The Price: $600

The Verdict: Casio did a great job of bringing the power of the EX-F1 down to a beginner's level for the EX-FH20. The functions on the new camera are more streamlined than its bulkier predecessor: missing are the dedicated shooting mode switch dial, the multi-use focus/zoom ring and separate buttons for video and still capture from the F1. But on the other hand, the FH20 bests the F1 in a couple places, with its 9.1MP sensor and 20X optical zoom, compared to 6MP and 12X in the original. The on-board video editor is still there and simple to use for cutting down lengthy slow-mo clips. And whaddya know, it takes decent (albeit more point-and-shoot than DSLR quality) pictures too, as seen in the gallery below.

But we know what you really want to see: how the slow motion video compares to the original exploding Mentos-capturing beast. As seen in the clip above, it does the job much like the original. You give up some video frames when opting for the budget cam—it records 210, 420 and 1000 fps instead of 300, 600 and 1200 fps—but that's not a huge difference. And while 1000 fps video shrinks is at a paltry resolution of 224x56 pixels—even measlier than the original—it doesn't get as dark as the F1's output tended to, so you'll have slightly more clarity in the crazy slow but still mostly novelty setting.

It also shoots other types of video well. The 30 fps-210 fps "She Walked in the Room" mode is still there, and is a fun way to make otherwise typical activities look extremely epic. Also, 720p HD video is crisp and clean, and doesn't have the nasty "jello effect" when panning that cheaper camcorders designed specifically for this purpose often suffer from.

If you choose an FH20 over the F1, you sacrifice more than just not-as-slow-mo video. Without separate buttons for video and stills, you lose the ability to capture images while you record video, a great feature in the last model and the hardest thing to lose. Also gone is ultra-fast 60 fps LED strobe flash option, but it can still fire off 5 fps with the standard flash firing (vs. the F1's 7 fps). Most of the other features remain, though slightly dialed down: 40fps high-speed burst shooting (with resolution dropped to 7MP) instead of 60fps on the F1, and smaller sizes for slow-mo video as mentioned earlier. And you better bring some rechargeable batteries—gone is the rechargeable Li-ion, and this camera eats four AAs like they were a delicious piece of cake. But with the steep discount over the F1 and the more direct, easier to use interface, for those who mostly want to shoot slow-mo video while taking a few pictures on the side it's not a hard sacrifice to make. [Casio]

What you gain with the EX-FH20 over the EX-F1:
• 9.1MP camera sensor over 6MP
• 20X optical zoom over 12X
• Easier interface for beginners
• $400 in your pocket (vs. the EX-F1's $1000 price tag)

What you lose:
• Slow-motion video size and frames (EX-FH20 records in 210, 420 and 1000fps at 480×360 224×168 and 224×56 respectively—EX-F1 records in 300, 600 and 1200fps)
• Taking still shots while shooting HD video
• 60fps LED flash strobe mode
• 20 fps of burst still shooting (down to 40 fps compared to 60 before)

Once again, if you can't get Giz's slow-mo song du jour out of your head, here's the Amazon MP3 link. [Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap]

And if you're still humming the song made famous by the Harlem Globetrotters, here's an Amazon MP3 link to that too. [Sweet Georgia Brown by Brother Bones]

Suppose that you are in a coffee shop and you need to let a friend hear your latest favorite album. What to do? No one wants to share nasty ear buds and most of us don't want to carry around normal size headphones. Well, now you have another option; XPod Active Sound speakers are a miniature pair of piezoelectric speakers powered by a 2-channel 770mW amplifier. At only 3.07" wide x 1.34" high and 0.33" thick they are similar in size to the iPod Nano.

Built-in is a rechargeable battery which is chargeable via any USB interface. If you will be listening to music longer than expected, a small slot on the back of the unit allows you to prop it up with some pocket change. The XPod is available only in Korea for the equivalent of about $17. If they hit the USA you will find out here.

