They're the preferred mode of transport for flannel plaided hipsters, sure, but when a fixie is crafted from carbon fiber by a company with a mastery of the material, it's downright impossible for anyone not to lust over. Oh, UBC Coren bike, you are purdy. Even if $32,500 in a stupid amount of money to spend on a bicycle.
You've probably never heard of UBC until now, and that's exactly why they created the Coren. The company has been producing carbon fiber parts for Formula 1 and other high-performance vehicles for years, but recently wanted to develop more brand recognition outside of expensive cars. So they've branched out to expensive bikes as well, designing and now manufacturing this masterpiece which weighs in at 17 pounds and uses a belt drive system instead of a chain. More here.
The idea to create "the toughest watch in the world" came to Japanese creator Kikuo Ibe, when he dropped and broke a precious watch given to him by his father. The first G-Shocks were developed in the 80s, and 30 years on they're tougher and smarter than ever. One item in particular, "the ultimate G-Shock", has been developed to celebrate the anniversary, the MR-G.
The MR-G is made from tempered titanium, and the face is inlaid with Japanese gold. They go on sale in January for $10,000 a pop. More here.
Unlike the Eye-Fi wireless SD cards which lock you into a set amount of storage, PQI's Air Carduses a microSD slot so that as the tiny cards get bigger and bigger, you can easily upgrade the adapter's capacity.
And like the latest generation of the Eye-Fi cards, the $50 PQI Air works with mobile devices thanks to an accompanying iOS and Android app. So you can share photos and get your snaps online without the need for a card reader or a USB connection to a PC. It works with three devices at once too, so you can send shots to your phone and tablet at the same time, and according to the PQI site it supports pretty much every popular camera on the market today. More here.
We've known it was coming for months, but the Acer Iconia Tab A110 finally has a due date and a pricetag. It's going on sale October 30th, and it'll only cost you $230. That puts it squarely in Nexus 7 territory.
But what does that extra $30 get you? Well, more. And less.
The Iconia Tab and Nexus 7 both feature Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 processor, both have 8GB of built in storage, and both run the latest version of Android (Jelly Bean, a.k.a. Android 4.1). The Iconia has some very nice features that the Nexus 7 lacks, however, most notably, a Micro SD card slot so you can boost the device's storage capacity an additional 32 gigs. It also has a micro HDMI port, so you can watch your movies/play your games on a full-sized TV. Very nice.
The biggest disadvantage is the screen. The seven-inch Iconia Tab A110 only has a resolution of 1024 x 600 which makes for a rather paltry pixel density of 170 PPI. The Nexus 7 crams 800 x 1280 pixels into those same seven inches, bringing the pixel density up to 216 PPI. Considering that reading and watching videos are likely to be the main things you do with a tablet this size, that might just be a deal-breaker. The Nexus is also about 1.75 ounces lighter than the Iconia, and it's a bit thinner, too. More here.
You want to be a precise chef, and you know that a cup is not always a foolproof cup, depending on your equipment and your method of measuring. In order to be as accurate as possible, you'll want to invest in a scale, like this one made by industrial designer Jacob Jensen.
It's no surprise that this $128 tool is beautiful and understated—Jensen is known for audio equipment he designed for Bang and Olufsen, shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1978. Fifteen of those pieces are a part of MoMA's permanent collection. Now that he's turned his attention to the kitchen, you can have his brushed aluminum take on an ingredient scale brighten up your countertops—and give you much more accurate measurements. More here.
Here are the stats on the average Twitter user: she's a 28 years old American girl who has an iPhone, has 208 Twitter followers while following 102 people, tweets a lot about fashion and family, likes the color purple and uses "love" quite frequently in her Tweets.
Beevolve, a social media marketing firm, analyzed 36 million Twitter profiles and came up with a bevy of numbers that break down Twitter users. Like did you know the average Twitter user has tweeted 800 times? Or that only 26% of users favorite Tweets? Or that nearly two-thirds of Tweets come from Twitter apps? There are a ton of Twitter statistics left, check them out at Beevolve.
Cardboard never ceases to amaze. Having been deployed in gramophones, stereos and even digital cameras, one inventor now believes it can be used to make the ideal bicycle. Izhar Gafni, from Israel, spent 18 months just folding the material every-which-way in order to discover a strong enough design, and now he claims his technique is almost ready for mass production.
