By Evan Ackerman

It’s a sad thing, really. All of those poor LEGO minifigs, lying face down in a container somewhere amidst piles of useless yellow bricks and even ::gasp:: DUPLO. Wracked with guilt, LEGO super-genius Ricardo M. Oliv designed this fully armed and operational movie theatre. Yes, it’s only about 3 fps instead of the more customary 24 fps, but minifigs have always been a little slow… Their heads are mostly hollow, after all.

[ Brickshelf ] VIA [ BBG ]

Spoilers Ahead!

After long weeks of dancing his heart out, propped up on his busted up legs by only his resolve, courage and legions of SMS-voting geeks, Steve “ThunderToes” Wozniac is booted from Dancing With the Stars.

For some, he was hard to watch dancing. OK, maybe for most. But not to me.

To me he was a giant (but rapidly decreasing in weight, mind you) bundle of circuit board, segway riding, love bouncing around with the enthusiasm of a child on two barely-functioning legs. The man who could out design professional mainframe builders in his early teens found dancing impossible, but here he was trying, bucking what fate handed him (genius, riches) for what nearly everyone else took for granted (having fewer than two left feet). Woz is a deep geek—ours—with the accompanying social awkwardness. And he lost, and lost perhaps more badly than any contestant in the history of the show. But I don’t think anyone else faced such overwhelming odds. And who can resist cheering for the underdog?

Lets see if we can get Woz on Survivor or American Gladiators. [Newsday]

*Sorry for spoiling the ending, ladies and dudes. I figured it was not so much a “spoiler” as a “save-you-from-having-to-watch-bad-TV-ler”.

If there was something to help Dell to stand out of the crowd, then it must have been the fact that, compared to other famous manufacturer, it gave you the chance to choose the hardware you wanted to be “stuffed” inside the machine. This is, undoubtedly, a great advantage, especially because other competitors are willing to give only what they want to. Dell’s idea later extended to the color of the notebooks, so you had more choices than only black or silver.

And because people seem to be crazy about colors, Dell listened to them once again and decided to launch an entirely new line of colorful desktop computers. Now, to be more precise, the company announced the release of two Inspiron desktop computers in a wide variety of colors, the colors you can see in the picture above.

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You’ll be able to choose from the following colors: Piano Black, True Blue, Spring Green, Tangerine Orange, Promise Pink, Plum Purple, Formula Red and Pure White. But the story doesn’t end here, if you thought that the color is everything this new line of Dell desktop computers is bringing in the spotlight. You can also choose from a wide variety of processors, either Intel or AMD, of up to 8 GB of RAM and up to 750 GB of storage. On the other hand, the computers can come with the option of integrated graphics or ATI discrete graphics cards. Another interesting feature is the fact that you can add a Blu-ray driver to your tower.

As for the price, you’ll be able to purchase the computer you best like for $299. It’s just that, for the moment, they are available only in China, but they’re expected to start selling worldwide sometimes in the following months.

(Source: coolest-gadgets.com)

Today Clearwire yanked the cloth off of its rumored Clear Spot portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot, a shiny little battery-powered device that lets you bestow real 4G bandwidth upon anyone in Wi-Fi range.

The $140 thing fits in your pocket, runs for four hours on a lithium-ion battery, connects up to 8 laptops via Wi-Fi, and works like a charm when you’re in a decent WiMax coverage area. (You still need to connect a WiMax modem, which costs $50 and requires a data plan.)

I tested it on the outskirts of Portland, at a Burgerville right off of I-5 in Vancouver, WA, essentially becoming a totally unwired, totally portable wireless hotspot for anybody with a computer or smartphone in the vicinity. Anyone can see the hotspot itself, as it has a standard Wi-Fi SSID, but once on, you have to enter a password, like you do in hotels or airports where the Wi-Fi network itself is technically public.

I can’t make enough of the experience, and how much it could change businesses, sales forces or mobile bloggin’ teams like Gizmodo. You don’t even have to be plugged in, you can just all hop on and work as usual for up to four hours, more if you can find an electric socket. And with WiMax, you’re not nearly as limited as you are with 3G—though there are some constraints, you at least have access to a network that, in certain coverage areas, bestows blistering broadband speeds similar those from today’s wired cable modems.

One big constraint, of course, is that WiMax from Sprint/Clearwire is currently limited to Baltimore and Portland, OR, but is growing this year and next to many cities.

There is also an internal limit to how much WiMax bandwidth you can harness. Since the Clear Spot uses the same Motorola WiMax USB modem that Clearwire sells for its standard WiMax service, I could test how well the bandwidth was passed through.

