Battery Charger Looks, Functions Like a Toster

The Toasty Charger is compatible with a variety of "lithium ion batteries -- you slide one in, push the toaster handle down and wait for it to pop back up again."

Granted this is one toast that'll take a little longer than usual so if you're not around to see it pop, there's a handy dandy color coded LED light in the shape of toast for visual reference.

[via Yankodesign]

Feature: Strobe Lights Make Water Bubbles Appear to Float in Mid-Air

Though just an optical illusion, these water bubbles appear to defy gravity, or so it seems.

Thanks to strobe lights and multiple streams of water, this creative installation makes the generated bubbles appear to float in mid-air. Once refined, the bubbles can be programmed to show images and/or text.

[Source]

Amazing SimCraft Racing Simulator

The amazing SimCraft Apex SC930 racing simulator "can toss you up to 40 degrees in most directions, enough to make me wonder if they include some vomit bags."

SimCraft, however, describes it as being suitable for training professional race drivers when they can't get to the track, so think well into five figures.

[via TecheBlog]

Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo Performing Runway Tests

Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo, the ship that will deliver SpaceShipTwo into orbit, just started performing runway tests. We're one step closer to personal space travel, folks.

it's just slowly trucking down the runway, but it's the first time we've actually seen this thing in any sort of action. The next step? The first flight, which is expected to happen around the 19th of this month. We still have a bit of a wait before it'll actually deliver SpaceShipTwo into space, but it's exciting to see progress being made. Now just drop the tickets, Virgin. I want to go.

[FlightGlobal]

Digital Window Gives Non-Distorted 180º Real Time Panoramas

The Digital Window camera stitches the video from five image sensors to give a non-distorted 180º real-time panorama. According to Tenebraex, the technology was designed to make armored vehicle's doors transparent for the soldiers inside.

But what they really wanted to do in the Bradley was to make that door, in effect, transparent. It doesn’t really matter how you get there—you just want an undistorted view. That was the genesis of the idea; it got us thinking about using multiple, low-cost sensors on the outside of the vehicle and having a display inside.

The Digital Window is the first commercial product coming from this technology, designed to be used in fixed points, not in military vehicles. The combined five-sensor give 15 frames per second, with a 100 megapixel per second over its ethernet port.
[Gadget Labs via Gizmodo]

Slot-Loading, iMac-Juiced Xbox 360 on eBay

Remember that slot-loading Xbox 360 we showed you back in November? It used an old iMac's CD-ROM drive to gain PS3-worthy style. Now it's on eBay.

Currently bid to just over $400, other than the fancy drive, it's sort of a disappointment. The hardware is pre-HDMI and the system includes no hard disk storage. But you know what? I still kind of want it.

[eBay via Gizmodo]

PS Home Hacked, But the Door Was Wide Open

It's technically an "Open Beta," but PlayStation Home features major security vulnerabilities that hackers have already exploited. The first, seen here in blurry video, allows you to play, say, Pineapple Express on Home screens.

Using Apache and DNS redirection (simple stuff), you can point your own version of PS Home to display movies, text and music of your choosing. That's fun, but fairly harmless.

Another hack allows for the downloading of any file you want, like someone's user profile or avatar, while the final two, and most worrisome vulnerabilities include uploading any file to the Home server or deleting any file from the Home server. That's about as bad as security can get.

[StreetSkaterFU and PS3Hax via Gizmodo]

Dubai Hotelier Hasn't Heard of Flip-Flops, Plans to Refrigerate Entire Beach

There's nothing like a good bit of Dubai excess, but this just isn't impressive enough to justify the profligacy: the Palazzo Versace hotel is building a beach with refrigerated sand.

The small beach will protect guests' precious feet by piping cold air through a series of tubes underneath the sand, which will suck enough heat from the blistering surface to offset the beaming sun and 110F temperatures. A system of computers and thermostats will monitor and adjust the system.

Hotel proprietor Soheil Abedian, who holds the uniquely Dubaian job title of "Guy Who Takes Wild Guesses at What Very Rich People Might Pay For", had this to say about his project:
We will suck the heat out of the sand to keep it cool enough to lie on. This is the kind of luxury that top people want.

Top people! I can only assume that this means the hotel's patronage will be strictly limited to previous winners of Top Chef and/or America's Next Top Model. The hotel is set to open next year, or possible in early 2010.

[Daily Mail]

The History of Apple, As Seen Through the Glazed Eyes of the Patent Office

Technologizer has meticulously reconstructed Apple's history in the form of sweet, formerly tantalizing patent filings.

Many patents submitted under seductive names like "Microcomputer for Use With Video Display" and "Media Player" went on to become commercial successes and household names, though even in this curated, selective list, for every recognizable sketch there is a promising one that never came to fruition. What ever happened to Apple's 2003 "Media Player System" filing, which promised wireless music transmission between the iPod and other devices? Or this awesome, fully articulated iMac concept?

The gallery is a novel way to piece through Apple's greatest hits and misses of the last 31 years, many of which, like the 1992 filing for an Apple cell phone are much richer in hindsight. After piecing through the gallery though, it's hard not to get the sense that after all this time and all these patents, there still isn't an effective predictor for which ones will ever amount to anything.

[Technologizer]

MSI Encourages Hackintosh, Leaks OS X Wi-Fi Drivers for the Wind

Seeing that the need for a warranty-voiding Wi-Fi module switch was the only thing keeping users from easily making convincing mini-MacBooks, MSI has semi-released OS X wireless drivers for the Wind.


After pelting MSI with unlikely requests for OS X driver support, a number of users on the MSIWind.net forums have received responses from the company, written in the "Dear Sir/Madam" parlance of a Nigerian scammer but nevertheless containing an early version of working Wi-Fi drivers for the Wind's Realtek RTL8187SE Wi-Fi module. The driver doesn't allow the card to be used like a regular Airport adapter, but according to users connects just fine through Realtek client software.

Forum-goers are floating copies on a couple of ephemeral hosting sites, so head over to the thread and give it a shot.

[MSIWind Forums via GottaBeMobile]