John Brownlee

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• Favorited Idyllic boyhood memories: summertime and the Fun Float on Boing Boing Gadgets
• Favorited Never get out of bed to blog with the Boom Arm Starbase Workstation on Boing Boing Gadgets
• Posted Flash still not coming to the iPhone while Adobe announces partnerships with almost everyone else to Boing Boing Gadgets
  The throw down: the gnashing teeth, the thump of the chest, the quivering aqueous vitreous diffused with pulsating veins. It's a glorious site, even when imagined upon the metaphorical face of Adobe. They are sick of Apple's App Store dominance. And they very definitely seem to be throwing down. At this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Adobe announced that it would release the first full-fledged Flash player for smartphones by year's end... and Google, Microsoft, Palm and Nokia are all hopping on board. At the same time, Adobe said they were still not close to getting Flash on the iPhone. At this point, that's pretty clearly not a technical challenge... Apple simply does not want to risk the financial success of the App Store, which largely serves up simple programs that could be ably rendered in Flash. Adobe's issuing a direct challenge to them: we have partners who say all their phones can run Flash, and we agree. That can only take some of the luster off the iPhone, especially as Apple's competition ponies up with real iPhone challenging devices with Flash pre-installed, like the Palm Pre. I hope Apple changes its tune. It can only improve the standard of App Store fare while giving iPhone users more reason than ever to own one. Adobe preps full Flash player for smartphones [Macworld]...
• Posted The Phonophone Il iPhone: powerless iPod speakers, classic design and horn acoustics to Boing Boing Gadgets
  The speaker system that uses no power is usually a travesty of audiphonics: the tinny sound of Bach reverberating through the fillings of a cavity-ridden back molar plucked from the inside of a skull and spread out across the room. But Tristan Zimmerman, the designer of this wonderfully shaped iPod speaker systems, claims that his Phonophone Il iPhone is different: it exploits the science of horn acoustics to maintain rich sound while boosting the audio output of the standard earphone jack to 55 decibels... which is equivalent to the volume coming from a pair of laptop speakers. That's respectable for a powerless solution, but not the kind of output that can be clearly heard over the screams and ululations of a night out at Club Rectum. But that's okay, because what the Phonophone really is is a wonderful throwback to the horn-and-conch of classical acoustic amplification. Visually, it's beautiful: a perfect shape captured in ebony and onyx. It looks Grecian, while at the same time conjuring a fondness for the living room aesthetics of the early jazz era with its geometry. It would just never fit in with Club Rectum's decor. I love the look. But $600 is way too much to pay for any powerless speakers when I could be paying that for oscillating LEDs and bowel-evacuating bass. Phonophone Il iPhone [Charles and Marie via Cult of Mac]...
• Posted Nokia adds Skype to the N97 to Boing Boing Gadgets
  For years, mobile phone companies have done their damnedest to discourage Skype leaping across the vacuum between PCs and cellular networks. The reason's obvious: why pay 20 cents per minute for a local call when you can pay one cent a minute to call Zimbabwe? If handsets were entirely separate from contracts, it would doubtlessly be a non- issue: some handset manufacturer would include the software in order to have a killer feature, other manufacturers would scramble to match, and pretty soon it'd be ubiquitous. But unfortunately, carriers and handset manufacturers are usually in cahoots... and in America, at least, the carriers call the shots. No Skype. But Nokia seems to have turned around on it. Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress, Skype and Nokia announced a partnership to bring Skype to Nokia's phones, with the upcoming Nokia N97 being the first to incorporate Skype into the system and allow for both outgoing and incoming calls. Seriously: kudos. Nokia has traditionally not played the United States' carrier game, ignoring their feature requests (or hobblings) in favor of a European model which largely looks at phones and service as separate deals. That may be a poor business decision on Nokia's part, and adding a carrier-challenging app like Skype built-in to the N97 isn't going to help them with US penetration, but it's still a great step towards hegemony-breaking from a consumerist perspective. I look forward to the day my mobile is also my Skype phone. Skype and Nokia Partner to Integrate Skype into Nokia Devices [Business Wire]...
