Category Archives: Tech

Papi off of the comment section asks:

… for the tech heads out there. I have an iPod with about 10 gigs of superb music, most taken directly from a vinyl collection. How do I get it off and into a new computer? The iPod works, for a bit, but I have no connection to the collection on iTunes. I’ve called Apple, they’re no help. All I have is the iPod. Help

Anyone?

Every year in Finland, 4,000 reindeer die from car strikes, causing an estimated e €15 million in damages.

In an effort to reduce the carnage, the Finnish Reindeer Herders Association has been applying fluorescent paint to the animals, which works well on fur but best on antlers, which can be seen from all angles.

“There are some problems with the durability and utility” says the Association, “but the product development continues.”

mymodernmet

An artificial skin cover for smartphones developed by Marc Teyssier and his colleagues at Telecom Paris. To wit:

Currently limited to smartphones, smartwatches, and touchpads, the prototype is responsive to a variety of gestures, including pinching, tickling, and poking, responding to different emotions: sudden, hard pressure is associated with anger, while gentle and sustained stroking is associated with providing comfort.

Oh dear.

sad&useless

Behold: Velox – a prototype amphibious robot designed by Pliant Energy Systems of Brooklyn with an all terrain propulsion system inspired by the locomotion of several natural species. To wit:

Velox can use several modes of locomotion found in the animal kingdom using just one pair of “fins”. These fins are best described as four-dimensional objects with a hyperbolic geometry that allows the robot to swim like a ray, crawl like a millipede, jet like a squid, and slide like a snake.

A craft equipped with this system has unprecedented freedom to travel through a range of environments in a single mission. As an underwater vehicle, the robot’s ability to instantly reverse direction and do quick turns make it ideal for task such as coral reef inspection or dragon fish hunting where a craft must rapidly manoeuvre to look around and between objects.

First the dragon fish, then all humans.

kottke

Behold: a rare 1940 index typewriter, the Toshiba BW-2112 – demonstrated here by New Orleans based Typewriter Collector – which uses horizontal cylinders with thousands of symbols to type in Japanese, Chinese and English.

In the mid 50s, when Toshiba switched to a Western style keyboard with Kana characters, the cylinder models were discontinued, making this a rare machine indeed. Of the device, which ordered characters in a manner similar to that found in a Japanese dictionary, Typewriter Collector sez:

They’re arranged phonetically by most common “on-yomi” (or kun-yomi in some cases) according to the kana syllabary (many homophones, of course)… Red characters help parse the readings. Last character to left of equal sign can be pronounced “kin” (exert) and the first character in next row “gin” (silver), then “ku” (suffer) in red followed by “kuu” (sky, empty), “kuma” (bear), “kun” (teachings, meaning [also the kun in kun-yomi]), “gun” (group), then “kei” (system) in red followed many, homophones of “kei”

Now for yiz.

colossal