His maintenance-free bike uses a "secret" mix of organic materials to make it waterproof and fireproof, and is then lacquered to give it a friendlier appearance. It's expected to cost a mere $20 and weigh about 20 lbs (9 kg) -- that's 65 percent lighter than an average metal ride. In fact, this bicycle doesn't use any metal parts at all -- the solid tires are made of reconstituted rubber and a car timing belt is used instead of a chain. It lacks the swank of aFaraday Porteur, perhaps, but then you could buy 175 of these for the same money. More here.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a smell has to be worth at least a few hundred. And the next time you're chatting and come across a thought or sentiment that can't be expressed with an emoticon, maybe a specific scent could translate your feelings. At least that's what the creators of the ChatPerf are hoping.
Created by the Chaku Perfume company, ChatPerf is an iPhone accessory and accompanying app that lets you remotely trigger a small puff of fragrance, or really any smell, on someone else's iPhone. So imagine sending the smell of fresh popcorn to lure a friend to a movie, or your favorite perfume to secure a date. The possibilities are endless, except that the atomizer accessory can only hold one scent at a time. And asking someone else to refill it takes all of the surprise out of the equation. So for $63 it's kind of a tough sell when that winky emoji actually sums up how you're feeling about 95 percent of the time anyways. More here.
Tokyo Flash is the go-to watch brand for people who don't care what time it is. Here's its latest creation, which hides the time in the negative space of a maze.
The Kisai Maze is labyrinthine in its complexity. It takes some patience to work out what the hell time it is—but once you've cracked it, it's actually quite satisfying. The watch is available in stainless steel or black, and is on sale for $99 until Thursday, when the price jumps to $139. More here.
9to5mac is reporting that Apple is going to announce a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro alongside the iPad Mini at a forthcoming product announcement event.
The website cites a "consistently reliable source at a high-profile U.S. retailer", who has learned of a new, smaller version of the current 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. According to the source, a 13-inch version of the Retina MacBoook will share the thinner, lighter style of enclosure of the 15-inch version, and will be sold in two configurations—with differing processor and storage options. The source also claims that the 13-inch Retina MacBook will be sold alongside the standard 13-inch MacBook.
The 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro was launched back in June to dropped jaws, and hinted at the future of Apple's laptop line: slim, hi-res displays, SSD-only storage and no optical drives. While a 13-inch version seemed inevitable, it remains to be seen with certainty if now is the time.
Still, chances are that the reason a 13-inch version wasn't launched alongside the 15-inch computer was that Apple was taking it easy on suppliers. Whether a six-month window provides enough breathing room—and whether we'll hear of a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro in the coming weeks—well, we'll just have to wait and see. More here.
Street View is good and getting better—and that's thanks to Google's massive fleet of cars, kitted out to capture the world around us in all its panoramic glory. This is what a parking lot full of them looks like.
Google's own Masrur Odinaev posted this picture of one of the company's holding pens: the fleet of Subaru Imprezas looks like an army of camera-equipped automatons, ready and waiting to do whatever Larry Page orders them to. Which, really, isn't far off the mark. Across the world, Odinaev estimates there are in fact 250 cars buzzing around. More here.
Microsoft's already opened up the floodgates with Windows 8 pre-orders, and it looks as if those still on the fence now have a sandbox to goof off in. Pictured above is a trio of Windows 8 notebooks from a Best Buy located in St. Cloud, Minnesota. More here.
A huge part of human history revolved around tying stones to sticks. We don't do it much any more, but if we did, we'd be super good at it. These modern stone tools prove it.
Designed by Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow, each tool is specially engineered to fit the piece of stone or flint its paired with. Digital scans taken of the flint stones let each handle account for its blade's subtlest nook and cranny, resulting in some stylish hatchets and daggers cavemen could only dream of, if that.
The tools were put on display at the recent Budapest Design Week in Hungary. No Neanderthals were around to comment, but you can imagine what they might have said: something along the lines of "oogh!" More here.
Lions and tigers and bears, join models of sharks and gorillas and gators—all the best animals, in desk tool form for $78 each. Even better? All of these creatures' teeth are properly proportioned to their bodies. More here.
We're almost there. Just a few more days until the big reveal. But that doesn't mean there aren't still a few final Windows 8 secrets to be disclosed. Two of those are the price and the packaging, which online retailer Newegg has just let slip. There are four packages listed: Windows 8 Professional Upgrade ($69), Windows 8 Pro Pack ($69, product key card only), Windows 8 OEM ($99) and Windows 8 Professional ($139), with the latter two being available in both 32- and 64-bit versions (for the same price).