• Posted TrapCall: Anonymity denied to Caller ID... at least for now to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Girls just got a new weapon in their attempts to totally shut their creepy, mouthpiece-licking, heavy-breathing exes out of their lives: TrapCall, a service that allows anonymous Caller IDs to be identified before pick-up. The way the unmasking service works is pretty clever. Caller ID's existing anonymity provisions allow anyone to mask their call, but excludes anonymity to callers of 1-800 numbers, since the owners of those numbers are paying for the call. TrapCall simply reroutes an unanswered call to a 1-800 number then back to your voicemail, recording the number as it squirts through its servers. AT&T and T-Mobile are already signed up to allow this, with other carriers expected to be announced within weeks. For the end user, the service costs $10 a month. There's privacy concerns, of course, but I'm okay with them: there's recipient lines in my emails. There's a peephole on my front door. It's not unreasonable to expect to know who a person is before you allow them to impose upon your time... but there's ways to get around those guards too. In the age of technology, privacy is all about the flux and ebb, the clash between competing systems.The way technology and capitalism interact will prompt other companies to come up with solutions that will guarantee customer privacy, just like how anonymous email services allow you to email someone without giving your identity away. I like that. It can only make privacy stronger and more clearly defined. Anonymous Caller? New Service Says, Not Any More [Threat Level]...
• Posted When geeks were lounge lizards... the HP-01 Calculator Watch to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Over on eBay, there are not one, but two utterly gorgeous HP-01 Hewlett Packard LED calculator wrist watches up for auction. Even at $1,500, it's just brutally hard not to pluck a kidney from the navel and hit the black market in order to own one. These herald back from a different era, when the fashion accessories of today's most hopeless geeks were the leathery, tobacco-scented wrist accoutrements of the opulent lounge lizard god. If you can afford one, go buy it. They even come with a case and manual in good nick, though it certainly looks like the manual has been used to swab up a bus station floor or two. Update: Literally within the course of writing this post, that last HP-01 was plucked from out of our hands... the reserve price has been met, the auction is over. I can't justify not posting this, though. Some commenter will write about their first HP-01, someone will respond with a loving reverie to their first calculator watch... and even if not, this post will stand as testament to how beautiful even the most obsolete gadget can be. It's still a post worth spitting up....
• Posted Dear Fashion: Uh, no. to Boing Boing Gadgets
  "That cursor is hovering dangerously close to the age verification zone." High-End Fashion Of The Day: Sancho Hemelsoen [The Daily What via Gizmodo]...
• Posted HP's custom Ubuntu skin for netbooks now installable by everyone to Boing Boing Gadgets
  As I hoped, plucky hackers have taken that gorgeous HP custom shell for their Ubuntu netbooks, ripped out the launcher, OS skin and some application skins, and made it available for everyone. Score. Hp mie interface download [Ubuntu Forums]...
• Posted Brother, can you spare a Crawligator? to Boing Boing Gadgets
  If you've got a vintage 70's Crawligator skateboard for babies around, this is very good karma. DaddyTypes got an email from a new dad of a disabled eight month old, who writes: I’m searching for a Crawligator for my eight month old son with leg deformities. He will be having them amputated and is expected to have trouble crawling. I would like to find him a Crawligator to give him the best start possible. If you've got one you can spare, drop a comment at DaddyTypes. Brother, Can You Spare A Crawligator? [DaddyTypes via Crunchgear]...
• Posted Electric man power strip rag doll to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Too adorable: this little rag-doll like electric man power strip pulses 110-volts of juice through his circulator system and out his limbs to keep your gadgets charged. It's $14.99, which is more expensive than a cheap strip picked up at Best Buy, but no where near as button cute. Electric Man [Urban Outfitters via Technabob]...