Add a comment | From: Teeny Tiny Speakers: Xpod | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals

After some months of saving my pennies, I blew them this week on a Nikon D700. Remember our post about buying old, full frame lenses and using them on your small-sensor DSLR? There was a reason for it -- those cheap old lenses will last you until you move up to full-frame.

There are plenty of reviews and incredibly detailed spec-sheets for the D700 already online, so here I'll just cover a few of the quirks and delights I have found so far. In short, though, the D700 kicks ass. It's easy to use, and takes an incredible picture, even in the dark.

That Sensor

The headline feature of the D700 is its full-frame sensor, which is the same one you'll find in the flagship D3. You only get 12 megapixels, but they're big pixels, and their light-gathering ability is extraordinary. The top ISO available on the D700 is a staggering 25,600, a full eight stops faster than ISO 100. At that setting, though, the pictures are terrible. Convert them to black and white and they look exactly like they have been through a photocopier. A photocopier that is running out of toner. That said, even this is better than the results that the Canon G9 gives at just ISO 1600.

Drop just one stop, to ISO 12,800, and things are a lot better. The pictures are still noisy but Nikon has tweaked its noise reduction algorithms to mimic film grain, or so it seems. The EXPEED processor has no mercy with color noise, but is a little easier on the luminance noise. What does that mean? It means that the nasty stuff is cleared out, leaving a grainy but pleasing result.

Drop the ISO to 6400, the highest setting with an actual number (Nikon uses names like H0.3 for the more sensitive settings) and you'd never know you were shooting at more than 800. This, combined with a fast lens (a 50mm ƒ1.8, for example) means you can shoot in ambient light, handheld, at night. And coupled with the heavy body, which steadies things, you can handhold to some pretty slow shutter speeds, too. If you were to add a shake-reducing lens into the mix, you'd likely have no trouble with shooting 2001's monolith in a black hole. At midnight.

The Knobs and The Aperture Ring

About that heavy body. The weight is reassuring (body only and without the battery it weighs 995g, or 2.2 lbs.) but the feel in your hand is what counts. I used to own a couple of Nikon F100 bodies and the feel is similar, if a bit chunkier. The biggest change for anyone moving up from a cheaper DSLR is the manual controls. Instead of all the functionality being hidden away in menus, most of the important functions get their own knobs, dials and switches.

Those of you who remember our post "History’s 5 Best Interface Designs" will know I'm a big fan of knobs:

Its strength is its simplicity. Once you have twisted one knob, you know how every other knob works. If it is marked, its position provides visual feedback. If not, our brains easily associate the amount of twist with the level of the knob’s effect. And best of all, it’s the only controller we know of which can go up to 11.

Better still, many of the knobs can be customized to do different things. Part of the fun is digging through the custom settings inside the menus to figure out just what you can tweak. The short answer is "almost everything."

But the one thing I really love, the discovery of which actually brought a small tear to the corner of my emotionally suppressed eye (hey, I'm English. We don't do emotions) is the aperture control. You can choose to use the aperture ring around the lens to set the size of the hole, shifting it away from the finger-dial on the grip (custom function f9, page 326 in the manual).

For someone who has this muscle memory baked in since childhood, this is huge. You lose the fine grained control of the 1/3 stop adjustments available with the command dial, but the shutter speed takes care of this. You also lose the Live View function, but you can always switch back temporarily (and quickly).

Live View

It works, and the high resolution screen means it looks great, but the live view is janky as hell. Here's how you use it: Turn the dial on the top to the LV setting (it's the same dial that chooses between self timer, single and continuous shooting). Then press the shutter release all the way down. The mirror flips up and live view is on. To refocus, press the shutter half way. The mirror flips down, the camera focusses, and the mirror flips up again. And when you actually take a picture, the mirror flips again.

