Mens Plaza

Oh, MK. When first I saw this, I thought, “Oh, MK. Why are you wearing a high-fashion version of the beach over-up my Great Aunt Doris bought in San Juan in 1986?” I mean, no offense to my Great Aunt…

Nick Rodrigues, a Boston artist, has developed the Personal Cell Phone Booth. If you’re making or receiving a call you pull this clunky bastard out and put it on over your head. That way no one else has to listen to you talk about why your boss sucks or what you’re making for dinner or whatever the hell people talk about. I really wish they’d make these things required by law. Because just yesterday I was at the bus stop putting my moves on the homeless bag lady that lives there, and this other freaking woman was on her cell phone talking about how her colon was acting up again. Talk about a mood breaker! Sure the bag lady was into it, but she’s a bag lady. She shits her pants all the time.

A video after the jump, but it’s just a guy walking around a city with the thing on. Don’t expect much.

It’s hard to imagine that dating Ashlee Simpson might have been the apex of Ryan Cabrera’s short career and life, but seriously, would anyone have known that he’s in the studio working on his third album — or that he…

Just a quick reminder to everyone, the Woot Off is still going strong and is now into its second day. Please go and buy now…so we can see what item is next. [Woot]

If my father taught me anything, it’s that no home improvement project should ever be attempted without a copious amount of alcohol. So he would probably be ecstatic to see this bad boy — the hammer beer bottle opener. They run $15 from crazyaboutgadgets and have a bottle opener on the back instead of a claw. Which means all the nails you screw up because you’re sauced will just have to stay. And if you find yourself trying to open bottles with the non-bottle opener side of the hammer you’re probably drunk as hell. Certainly way too fucked up to be up on the roof wielding a hammer.

Beer Bottle Opener, Not Much of a Hammer [uberreview]

Listen, Liv… your son isn’t even three yet. Isn’t he a little young for you to be tromping around in Mother Of The Groom couture? This isn’t Tudor England, where little infant babies are betrothed to each other before they…

The Crayon Physics Deluxe must be one of the coolest touch-screen games ever. The aim is very simple: take a ball to where the start is. The tools to do it are a crayon and your imagination, since whatever you draw will automatically get recognized by the physics engine and put into motion over a piece of paper. Microsoft must buy this game and ship it with every Tablet PC. And somebody should port this to the iPhone. Pronto. [Kloonigames]

Induction recharge devices have existed for a little while, but this one adds some flair to the typically boring design of such units. This unnamed charger by designer Sun Kyung Kim resembles a little bird bath. When you place your phone on the unit the water ripples act as a visual indicator of your current charge level. It looks good in a cute sort of way, but I can’t get one. I just don’t have room in my tenement for a phone charger the size of a huge dinner plate. Well that and the whole no electricity thing.

Visual Desktop Charger [yankodesign]

Behold the smallest electric guitar in the world. Well, it’s called the “smallest precision electric guitar available,” because even though overall it’s just 1/6 the size of a normal instrument, its fretboard is the same size as an ordinary guitar. This is not a toy; it has a couple of pickups that can give you your choice of humbucking or single coil sound, and tuning machine heads that look pretty solid. The makers even tried to mimic the cellular structure of wood with its plastic body, injected with air bubbles in an attempt to give it more resonance despite its diminutive stature. Plus, holding his guitar will make you look really, really big. If that’s important to you, it’ll cost you $799.95. Kinda reminds us of that little Martin Backpacker. Click through to the next page for a big pic of this tiny electric ax.

[Hammacher Schlemmer, via TFTS]

According to actual scientific research, a robotic Pied Piper can lead a flock (gaggle?) of roaches out of a secure location and into the open, where they could technically be exterminated more easily. José Halloy, a biology researcher at the Free University of Brussels, was lead author on a paper published today in Science, wherein he details his robotic roach exploits.

Halloy and his team corralled roaches in an area covered by two discs, a dark one and a lighter one. Communists by nature, roaches tend to cluster together, motivated by group instinct. Since they all dig the dark, they did as expected and congregated on that side of the arena. But when robotic roaches were sent in to mingle, and then started easing their way over to the light side, the real roaches followed about 60% of the time, overriding their own survival instincts to hang with the cool kids.

You may notice that the robot in the picture looks nothing like a roach. Says the NYT:

[Roaches]have weak eyes, which allowed the researchers to create a robotic roach that resembles a miniature golf cart more than an insect. In the roach world, however, looking right is not as important as smelling right, and the scientists doused the machines with eau de cockroach sex hormones.

Awww yeah. So next time you have a roach problem, find a small robot and slap some succulent roach cologne on that sucker, and see what kinda sparks fly. [NYT]

Witness the mother of all big mechanical toys: the GE90-115B turbofan engine, the most powerful gas turbine engine in the world with a 127,500-pound maximum takeoff thrust, even if it’s rated at a maximum 115,000 lb. It may not look big on video, but with a 128-inch fan tip diameter, up close and personal this thing is amazingly huge. Surprisingly, you won’t find this engine on the Airbus A380: it was specifically designed to power the Boeing 777.

