O’Brien speaks to the co-creator of USB on The Tonight Show

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Conan O’Brien speaks to the co-creator of USB on The Tonight Show originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 10 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not exactly the Baroque Vocoder we were hoping for, but an Austrian composer has hacked a mechanical piano to recite text — and recite text it does (even if you need subtitles and some prompting from the voice-over to understand what it’s saying). The video itself is a little skint on technical details — even if the “wow!” factor remains pretty consistent — but apparently composer Peter Ablinger took a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court and converted the frequency spectrum to MIDI, which he was then able to play back using the chordophone pictured above. The gang at Hack A Day seems to think that the actual conversion was done in the Pure Data software package, and who are we to argue? We’re just wondering how Black Moth Super Rainbow will ever fit this thing onto their tour van. See for yourself after the break.

[Via Hack A Day]

Continue reading Mechanical piano hacked to talk, states nothing you’d be interested in

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Mechanical piano hacked to speak, says nothing you’d be interested in originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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