You can choose the "tripod mode", which uses contrast detection like a compact camera, but it is slow as molasses. To me, Live View is little more than a gimmick. You can, however, zoom in on the live view image to see a 100% rendering for easy manual focussing (if holding a two pound camera plus lens at arms' length and twisting the focus ring is your thing) and there's a semi-useful level that can be superimposed on the image, but still: Gimmicky.

Built-in Flash

Really. Why? C'mon, Nikon.

Full Frame

The full frame sensor means that all your DX lenses are useless. If you were hoping that you could use your 18-55mm DX zoom as an ultrawide objective, you're out of luck. You can force the camera to treat the lens as a full frame one, but you'll get heavy vignetting at the wide end and a drop in image quality away from the center at all focal lengths.

The D700 defaults to reading just the central part of the image area, which means that an 18mm lens will act just like it does on a DX camera and give the equivalent view of a 27mm lens. The rub is that you are then shooting at just 5 megapixels. Even my D60 doubles that. For Lomo-style fun and frolics, though, those extreme angles, low-definition edges and black corners can be useful.

Auto Focus

The D700 has 51 focus points, all of which can be individually selected, and 15 of which are cross-type sensors which are faster and more accurate. There are several modes, from single point AF to a 3D tracking mode which remembers the color of the thing you first focus on and then locks onto it like a junkyard dog on a schoolkid as it moves around the picture.

But all you really need to do is to set it to auto and forget about it. The D700's autofocus is uncanny. It seems to know what you are taking a picture of and it locks on almost instantly. If you ever saw the Clint Eastwood movie "Firefox" (or read Craig Thomas' book), you'll remember the thought controlled weapon system in the plane. I believe Nikon took this and built it in to the D700. It really is that good.

Should You Buy One?

There's so much more to this camera that we have no chance of covering it here. But if you're thinking of buying a D700 (and especially if you are weighing it up against the more expensive D3), go ahead. I haven't had this much fun taking photos since I sprung for a Leica M6 some years ago (yes, I saved long and hard for that one, too. I then sold it to pay the rent). Bonus: Stick the 472 page manual in the bathroom and you'll have your morning reading taken care of for weeks. $3000, or thereabouts.

Product page [Nikon]

Review [DP Review]

Review [Imaging Resource]

Review [Ken Rockwell]

By Evan Ackerman

Food chains are rather nasty things. We don’t like to think about it much, but you know all those cute little fuzzy wuzzy soft and cuddly animals like bunnies and gerbils? They exist primarily to get EATEN by bigger animals with NASTY SHARP POINTY TEETH. GRRRRRR!!! The sooner your kids learn that, the better they will be able to survive in the wild, so why not be pragmatic this holiday season and get them some Food Chain Friends.

Food Chain Friends come from a far away planet called Daro, which exists much like Earth did, some 200 million years ago. They come in sets of five, and cutely feast upon one another. For example, the Frokol eats the Vextie eats the Fergel eats the Skoodle eats the Zezzel, which gets by on Floober Tree Moss. Get it? No? Well, if you can fit one into the mouth of another, odds are it’s lower on the food chain and therefore lunch.

They’re friends. They eat each other. It’s a complicated relationship.™ Food Chain Friends come in two different sets, and are available for about $50 at FAO Schwartz among other places.

[ Food Chain Friends ] VIA [ Neatorama ]

Just unveiled yesterday, Google's latest offering — google.org/flutrends — takes the results of millions of searches with phrases like "flu symptoms," mixes them with Google's special proprietary algorithm sauce and produces a real-time map (above) showing where in the U.S. it's hitting.

Miguel Helft's front page story in today's New York Times on the new new thing in infectious disease tracking follows.

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks, called Google Flu Trends.

Tests of the new Web tool from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu cases had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states. But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report was released. Its new service at google.org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading.

The C.D.C. reports are slower because they rely on data collected and compiled from thousands of health care providers, labs and other sources. Some public health experts say the Google data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives.

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Dr. Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C. From 5 to 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to roughly 36,000 deaths on average.

The service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide.

