I seem to recall that speaker enclosures should be rigid and massive, generally speaking, but there’s no denying the cool factor in this build-it-yourself project from Quebecois industrial designer Samuel Bernier. [via nerdstink]
from MAKE
From Lifehacker: How to Make Skype Play Nicely with Google Voice
Landlines are so 1990s. If you’d rather not use your cellphone at home but don’t want to pay for an expensive landline, you can use Google Voice and Skype to set up a cheap home phone system that won’t require everyone learning a new number. Here’s how. More »
from Lifehacker
From Gizmodo: How to Beat a K-Cup With Simple Coffee Gadgets [Video]
Friend-of-Gizmodo Tonx.org has a cute little comic today bemoaning Keurig K-Cups—the little coffee pods designed to brew single servings of coffee. They’re convenient, but they’re ridiculously overpriced, and don’t make very good coffee. You can do better. More »
from Gizmodo
From Gizmodo: Open WebOS 1.0 Coming in September [WebOS]
When HP kinda, sorta killed webOS as a money making endeavor, they promised to keep it alive as an open source project, but offered little in the way of concrete details. According to The Verge they’ve partially pulled back the curtain, revealing that Open webOS 1.0 should arrive in September. More »
from Gizmodo
From Gizmodo: Google-Approved Motorola Lawsuit Trying to Block iPhone 4S and iCloud [Motorola]
In the words of Jack Nicholson acting as the president from “Mars Attacks”…
- “Why can’t we all just… get along?”
Oh well… now the war is heating up even more!
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The days of Apple and Google sitting down for a nice cup of tea are long gone. Now they’re staring across the battlements, just waiting to lawyer bomb each other into the Stone Age. Motorola’s new lawsuit against Apple—which Google had to approve—is the latest stop on the road to the inevitable clash of titans. More »
from Gizmodo
From Gizmodo: How the Government Used a Con Artist to Catch Google’s Criminal Activities [Google]
Oy?! One of my favorite shows, “White Collar”, is now a reality… o.O That’s … weird…
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Last summer, Google had to pay $500 million to avoid criminal prosecution by the US government. Using a convicted con artist, the feds caught Google aiding illegal online pharmaceutical drug sales. The operation—as described by the Wall Street Journal—is movie material. More »
from Gizmodo
From Geeks are Sexy Technology News: 3D Piracy Takes a New Twist
Whoa! That is going to be… interesting… and weird… 3D printing pirates?!
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Filesharing as we know it involves transferring 0s and 1s that usually turn into pixels and electronic sounds. But if The Pirate Bay’s latest idea takes off, filesharing — and digital piracy — will get a whole lot more physical.
In what appears to be as much as a publicity stunt as a serious feature, the site has added a new category alongside the usual audio, video, applications, and games. The physibles category is intended for data that either can, or feasibly could, become a physical object.
Specifically the site is thinking of data for 3D printers, a concept that sounds like science fiction but already exists. One company at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show launched, and is now selling, a $1,749 device that can take a computer 3D model and turn it into a physical object using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the same plastic material used to create Lego bricks. The machine also works with polylactic acid, derived from corn starch.
The PirateBay currently has a dozen torrents for “physible†files, which appear to be largely or entirely compliant with copyright laws. It’s certainly at the demonstration novelty stage, with two of the choices including a toy pirate ship taken from the site’s logo, and a 3D picture of MPAA chief Chris Dodd along with part of the encryption key for Blu-ray discs.
Given the nature of the site and its user base, it will be interesting to see if we ever get to the stage when copyrighted 3D printing design files start getting shared. The Pirate Bay predicts that “you will download your sneakers within 20 yearsâ€, which does make you wonder if one day you’ll be able to get counterfeit Nikes without even needing to find a shady street market.