Crave just uncovered the meaning of the weird Alienware emails we’ve been getting, obliquely worded invitations to a November 19 product unveiling. Well, the product, or products, are two new laptops, the Area-51 m15x and m17x. The 15″ and 17″ systems are ground-up redesigns featuring crazy angles, Martian runes (as seen above) and as many colored LEDs as you’d expect from any gaming PC worth its salt. We’ll get some pics of them whole—plus pricing and availability—on Monday, so stay tuned. [Crave]

This Zune Original Steve Ballmer edition is good. Its unapologetic adolescent humor was jut the ticket to making us lol a bit on a Friday morning. (In truth, it’s tough to screw up a Ballmer parody.) But it made little Christmas lights illuminate in our otherwise dusty heads. Our question to you: Who wouldn’t want a Bill Gates edition Zune, complete with dorky laser-etched caricature and maybe a few soundclips from the big man himself? Seriously, it would sell like the metaphorical “hot cakes,” if said metaphor were to procreate with a popular portable media player. So let’s make this happen, Microsoft. [iphonesavior via crunchgear]

It’s a fact of life: when you buy a 1080p set, you never see true 1080p resolution when things are in motion. Gary Merson (of Home Theater Mag and HDGuru.com) looked at 19 TVs listed as 1080p, and found that while their “static” resolution ranged from true 1080 down to a miserable 400, the “motion” resolution of the best sets was 880, while the worst only delivered 360 lines. “You’re never going to have full resolution with moving pictures,” Merson told us. But the differences in performance were startling:

Vizio was the steaming turd of the study, with its GV47FHDTV scoring both the 400-line static res and the shabby-as-hell 360-line motion res.

The plasmas did the best on the test. The two Panasonics tested (50PZ700 and 50PZ750) scored full 1080 when still, and 880 when moving. A Samsung plasma (FPT5084) got high marks with 1080 static and 830 motion res. (Note: the test Merson used originated with a consortium of plasma makers—Advanced PDP Development Center—so plasma scoring higher is no big surprise.)

The LCDs that fared best on this resolution test were from Sharp, with 1080p static and 600 lines in motion, almost across the board. An LG model also scored 600 in motion, while Sony and Samsung LCDs scored in the high 500s.

For more detailed analysis and a look at Merson’s chart, hit the Home Theater Magazine article. [Home Theater]

Probably all the US treehuggers ignored this but yesterday there was an international call for a five-minute blackout to save some watts and call attention to the staggering energy consumption on the planet. Too little you say? Try Blackle, a non-official version of Google, which claims to have saved 307,326 Watt hours by using a black background instead of the classic white. Anything that may save some cents from my bill and minutes from my monitor life is welcome, but is this real?

Since there are all kinds of display technologies and sizes out there it will be extremely difficult to measure the savings that this kind of trick may gave you. Since most LCDs use lamps that are always on, you probably will be saving a lot more energy by reducing the brightness of your monitor. Probably this will change with LED-backlighting. What do you think? Could this be a real saver or just silly? [Blackle]

Well, here’s the event you’ve all been waiting for: the 2007 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Savor these pictures of Adriana Lima, Heidi Klum, Alessandra Ambrosia, Miranda Kerr, Selita Banks, Marisa Miller and Karolina Kurkova all together in one room, because it only comes once a year. Enjoy!

Related Articles:
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The Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2006
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More Victoria’s Secret Madness!

Photos: Bauer-Griffin

Zumreed’s raindrop-shaped iPod dock is waterproof, so it’s perfect for singing along to sad songs in the shower, if you’re that kind of person. Available in three colors, white, turquoise and orange, it weighs just over a pound, costs $49.95 and is compatible with most 4th- and 5th-gen iPods. [AudioCubes via Sci-Fi Tech]

If you are a virtual console fan, a Club Nintendo member and live in Japan, here’s the perfect retro gamepad for your Nintendo Wii: a Super Nintendo Entertainment System controller for the Wii. It will be out in April of next year and hopefully it will be such a raging success that Nintendo will have to rerelease it commercially all over the world, may Godzilla destroy their headquarters and kick Satoru Iwata’s butt if they don’t do that. Verdict: Gimme. [Gamebrink]

Anke Weiss has designed these neat lights made from packaging, by pricking holes in soap boxes and juice cartons. There is one problem, however:

They lose their mojo somewhat, once you see them in broad daylight. [Anke Weiss via Dezeen]

Lars & Ivan’s entry into the iPod Dock market is not the typical do-it-all, moderately-powered device. Instead, the PA-40Ti Hybrid is a tube-based 40-watt amplifier that hooks up to whatever speakers you so desire. It also looks like some sort of utopian alien fortress, but I digress. Additional features include RCA inputs, subwoofer preamp and dock connector output (for video and usb connectivity). Belgian retailer designgadgets currently has the Hybrid available for about $342 USD. [designgadgets via technabob]