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive.

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu.

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Dr. Philip M. Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and an author of the study based on Yahoo’s data.

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keeping daily tabs on disease trends in their communities.

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Dr. Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in New York City.

If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional, free way to detect influenza, said Dr. Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

A paper on the methodology of Google Flu Trends is expected to be published in the journal Nature.

Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into them represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they have trouble with their mortgage. Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes.

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance. Yahoo has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site.

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune ad campaigns. And internally, the company has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends.

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction. Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but privacy concerns had generally stopped it from sharing it with outside academics.

Google Flu Trends avoids privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers. To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others.

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped it onto the C.D.C.’s reports of influenzalike illness. Google found a strong correlation between its data and the reports from the agency, which advised it on the development of the new service.

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org. Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Dr. Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid.

Google also says it believes the tool may help people take precautions if a disease is in their area.

Others have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes. A Web site called whoissick.org, for instance, invites people to report what ails them and superimposes the results on a map. But the site has received relatively little traffic.

HealthMap, a project affiliated with the Children’s Hospital Boston, scours the Web for articles, blog posts and newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world. It is backed by Google.org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives.

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track a disease.

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

Robert A. Guth's report in this morning's Wall Street Journal follows.

Sniffly Surfing: Google Unveils Flu-Bug Tracker




You can Google to get a hotel, find a flight and buy a book. Now you may be able to use Google to avoid the flu.

One month into flu season, Google Inc. on Tuesday opened a free Web service that the Internet company says can show if the number of influenza cases is increasing in areas around the U.S., earlier than many existing methods.

The service, called Flu Trends (www.google.org/flutrends), uses computers to crunch millions of Internet searches people make for keywords that might be related to the flu — for instance "cough," or "fever." It displays the results on a map of the U.S. and shows a chart of changes in flu activity around the country. The data is meaningful because the Google arm that created Flu Trends found a strong correlation between the number of Internet searches related to the flu and the number of people reporting flu symptoms.

Google built the service with the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. government's public-health watchdog that runs a range of flu-surveillance systems. Flu Trends can be a complement to those tools, health officials say.

Flu Trends "maps very closely to the influenza-like trends that we see in the U.S.," says Lyn Finelli, lead of the influenza surveillance team at CDC's headquarters in Atlanta.

The service adds Google to a growing number of Web sites that are trolling, culling and crunching Internet data in ways to better pinpoint and predict where diseases are hitting around the world. The sites use varying degrees of human and computer methods for detecting outbreaks and many have historically been aimed at doctors and health-care professionals. Google executives say their service could also appeal to consumers.

In any given year, between 5% and 20% of Americans can catch the flu, depending upon the strength of a particular flu virus and other factors, the CDC says. Around 145 million doses of flu vaccines will be available this flu season, which generally runs from October to May and typically peaks in February.

Finding a new tool to stave off infection is important to Maureen Rinehart, a 28-year-old kindergarten teacher in San Francisco. Ms. Rinehart says daily contact with her kids means she gets sick about once a month. She got a flu shot about two weeks ago and is armed with hand sanitizer in the classroom.

"They're really snotty and they want to hold hands with you; you know how it is with the little guys," says Ms. Rinehart. So if the Google service shows flu cases are rising, she says, "you could bulk up on vitamins and wash your hands more — all the necessary things you should do."

The Google service is the brainchild of Google.org, a three-year-old group at the Mountain View, Calif., company that works on areas for the public good — such as renewable energy — that may or may not have a direct financial benefit to Google. The company won't use advertising on the Flu Trends site.

The Google group examined flu-related keywords over five years, noting times when searches of those terms surged. It then compared those times to CDC records and found a strong correlation between when people searched flu keywords and when people have had flu-like symptoms. It spent the past year testing new search results against data from the CDC, tweaking its software to make its results more accurate, Google executives said.