If you go into the product page, however, we can see that the original price for the upgrade and product key card only versions is listed as "$199" suggesting that this might either be a launch offer, or subject to change. Don't forget though, there's still the chance to upgrade for an even lower price, for those who qualify. You can officially reserve your copy of Pro from today for $69.99 at all the main retailers, but if you can hold back on that impulse purchase for just a little longer, you'll be able to upgrade to Pro online for $39 (until January 31st). More here.
Kitchenware might be practical, but it isn't nearly enough fun. Fortunately, cookware company Lodge has decided to change that by creating a seasoned guitar-shaped cast iron skillet at its Tennessee foundry.
Lodge refers to it as a mini skillet, and it isn't wrong: at a mere 11 inches, end-to-end, you'll struggle to fit a family's worth of steaks in the pan. But who cares about that when you pretend to play audacious guitar solos as you cook. The best bit? It only costs $18. More here.
Designed to accomodate kids of any age and height, this Grow Table drawing desk features a sloped work surface so at one end it's low enough for little tikes, while the other is high enough for teenagers.
Made from marine plywood with Douglas Fir accents, the Growth Table encourages both young and old to work and play together at the same desk. And its simple design means the table can keep up with a growing kid without the need for complicated adjustment mechanisms. Just be careful not to misplace a pencil when you're older because it has a long way to roll. More here.
It's a famous question among academic philosophers: how can we be sure we're not living in a gigantic computer simulation? Fortunately, researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany think they've cracked it.
Their reasoning is pretty straightforward, according to Technology Review: if the cosmos is just a numerical simulation, calculated on some insanely powerful supercomputer tucked away in another world, there should be clues around us that can reveal the truth. Glitches in the system, if you like, that give the game away.
Moving from that reasoning to the science required to find those clues isn't quite so easy. To kick things off, the team of researchers from Bonn have speculated that the problem with all simulations is that they're discretized: to model a physical phenomenon, the real world has to be represented by separate points in time and 3D space. Sure you can make the distance between those points reeeeeeally small—but you still have to have this kind of grid.
So the researchers started looking at some physics they understood—in this instance high energy processes that become smaller as they get more energetic. Interestingly, they found that the idea of a world-as-computer-simulation would impose limits on the absolute amount of energy any particle can have, a result rooted in the fact that nothing could ever exist in a simulation which is smaller than the 3D grid it's represented on.
Weirdly enough, turns out such a limit actually does exist here in our world, and dictates the amount of energy cosmic ray particles can have. But the idea of the lattices add a further complication, because it would theoretically mean that we wouldn't see cosmic rays traveling equally in all directions across the imposed 3D grid.
To finish off by blowing your mind: that's a measurement that current technology could be used to make. Of course, if the findings were negative it wouldn't rule out the fact that our world was a silicon simulation, because it might just be more complex than we could ever imagine—but if results came out positive it could mean we're all made of code. More here.
If you've been wanting an extra iPhone 5 cable, but haven't wanted to pay the full $40 for one, help might be on the way: a Chinese company called iPhone5mod says it has cracked the authentication chip found in the lightning connector and is now selling the cables for $20 apiece.
According to TG Daily, the company also has a supply of real authentication chips from an official Apple supplier as well:
"We are the first company to release a different Lightning Cable from Apple that fully supports the iPhone 5 (also works with iPod Touch 5th Gen and upcoming mini iPad too). It works independently or together with the iPhone 5 Dock," says the company.
[...]
According to the company, it's got two sources of appropriate chips: a supply of the genuine article from Apple's own supplier, and cracked chips that bypass Apple's authentication functions. Both work equally well, it says.
While these aren't yet cheaper, the fact that the authentication chip has been cloned opens the doors for a wave of other manufacturers. But though the knockoff lightning cables are said to do everything the official cables do, word has it that Apple will try and block the version of this cable that iPhone5mod is peddling. More here.
Motorola had said its dearest RAZR HD LTE would be coming "later this fall" as an exclusive to Rogers, and today's the day that relatively thin and powerful Android handset hits shelves across the border. Available now for $100 (with the obligatory three-year commitment, of course), the RAZR HD LTE will hand interested Canadians a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich (sorry, no Jelly Bean for now), a 4.7-inch Super AMOLED HD, 720p display and a 1.5GHz, dual-core S4 CPU -- not to mention the ability to surf on Rogers' LTE waves in areas where the network's live.
Meanwhile, those who would like to go the "outright" way will have to spend a cool $600 on Moto's Kevlar-sporting slab, but, needless to say, that's the price folks have to pay for walking out the door with a bit of leeway. More here.
