Archive for August, 2010

Lights Above, Lights Below

Where do you have all of your lamps? Above? To the side? All around? How about you get some lamps that sit on the ground and some other lamps that sit above your head? How about a collection of lamps that works in basically any position? Take a look at this “7/7 Lights” lamp collection by Albertine van Iterson. Each lamp is made out of its own materials, has its own identity, and require slightly different treatments. Yet at the same time, they’re all part of the same family.

How you interact with this set of lamps is entirely up to you. Get a bunch of the wood ones and let them all fly above your head. Get a few metal lamps and lie them around your lovely wood-floored no-cat apartment. Or get them all, all the different sorts of lamps in the 7/7 Lights series, place them all around your huge house!

It’s a lamp family.

Designer: Albertine van Iterson

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Intel gobbles up Infineon’s mobile unit in $1.4 billion deal, looks to ‘accelerate 4G LTE’

Infineon, the company behind the baseband chips inside your super-duper new phone, is about to cash out from the wireless industry courtesy of Intel’s insatiable appetite. The Wireless Solutions Business (WLS), which accounted for nearly a third of Infineon’s €3 billion ($3.83b) revenue last year, is being sold to the American chipmaker for a cool $1.4 billion. For its part, Intel is quick to reassure the world (and its antitrust authorities) that WLS will continue to operate as a standalone business and continue to support ARM-based devices. Chipzilla’s perfectly innocent ploy is to harness Infineon’s knowhow in future smartphone, tablet and laptop products, providing both the processing and wireless capabilities. Specifically mentioned in the news release is Intel’s ambition to “accelerate 4G LTE” through this deal, while also not neglecting its ongoing efforts with WiMAX, with the overarching strategy being described as “a combined path.” We should know more about where this path will take us when the acquisition is completed in the first quarter of next year.

Continue reading Intel gobbles up Infineon’s mobile unit in $1.4 billion deal, looks to ‘accelerate 4G LTE’

Intel gobbles up Infineon’s mobile unit in $1.4 billion deal, looks to ‘accelerate 4G LTE’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DIY Friday: Charge Your iPhone With AAs or Solar Power

Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power. About a month ago, she released this video outlining the Apple hackery needed to make this work.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip this summer, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Why Arduino Is a Hit With Hardware Hackers
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

Steelcase Node Reinvents Classroom Seating

By Andrew Liszewski

It might be designed for the needs of modern classrooms, but I’m pretty sure I could use one of these Steelcase Node desk chairs around my home/office. Besides better addressing the needs of today’s laptop-toting students with ample bag storage under the seat and an adjustable work desk sized for most notebooks, the Node also swivels and is on wheels making it very easy to re-arrange an entire classroom should a different configuration suit the day’s lesson plan. Whether it’s a lecture or working in smaller groups. The chairs are also available in a variety of color combinations since branding seems to be an important part of higher-learning these days.

[ Steelcase Node ] VIA [ designboom ]

Casio G-Shock GD-100 Is Easily The Brightest Kid In Its Class

By Andrew Liszewski

Waaaay back in 1992 Timex introduced their first Ironman watch with electroluminescent Indiglo backlighting and the world of watch face illumination has never looked back. But even though it provides ample illumination for an LCD display (and perfectly stealthy illumination for use in a dark theater) I guess Casio figures there’s finally room for improvement. So their new G-Shock GD-100 models, which will be available at the end of September, feature a new LED backlighting system that’s 6 times brighter than your standard LED. Now I’m not sure who needs a watch that bright since the iPhone 4 has already taken over flashlight duties for a lot of us, but since the G-Shock line seems designed to handle any situation, I guess it’s nice to know it’s there.

[ Hypebeast - Casio G-Shock GD-100 ]

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