The Flu Trends site displays results of its analysis in a five-tier scale of flu activity ranging from "minimal" to "intense," with a middle point of "moderate." The site includes CDC flu prevention messages, a flu vaccination locator and links to flu-related news items.

"It's still quite experimental," says Jeremy Ginsberg, Google's lead engineer on Flu Trends. "We feel it's an interesting, unique way to track disease outbreaks."

In 2003, the Canadian government and other organizations used versions of these data-collection and health sites to detect early signs of the SARS virus in China. The Canadian service — the Global Public Health Intelligence Network — automatically scans Web sites and news sources in seven languages for information on disease outbreaks, contaminated food and water, natural disasters and other health risks around the world. It charges a fee based on the type of organization that accesses it and its usage.

At Harvard Medical School's Children's Hospital Boston, a site called HealthMap crawls through 24,000 Web sites looking for disease-related terms. Results appear on a world map, which has colored markers for dengue fever, avian flu and other diseases.

Google.org last month started funding HealthMap to find ways to collaborate with ProMED, a site that uses people to gather clues about diseases from the Web and from other sources.

The Web-based services have shortcomings. The most accurate way to measure a disease outbreak is by the number of actual cases confirmed by a laboratory. By tracking keywords in news stories and search results, the Web sites can't guarantee that they are finding actual outbreaks.

But what they lose in accuracy, the sites may make up in speed. Getting accurate data on real disease cases requires people to be tested for a disease and that data to be collected by public-health organizations. While the CDC and other organizations do this kind of research, it takes time.

Reducing that time is crucial for combating influenza, which can manifest itself one to three days after a person comes into contact with the virus. "If you get data that's not very timely one or two weeks old it's possible that the outbreak has already peaked," the CDC's Ms. Finelli says.

Still, some consumers question how helpful the new Google health service will be for them. Tony Deen, a 22-year-old recent college grad in San Francisco, says he hasn't had the flu since he was a kid and uses health Web sites only when he has a medical problem. "It's not like I can flee the city if the flu is coming," Mr. Deen says. But "it might convince me to get a flu shot if people are getting sick."

A single shopping cart will change hands many times in a single day, so think about all the nasty stuff that gets accumulated across the handles each day. While most of these are harmless, they could prove to be a hazard to those with a less robust immune system. Never mind though, as a new shopping cart sanitizing system known as PureCart is now available, touting a 99% kill rate of common pathogens which are normally found on such carts. Perfect for paranoid parents to bring their kids out shopping for weekly groceries. We would like to see the local supermarket install one of these.

Add a comment | From: PureCart Does Away With Nasty Germs | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals

Are you one of the few who suffer from nasty hay fever problems every year? Well, the Lifemax Sneezer Beam aims to get rid of that problem once and for all simply by using light in a certain way. All you need to do is stick the couple of laser light beam rods right into your nasal cavities and allow the photons released to ‘inhibit the cells that release histamine’. According to the device manufacturer, all it takes is three minutes a day, three times daily for you to see an improved result. We suppose after trying just about any and every remedy out there, the £39.95 asking price is worth a shot. This is one personal appliance I would not want to borrow, no matter how close I am to that friend.

Add a comment | From: Lifemax Sneezer Beam Manages Hay Fever Problems | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals

Do you want a nasty shock or a tree fire? Well do ya? Hell no you don't. So, watch out for "surprisingly low prices, unusual labeling or certification marks and a lack of sales tax on a receipt since counterfeiters generally don't report their sales. Consumers should also be aware of street vendors and unauthorized dealers." If this message scared only one of you straight, then I (and the National Electrical Contractors Association) have done our job.