After a five month beta, iPod owners can finally look outside of iTunes for their video content thanks to RealPlayer. As part of the RealPlayer Plus package, it is now possible to transfer downloaded video content to the Apple iPod Nano, iPod Classic and iPod Video. Naturally, that opens up a world choc-full of non-DRM protected videos for users to enjoy. A beta version for Mac users is also available. The RealPlayer Plus package will set you back $39.99 —a small price to pay if you ask me. [RealPlayer]

Firefox 3.0 Status meeting notes have revealed that Mozilla will leave about 8 in 10 bugs untouched before the final version is released. Instead, they have decided to devote their attention to correcting the most serious bugs in order to strike a balance between stability and the impending release schedule. [Mozilla via NYT]

Well, look what we’ve got here: Kim Kardashian holding an apple while showing off her apple bottom. You know, pictures like these don’t come along too often where they just write themselves. Thanks Kim, you just made my job a hell of a lot easier.

Related Articles:
Kim Kardashian’s Got Cleavage
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Kim Kardashian Sex Tape Part 2?!
Kim Kardashian Nude With Her Sister?!! Let’s Hope Not!

Photos: FlynetOnline

I was wondering the other day where the hell Jessica Simpson disappeared to for the last two weeks, and lo and behold, today she emerges from her Manhattan apartment. Unfortunately, due to weather constraints Jessica Simpson decided not to show off the sweater puppies. Boo! Girl needs to suck it up. You don’t take a leave of absence and then come back looking like a church girl. That’s just blasphemy.

Related Articles:
Jessica Simpson Nude Is What We Really Want!
Jessica Simpson’s Breasts Are Hard Not To Write About
Jessica Simpson Got Cleavage!
Jessica Simpson And Mandy Moore Make A Great Pair

Photos: INFDaily.com

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Lysandre Follet’s watch concepts assume the identity of a pair of Nixon timepieces, throwing pong or tetris into the inner workings while avoiding excessive nerddom. The watches balance throwback games with simple, clean designs that don’t look to irony for their appeal (like the designer retro-reissue of the Casio Databank). If this were ever real, I’d seriously consider buying it. [Yanko Design]

Imagine being able to store every second of your life on a computer and then calling up digital snapshots of individual moments with a quick search. If Gordon Bell, the head of Microsoft’s Media Presence Research Group has his way, this technology could become a reality. The idea behind MyLifeBits or “surrogate memory” as Bell has dubbed it, is that people should be concerned with living life, not “maintaining our memory systems.”

MyLifeBits consists of a “Sense Cam” developed by Microsoft that takes pictures when it senses that the user may want a photo, sound recording equipment and a complicated software program that can help the user recall information using simple keywords. According to the researchers, a 1TB hard drive could easily hold all of the text documents, voice files and photos over the course of a person’s life —but would only be able to store four hours of video a day for a year. Naturally, that reality wouldn’t make MyLifeBits very cost effective in a more complicated form. It may be just as well though, do you really want video floating around of that time you got drunk and hit on that dude with long hair?

On our blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visit to the world’s largest building site, aka Dubai, we stopped for a gawk at this, the Burj Dubai. Currently the tallest structure in the world, it stands at 156 stories and 585 meters high, but is expected to reach around 800 meters when finished. Designed by Adrian Smith, the tower continues the Armani-Samsung love-in, as the Italian designer is putting his name to a sexy hotel, while the Korean mega-corp is one of the three constructors on the skyscraper. But the cruelest cut of all is that Burj Dubai (burj means “tower” in Arabic) will be dwarfed by Kuwait’s Burj Mubarak Al-Kabir, which will measure 1,001 meters (3,284 feet) when it is ready. But that’s not expected to be until 2012 so, until then, size queens will be eyeing up Dubai. [Burj Dubai]

PhotoVu is doing what they do best with the new 1765w, namely develop cool RSS- and Wi-Fi-enabled digital photo frames —except this time they are cramming it all into a relatively compact 17-inch form factor. The frame comes equipped with a 1280 x 800 LCD display, built-in software to handle apps like iPhoto and Picasa, an RSS reader, support for services like Flickr, SmugMug, and .Mac as well as the ability to organize it all remotely via the internet. The whole package clocks in at a not-so-affordable $699, so make sure you have some photogenic friends and family. [Product Page]

Steve Jobs’ options case has been thrown out of court. The judge let the case go since there’s been no drop in the stock price as a result of the backdating. [Apple Insider]

Valerie Beetle, a man from Pervomayske (probably where I should live) in southern Ukraine handcarved this PC case. It is wood and looks good. Now I’m all for cool computer mods and all, but I think we all know the true story behind this one. This man sold his soul to the devil for a custom wooden PC. The demonic accents were all the devil’s idea — Mr. Beetle actually asked for a unicorn climbing a rainbow over Strawberry Mountain. That’s just what happens when you deal with the devil. Don’t believe me? Just check out the pictures after the jump, particularly the one featuring Mr. Beetle’s face. He might very well be the devil.

Two more pictures after the prayer.