• What I got when connecting an HP Pavilion dv4 Windows laptop to WiMax: Around 7Mbps
• What I got when connecting the same modem to the Clear Spot, then connected MacBook Pro via Wi-Fi: 3-4Mbps

That does certainly represent a bottleneck, and there’s a reason for it: The wireless hotspot itself—which you might have seen under the brand Cradlepoint for a year or more—was designed for 3G, for whom 3Mbps downstream is a frickin’ miracle. It has a gimped USB port that throttles bandwidth over 5Mbps.

Though that’s a flaw, it’s not a big deal when you consider most Clearwire WiMax plans will be sold with a 4Mbps cap.

Beyond the hardware bottleneck, my other complaints are relatively minor:
• There’s no Ethernet port, so this can’t fundamentally replace home broadband.
• In areas of low coverage, you get an error message saying the modem was not found, which is inaccurate.
• There’s no good way to read WiMax signal strength on the device itself.

The good news for patient people is that, according to Scott Richardson, Clearwire’s chief strategy officer, the company is exploring selling an unfettered WiMax account, so you’d get an experience closer to the one I got in my uncapped testing. Also, Scott tells me there will be another portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot device available—probably in the fall—that’s even smaller, and that wouldn’t be restricted by the USB bottleneck.

This is one of those products that’s totally niche but totally cool. Like, even if there are many people who are interested in getting WiMax, or better yet, a combo EVDO/WiMax modem from Sprint, I am not anybody would, at that point, also feel the need to share it with others. Maybe it’s good for bringing your work-supplied modem home, or maybe it’s a good way to split the cost of wireless modem service between a team of people who are always working together, on separate devices.

Regardless of all these scenarios, the fact is, it’s a truly new experience, and hopefully something we see more of in the future. I would say this is one of hell of a reason for Big Cable to be shaking in its boots—that is, if only Comcast wasn’t already part owner in Clearwire. [Clearwire Clear Spot release]

Antonio Rodriguez

HP has radical plans for the future of consumer printing, promising an end to printer drivers and the introduction of devices that just don’t care what you’re printing from–Windows, Linux, iPhone, or your washing machine.

CNET News’ sister site ZDNet UK talked to Antonio Rodriguez, the chief technology officer of HP’s consumer-printing division, about the fundamental changes it wants to make to low-cost output.

Q: First, what do you define as consumer? Increasingly, we’re finding enterprises buying “consumer” equipment.
Rodriguez: That’s an interesting dynamic. For me, it’s a question of who’s buying it. If the people buying it use it, it’s consumer. If it’s being bought by people three stages away from the people who use it, it’s enterprise.

What’s the thinking behind what you’re going to do?
Rodriguez: Twenty-five years ago when the inkjet was invented, it looked fantastic compared to the quality of screens and nothing else could touch it. Now, lots of people have caught up with inkjet technology, and screens are a lot better. It’s an incredible technical process squirting a billion droplets onto a sheet of A4, but it’s commonplace.

There’s a move to authoring and editing digital content, so we want to focus on ways to do that which keep printing relevant. And we’re excited that while people are used to thinking of printers in terms of feeds and speeds, they’re forgetting that printers these days have networked computers built in. We’re going to make a lot more use of that.

There’s going to be a change in the way printers are named, too. Today, if you go to the store, there are more characters in the model number than there are letters in the alphabet. That’s before you get into driver hell.

What does that mean in practice?
Rodriguez: You’ll take your printer home from the store and plug it into your network. It’ll register with our servers over the Internet, and you can link that registration with your various accounts.

We have ways to make that easy. When you print, you print to our servers and those send the output to the printer. Or you’ll be on a Web service, tell it what and how to print.

It doesn’t matter what you want to print from. It’s a Web service, so you can print from your computer, or your iPhone, or whatever. If you’re printing from Google Docs, for example, it really doesn’t matter what you’re using to access the Web service. It could easily be a post-PC device.

But you can print locally if you want?
Rodriguez: You will be able to use it locally, too: we support local discovery via Multicast DNS.

Are people going to be comfortable with this change to Web-based printing?
Rodriguez: The way that I see it, we have to deliver on a set of core printing experiences. People print as keepsakes, photos, collage, on-demand printing. They want to keep a memento. We know that’s a base human need.

Where will it take place? Ten years ago, it was all desktop clients–Adobe, Office, etc. Now the data collecting is taking place on social networks. What we’ve done is gone to people like MySpace and said: “We will provide a set of Web services that lets you expose more complex products,” so users can select photographs and have them delivered as collages, or formatted as cubes you can cut out of the paper. Then there’s utility printing–a map or a recipe is going to be more useful on paper than on a laptop. And communication, printing out office documents for others to read.

We’re looking at all three as digital workflows. That’s going to be a critical part of the future of printing as we progress along rich digital veins.

…

Originally posted at News – Business Tech

This week, I asked you to send me in photos of your disastrous workspaces. And man, you people are much, much more disgusting than I thought. And I assumed you were pretty disgusting.

First Place — David Schaefer
Second Place — Grossi Roberta
Third Place — Dudesque