Counterfeit Christmas Lights Pose Safety Hazard for Consumers
Decorations with Fake UL Labels Among Growing Range of Counterfeit Electrical Products

BETHESDA, Md., November 11, 2008 — Counterfeit Christmas lights—including those with fake Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. (UL) labels—pose a threat to consumers for their potential inability to meet electrical safety and fire codes. The traditional holiday decorations are part of the rapidly growing crime of counterfeit electrical products in the United States—90+ percent of which are imported from China. Now reaching epic proportions in a $130 billion industry, counterfeiting is a crime that threatens the lives and safety of all U.S. citizens and electrical workers.
"Underwriters Laboratories Inc., like many other Intellectual Property Rights and Trademark owners, has seen a dramatic increase in the amount of counterfeited products and trademark labels on those products in the past, several years," said panel participant Robert Crane, lead enforcement manager, Anti-Counterfeiting Operations, UL, Chapel Hill, N.C. "For several decades, UL has integrated security features in many of its labels."
Crane participated in the opening panel discussion last month in Chicago as part of the new Anti-Counterfeit Products Initiative hosted by the NECA-published Electrical Contractor magazine, Bethesda, Md., and The Electrical Distributor (TED) magazine, published by the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED), St. Louis. The joint industry initiative is endorsed by NAED, NECA and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA).
Crane said that more recently, holographic labels were developed to further thwart the piracy of UL labels with the first holograms introduced in 1993 for decorative lighting strings and outfits. Since the holograms were so successful, said Crane, in 1996 additional categories for products manufactured in China also required holographic labels. This year, he said more requirements have been implemented regarding the use of holograms along with a newer hologram technology including the newest gold holograms.
A few warning signals for counterfeit lighting include surprisingly low prices, unusual labeling or certification marks and a lack of sales tax on a receipt since counterfeiters generally don't report their sales. Consumers should also be aware of street vendors and unauthorized dealers.

###

Published by the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA), Bethesda, Md., Electrical Contractor magazine delivers 85,300+ electrical contractors and more than 68,000 electrical contracting locations, more than any other industry publication.

A technology well over a century old may soon revolutionize transportation. Robert Stirling's novel engine was an attempt to make steam technology safe. By repeatedly heating and cooling gas inside a sealed chamber, he was able to avoid the nasty explosions and scaldings that were the bane of steam engine technology.

While quite popular in the 19th Century, Stirlings were no match for the practical electric motors that appeared a few decades later. The technology languished as a laboratory curiosity for decades - the little $379.95 desktop Stirling engine above is a typical modern example.

However, Stirling technology might get a new lease on life thanks to Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who recently announced a prototype Stirling hybrid electric car. His development mule is built on the chassis of a Ford Think, a tiny 2-seat electric car that ceased production in 2000. The little car is driven by a lithium battery and can travel around 60 miles on a charge.

The futuristic Stirling engine is tucked into a compartment on the floor of the hatchback for easy access. It  can recharge the battery when needed and also powers the heater and window defroster directly. It's an approach that makes a lot of sense.

It remains to be seen how efficient Kaman's Stirling engine is in the real world, but it holds significant promise, especially since the Stirling engine has the ability to run on multiple fuels. Essentially, any liquid with sufficient energy density can serve as fuel.

Sadly, Kaman doesn't expect Detroit's Big Three to adopt his technology. "I think what Darwin really was saying was: It's not the fittest, not the smartest, not the strongest; it's the ones that can adapt to change. And big industries that have long histories, particularly successful long histories, and a lot of ingrained infrastructure become the least adaptable to change. And when a disruptive opportunity comes along, they are the last that are capable of dealing with it," he mused recently.

The Desktop Stirling Engine
Dean Kamen: part man, part machine
DEKA Research, Kamen's think-tank

If you thought that the $50 solution that offers the iPhone a gaming grip in the form of the Marware Game Grip is daylight robbery, along comes this DIY cardboard game grip which works with both the iPhone as well as iPod touch. It does not look too comfortable in our eyes, and hopefully you won't suffer from nasty cardboard cuts during one of the more frantic gaming moments. Also, you'll get to save $50 in the progress which is good enough to purchase a decent meal for two outside.

Add a comment | From: iPod touch Gets Game Grip | Visit Ubergizmo | Good deals