LIVEdigitally

Are you tired of chipping in with the rest of your family to buy Dad a horrendous looking tie? Tired of the awkward moment where he’s forced to put it on and wear it to work while looking thrilled and saying “Yes, I never knew polka dots went so well with pin stripes”?

Then what you need to take a look at, is the “AMAZING Water Clock”. It’s a great replacement father’s day gift. In many ways, it might be an odd enough present that it is the equivalent of the horrendous tie, but this time your Dad is saved from wearing it in public.

It’s not just a water clock or even THE water clock. It’s the AMAZING water clock. And what is most impressive is that it is powered by water. Which is amazing. Hence the name, which I’ll say one more time since it’s fun… the AMAZING water clock.

What’s cool about this clock is that it runs on pretty much any fluid. So quite easily, it could be the amazing beer clock. Beware though, if you add too much beer, I’ve heard that up to 4 hours can pass and the clock has no idea where they went or if it was telling time during them. I reckon adding beer to the clock might be a waste of good beer anyway.

You can put coffee in the clock though it runs a little faster than average, or you can try plain old water. Beware the plain old water option if you get a girly AMAZING water clock, as it will retain water at least once a month and perhaps tell time erratically.

Bottom line, this clock is fun. Just please don’t put any coke in it. If you do, your clock is likely to become hyper and refuse to sound any alarm you set on account of the fact it’s afraid everyone is out to get it.

Technology Review covered Motorola’s next big ambition. To be the pioneers of nano-emissive display (NED) technology, replacing any need for LCD’s. They unvieled their prototype on Monday at the Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Boston.
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I’ll never forget that one scene in Terminator II where California’s governor cut off his hand to reveal a metallic skeleton (Man that’s a weird sentence to read).

The idea is starting to take shape though. Shadow Robot Company has just released a robotic hand for public consumption. They say it’s “the worlds most advanced Dexterous Hand.”

Now all we need to do is learn to put it under the skin and we can make real Terminators. Or, make them adamantium and we got Wolverine. Sorry, I love taking real science and seeing how close to sci-fi it gets us.

I LOVE phones. And gadgets, and computers, basically anything that comes with batteries or plugs in get me all warm, fuzzy, and some other emotions that we’ll avoid at this time. The FCC has leaked a bit of info about it’s SGH-D307 phone. I am a huge fan of QWERTY keyboard phones, once you go QWERTY –you don’t go back they say. Most QWERTY phones are huge, or have a micro non-useable thumb keyboard and (my dad often referred to me as Mr. Fat Thumb) I need a bit of space between keys.

This phone comes with Bluetooth, it’s quad-band GSM and supports EDGE. My favorite feature is the fact that the display can be in portrait or landscape! That’s just hot stuff if you ask me.

My newest Internet hero, weblog read and gadget fantasy is featured in the most recent issue of Fortune,“The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy.”

Pat Misterovich is designing a Pez mp3 player.

Well, in my case, it wasn’t a utility belt it was a utility car. I recently drove across the country from Cambridge, MA to San Jose, CA, and I couldn’t have done it without my carload of toys.

The first and most obvious gadget was the car itself, an “Aquarius Blue” Volkswagen New Beetle convertible. I bought it because it matches my iPod mini. (more…)

Technology advances bring great things. People can work faster, more productively, and have more fun doing it (sometimes). But you can’t progress 100%, there’s always a bit of regression and today I found truth to that. A man was caught holding a mobile phone and PDA for ransom. Granted it’s much better that he kidnap these items instead of a 9 year old daughter, but still people, what are you thinking? He was caught, and now faces charges. I wonder if he sent pictures of the PDA tied up, or those magazine cut out notes saying “if you ever want to make a phone call again, give me a million dollars!”

Last week quite a bit happened. E3 (the biggest video game conference) was held, and numerous nifty unveilings occurred. Nintendo and Sony gave announcements of new cool must have toys for the near future. Another huge occurrence last week was the Revenge of the Sith. Star Wars lives on, and with we have resurfaced kooky fans.

USA Today has built a small website dedicated to the 3rd prequel from Lucas. I think that my favorite is the storm trooper Elvis. What a combo! I be there were a few storm troopers in the original Star Wars trilogy that had sideburns like this guy does, hence the storm trooper Elvis just may have existed. The site has other factoids and a “Are you one with the Force” quiz. Uh huh baby (in an Elvis voice)

I’ve had fantasies about being able to blog from wherever I am. Blog from the bus, blog from the dentist office waiting room, and even blog at grandma’s house (where you know there is no internet much less a computer). So what, laptops have been around since I was in diapers, blog from a laptop at any of these locations you say? No sir, blog from your phone I say!

Customers of 3 (the UK’s first mobile blogging network provider) has got it right, and I’m jealous. Blog from your phone, upload pics and videos to your blog all simply by mobile phone. My blog would be updated 78,978,907.6 times a day if I had the capability of blogging and posting pics/vids all from my phone. Entry example 1: “look at how good I parked my car!” entry example 2: “hey she’s cute, what do you think?” entry example 3: “do I have anything in my teeth?”. I imagine getting those three posts published in a span of 7 minutes or so.

I say this needs to come to America sooner than later. Or maybe I should just move to the UK.

The war on internet piracy is about as dramatic as America’s ‘War On Drugs’. P2p filesharing is nothing new, but there’s constantly new spins to this concept. BitTorrent made a huge splash in the downloading pool for pirates. Produced as a “free speech tool” BitTorrent would rely on ‘trackers’. Web sites would host these trackers which were simply small files needed to download any specific file. These sites that host thousands of trackers are sought out and shut down by anti-pirate groups.

Evolve or Dissolve is a cliché that I rip off now and then, and BitTorrent has done the evolution this time around. The beta-version of BitTorrent does not rely on the need for trackers anymore. This tracker elimination is a huge wave that rocks the boat of the anti-pirates.

I can’t say I’m for or against either of the sides on this coin. I feel that this situation is similar to when your brother and sister start fighting, you just sit back, lay low, and see who wins.

Yesterday I went to see the new Will Farrell movie, ‘Kicking and Screaming’. While walking to the theatre from the ticket booth I noticed a line of people sitting on the floor playing card games, PSP, and even children with plastic light sabers hopping about. “Star Wars is out, that’s right!” I thought to myself, and wondered why I hadn’t seen something on the internet about a bootleg download running around.

Today I visited TechDirt and my vision came true. Star Wars Episode III is on the net and shiver me timbers there’s people pirating it as we speak. No need for alarm, I’m certain that anyone who downloads the movie has either already seen it, plans to buy the DVD, and has invested thousands of dollars in Star Wars paraphernalia already.

I used to sit in lectures and play ‘snake’ on my Nokia 3390 phone. I could pass a few boring minutes of anthropology with my trusty Nokia game. I could have brought in my old Nintento Gameboy for a round of Tetris, but the fact of carrying a game only addition to my already full pockets was too far of a stretch for me. Today I don’t find myself buying a PSP or Nintendo DS simply because I’d need a purse to carry everything that I have. I do carry a mobile phone around with me everywhere, and according to some, that’s a game console in itself.

“People have a gaming machine in their hand whether they want a gaming machine or not,” says Greg Ballard, CEO of Sorrent, a mobile gaming developer and publisher.

I can see downloading games to your phone mimicking today’s downloading of ringtones, what do you think?