• Posted Microsoft: Bring me the head of the Conficker worm programmer! to Boing Boing Gadgets
  And suddenly, all the late nights of IRC channel bragging seems like a bad idea: Microsoft has put up a bounty of $250,000 to anyone who can identify the author or authors of the Conficker or Downadup worm, which takes advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows to propagate, steal personal information and infect the machine with malware. Note that the dripping, decapitated coconuts of the suspected perps aren't good by their own... Microsoft will require some proof before ponying up the gees. Microsoft offers reward to catch worm maker [Yahoo]...
• Posted Next iPhone to come in matte black? to Boing Boing Gadgets
  As far as Apple rumors go, this one's pretty insignificant, but here it is: according to iPod Observer, they've attained leaked images of the new 16GB iPhone, and while there isn't anything new spec-wise to report, it will apparently come with a matte black shell as an option. There's plenty of reasons not to accept this as gospel, but it's not wholly unlikely: Apple has retained the same look for both iterations of the iPhone so far, with the exception of the back casing. It makes sense for them to change it again to differentiate the 3G's successor from the past two models while retaining the iPhone's iconic front design. New 16GB iPhone 3G May Be On The Way [iPod Observer]...
• Posted Micro Innovation brings bamboo to accessories to Boing Boing Gadgets
  In Japan, the usage of bamboo in computer products is pretty much the generic equivalent of using charcoal gray or opalescent white plastic in the States: wholly unimaginative, perhaps cloying. But what's a design cliche in one hemisphere is fresh and invigorating in another, and I'm not ashamed to say I find the polished bamboo look of Micro Innovation's latest accessory line-up to be pretty swank. They should start filtering through electronics retailers in April or May. Micro Innovation to Distribute Eco-Friendly Computer Accessories [Imagining Info]...
• Posted Gas mask kazoos to Boing Boing Gadgets
  For the Berliner, the vodka-reeking hawkers of Soviet kitsch are a ubiquitous site around the Disneyland spectacle of Checkpoint Charlie. Wearing faux-beaver caps and decked out in a horrifying array of replica Soviet medal celebrating the wearer's capacity for murder and oppression, they grab any tourist by the arm who seems interested and drunkenly attempt to foist upon them a replica rubber gas mask, accompanying it with a slurred story of underground bunkers and recovered military surplus hordes. It's all a sham, of course, and these gas masks are only usually good for one thing: sadomasochistic sex games. They don't work, and they are too terrifying for casual display. But Joel Veitch over at Rathergood did figure out one use for them outside of the realm of Marilyn Manson's bedroom: they make fine housings for the installation of kazoos! Yes! Gas Mask Kazoo [Rathergood via MAKE]...
• Posted Japanese porn moves to USB Flash Drives to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Heavily pixelated Japanese pornography featuring school girls, scarily gnarled tree roots and suckling cephalopods is now available on USB flash drives for outrageous prices, considering that Google can instantly deliver all your Japanese pornography pretty much for free. USB Memory Porn [Official Site via Crunchgear]...
• Posted GameBoy cosplayer features torso-playable Tetris to Boing Boing Gadgets
  A working Gameboy costume built buy a cosplayer at Ohayocon 2009, replete with built-in emulator, which is accessed by hammering the d-pad perpendicular to his junk....
• Posted Yesterday at <i>Boing Boing Gadgets</i> to Boing Boing
  Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets: • Robot faced keytoppers started the robotification of Brownlee's home at the front portal. • We were serenaded by the sound of a thousand iPhone App Store farts. • Honda claimed they could, like, totally send a dude to the moon. • Secondrun.tv released a neat Media Center Extender to allow better streaming of Hulu on home theater PCs. • Brownlee considered gorgeous restored reel-to-reel tape decks as objects of art. • Obama may have pushed a bill through to delay the digital television transition, but 40% of all television stations are shutting off their analog transmissions next week anyway. • Someone finally got the iPhone external juice pack slim and right. • lolwut? What the hell is this thing even supposed to be? • Steve McQueen's zombie endorsed an absolutely gorgeous watch. • Lamborghini entered the stiletto heel game. • Palm's Pre continues to shape up as everything the iPhone is not, except sexy: they're killing off PalmOS, setting up deals with International Carriers, and will allow installation of applications through USB. • And if you haven't read it yet, Joel's thought piece on why the PSP failed and what Sony can do to ace the PSP2 is a must-read... or at least skim. Link...
