Magic Mirror Security System

The Magic Mirror is essentially hiring the floating face character from Snow White and, instead of it telling you who the fairest one of all is, it monitors your home. I will admit that the Magic Mirror is a useful security system, but I don’t really appreciate its theme. I suppose if my home really was my castle, then this would go with it perfectly.

The M30P Magic Mirror system has an interface that is designed to look like a mirror, but it is only to hide the 30 inch LCD display. It has a program with a CG character named Basil of the Mirror.

Basil is designed to say about one hundred things about the problems around your home. Samples include “may I inform you that the motor car garage door has just been opened” or “pardon me, but isn’t it time to leave for practice”.

I can only imagine that he says things with the tonal snobbery pattern of Batman’s butler Alfred. Of course, if you don’t like Basil, Themeaddicts, Inc., the company who makes this odd yet practical product, will gladly custom make a character for your mirror.

The company site doesn’t really give any estimation of cost on the Magic Mirror system, but I’m guessing it isn’t cheap. It will be even more expensive if they custom-make your character.

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Does Apple do Conceptual design? Sure, but we’ll never see it

The Apple rumor mill is filled with Photoshopped design concepts which are meant to convey what the next great secret project is that Cupertino will release to the faithful. But this article makes a compelling argument what while doing conceptual products may be a tempting way to innovate, they seldom reach the marketplace. Companies like Microsoft may reach headlines with tantalizing projects like Microsoft Surface, but if they never ship to the mainstream consumer what’s the point? Apple, on the other hand disciplines it’s design teams to keep focus on products that will be released and as such, create some killer and ground-breakingly cool gadgets and proving the old saying that while artists may design, real artists ship.

The argument goes on to suggest that working in secret until he’s ready to announce and ship, Steve Jobs can streamline a design and maintain an aura of anticipation with the audience, making them search the rumor mill for any news on new Mac products. Jobs has even gone so far as release disinformation in order to root out would be leakers and fire them. But any concepts that Apple creates are solely for internal use until the products either meet or exceed Mr. Jobs design requirements. And only then will it see the light of day. Which is probably why we see more rumors about a Mac Tablet that has simply never arrived.

But this kind of design philosophy also focuses the design team to work on practical issues pertaining to releasing a product and not “pie in the sky” brainstorms which take years to overcome and are often merely dropped in favor of the next design.

One thing is certain, you can’t argue with their track record since Jobs has returned to the Cupertino helm.

Thanko Magnetic Earphones: Perfect for Talk Like a Pirate Day

Ahoy, me hardies! In case you don’t know, September 19th is officially Talk Like a Pirate Day, and I have found the perfect accessory for ye, matey! Thanko, who has offered landlubberin’ consumers a lot of unusual products, is now offering the Sound Lives Magnetic Earphones.

So why are these perfect for Talk Like a Pirate Day? For starters, they have some interesting graphics on some of them, like a soccer ball, a panda, or a skull and crossbones. Arr, it be the Jolly Roger! What a great thing for puttin’ on a pirate’s ear!

In fact, that is one of the bonuses of the Magnetic Earphones: they can be used as jewelry. In fact, from the picture here, I would think that this is all the headphones could be used for. After all, if you look at where the speaker is at, it doesn’t appear to go into the ear canal at all. Is there some bone conduction technology going on here?

The pair of earphones have a frequency response of 20-25,000Hz, with a sensitivity of 100db/mW. You should be able to find the Sound Lives Magnetic Earphones on the Thanko site for a very low price of $19. Godspeed to you, and have a great Talk Like a Pirate Day.

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Is this the Gphone?

It looks like the HTC’s Google Android-powered Dream phone has been spotted.

One of my super secret spies at Google just happened to trade contact information with someone who admitted that the phone in his hand was the fabled Dream.

It says that the the official release date of the Android-powered T-Mobile Dream is on the 23 of this month. All these was from rizzn’s blog.

Fit PC Slim - World’s Smallest PC

It was claimed as the world’s smallest PC measuring at 4.3 x 3.9 x 1.2 inches(110 x 100 x 30mm) and weighs 13 ounces. This handheld-size pc is running on Windows XP or Linux and powered by a 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor. It comes with a 40GB hard disk, network and USB interfaces, 256 MB of DDR RAM and up to 512 MB of NAND flash. There’s two versions available, one with 256MB configuration (sans WiFi, hard drive) for $220 and the other one with 512MB WiFi version (with no hard drive) for $245.

[via TechFresh]