• Posted Shuttered guitar store becomes giant amp to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Guitar Store [Glen Scott's Flickr via Gadget Lab]...
• Posted Free update to Windows 7 for Vista buyers after July 1st, 2009 to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Good news: if you're forced to buy a Windows Vista computer in the later half of the year, Microsoft will upgrade you for free to Windows 7, with versions syncing up (Home Premium to Home Premium, etc.) Bad news: it's optional to OEMs, so not everyone will be participating. And while it's a pipe dream, there's still sort of the resentful residue of a feeling that given Vista's epic crumminess, Microsoft should be upgrading everyone to 7 for free anyway. The Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Program [Techarp]...
• Posted Pioneer plasma televisions going the way of the ghost to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Pioneer has confirmed that they are leaving the television business, shipping their last televisions in March 2010 and focusing on car electronics and home audio-video lines. This is sad news: they make some of the best plasma HDTVs on the market, and with Vizio also dropping out of the game, plasmas are getting rarer and rarer. That's a shame: while plasma will eventually be made obsolete by OLED displays, we're still a few years away from that... and in the mean time, LCD blacks just aren't quite there yet. A quality player leaving the market is something to be mourned. Pioneer exits TV business as losses mount [Twice]...
• Posted Medical laser welds sliced skin shut without sutures to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Presented as part deliverance of our promise to cover more cool medical lasers on Boing Boing Gadgets, this laser beam created by scientists at Tel Aviv University to weld skin shut without stitches. "Doctors know how to cut skin, but not really how to bond it." We're just one step closer to Trauma Center style surgery here, people. Sci-fi laser stitches wounds [Reuters]...
• Posted Acoustibuds introduces fins to stock ear pieces for better grip and acoustics to Boing Boing Gadgets
  One of the unexpected casualties of the iPod age is banded, in-ear headphones. Sony used to make a set that really suited my ears, but they did not lend themselves to lazily twining around an MP3 player and throwing in a pocket. I've come around to ear buds, especially the higher-quality Bose and Sennhauser models, but I still find them hard to keep in the ears... there seems to be some sort of casual cocheal queefing that occurs that makes even the best ear buds plop out at the most inconvenient times. Perhaps it's simply an issue with the rubbery shape of most ear pieces. Acoustibuds offers threaded, snap-on pieces for most ear buds, and they boast improved fit and sound quality due to flexible, hypoellergenic fins and a twin-cone core design. Who knows if they actually do help keep ear buds in your slicked, greased up aural canals, but my instinct is that anything with ridges probably would, and if they can make those ridges comfortable, it's worth a shot, especially for $13. Acoustibuds [Official Site via Crave]...
• Posted .44 caliber revolver is the world's most powerful NERF gun to Boing Boing Gadgets
  "The Most Powerful Nerf Gun" is not a designation that garners much fear amongst the six-shooter set, but loading a dart into a .44 caliber revolver and then firing it into a willing demonstrator's junk at 1,500 feet per second to the elicitation of his immediate crumplement is enough to give even the most steel-nerved NERF gunslinger the shakes. Especially when it is predicated by comments like, "I filled it with metal" and "Molly's ready to call 9/11 if shit gets real."...
• Posted GPS chips are now smaller than a match head to Boing Boing Gadgets
  GPS units are getting disconcertingly small: Epson and Infineon's XPOSYS chip is just 2.8 x 2.9mm and can fit comfortably within the sulfurous volume of a single match head, while still having enough power to stay in contact with orbiting satellites. Gnash your teeth in holy dread, privacy activists: we're fast zooming into a day and age where GPS nano-chips will be sprayable in a fine mist all over your body as you pass through airports customs. If we're not there already, we're rapidly enterting the age of ubiquitous personal trackability, with our only solace being informational mass entropy and the inherent incompetence of bureaucracy. Press Release [Infineon via Crunchgear]...
• Posted iTunes might get video streaming to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Apple's iTunes video purchases have a rather big drawback right now: storage. The files are large, especially the high-def videos, and most users don't have a lot of hard-drive space to store them all without constant binge and purges. According to Apple Insider, Apple's got a solution: they will bake video streaming into a future update of iTunes. This won't actually replace video downloading, but will be an option for users: either download it to disk and load it up on the iPod or iPhone, or stream it immediately, but transiently. Obviously, this would be quite a nice little boon of a feature to Apple's flagging TV box, which has had a hard time slicing itself out a space: it's not as full featured as a PC hooked up to your television, nor as immediate as solutions like Roku's Netflix streaming solutions. Streaming functionality would help edge the Apple TV closer to the latter, if not the former. This is a rumor, but it seems to make sense: Apple already offers "rent" ability, and streaming is just a more storage savvy way of renting content. If this one doesn't come true in an iTunes 8 update, you can color me surprised. Apple plrepping iTunes replay on-demand video service [Apple Insider via Cult of Mac]...
• Posted Yes, Virginia, the Palm Pre <em>will</em> have tethering at launch to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Another spike down the throat of Apple's iPhone volleyball squadron by Team Palm Pre: at launch, their prospective iPhone-killer will feature data tethering over both Bluetooth and USB, without jailbreaking. If it's so easy for Spring and Palm of all companies, Apple, why can't you move your monolithic mass and make it happen on the iPhone? And, while you're at it? Cut and paste, for christ's sake. Palm Pre [Sprint via Engadget]...
• Posted Pac-Man ghosts gobble up iPods in dock form to Boing Boing Gadgets
  It's hard to feel too passionately about iPod docks — at best, they serve the function of a line-in cable with significantly less aural oomph — but when they are as wonderfully, nerdtastically shaped as these Pac-Man-esque ghosts, it's hard not to feel that a couple are required, not from the perspective of stereophonic completion, but from the casual joy-infusion of whimsical interior design. They're $90, and not too shabbily specced, with three speakers, a subwoofer and 15-watts of sound. iBoo [Speakal]...
• Posted Palm CEO: PalmOS is dead, Pre App Store, International Carriers to Boing Boing Gadgets
  Some great announcements burbled out of Palm CEO's talks with investors about the upcoming Pre: • PalmOS is dead, which will certainly drive the lingering but eerily fervent PalmOS community to teeth-gnashing, but which is only practical in the era of smartphones. All future Palm phones will be driven by the Pre's webOS (yes) or Windows Mobile (no). • Pre App Store at launch. Better: no lock down, a la iPhone. You will be able to install third-party apps without jailbreaking, through USB or over the air. • Palm has already established partnerships with carriers in Canada, Latin America and Europe. The Pre's going international. • Although there's no details about Palm's exclusivity deal with Sprint, Palm hopes to have the Pre on other carriers by 2010. It's great to watch Palm not only get the handset right, but get so many various philosophical aspects right, like open app development not limited to one corporate controlled distribution channel. Short of some appalling day one reviews, this is the phone that's replacing my iPhone. Palm CEO Ed Colligan talks Pre with investors [Precentral]...
• Posted Lamboghini Gallardo Stilettoes: your girlfriend's feet as a mech robot to Boing Boing Gadgets
  These Lamborgini Stilettos make your girlfriend's feet look like those of a cross-dressing vehicle Voltron. But, otherwise, ghastly. Lamborgini Gallardo stilettos are outrageous [Luxury Launches]...