Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

She’s not one of the fembots from the Austin Powers movies, but she’s the next best thing.  Her name is EMA, which stands for Eternal Maiden Actualization.  The maker is Sega Toys, and the target demographic is lonely dudes.  That’s right, according to Reuters she’s being marketed in Japan as a female companion.  She can sing, dance, hand out business cards (?), and of course give kisses.  EMA would make a great girlfriend because not only is she very affectionate, she’s also really low maintenance.  All she needs is some battery power, as that’s what she runs on.

She’ll be available in September for about $175, and Sega hopes for first-year sales of 10,000.  Maybe this could be like a Lars and the Real Girl situation, where not just the Lars character but everyone else could come to see EMA as real!  Except EMA is only 15 inches tall.  But her other measurements would make any girl jealous!

Speaking of robot women, check out this video for comments made about Madonna by singer Dan Gillespie-Sells of The Feeling.  Hilarious!  Unfortunately, unlike EMA, Her Majesty has been unavailable for some time.  But she can still sing and dance though.

Read [MSNBC]

Here’s another way to accessorize your monitor besides sticking Post-It notes all over it.  This Posy Cozy by artist Darlene is a knit holder that includes a plastic vial to hold flowers and comes with a gift card and Velcro to attach to the side of your monitor.  It is available in many different colors and costs $10, $14, or $15 on Etsy.  This would be a great way to have a flower arrangement at your desk without taking up desk room.  If having water in the vial would be too messy for you, you can just put fake flowers, or put pens instead.

But let’s say that knits are not your thing and you just want the vial.  Well if you have an HP monitor, you can get this Easy Clip kitfor $9.99 that has a flower vase, plus a headphone holder and two photo holders.  I suppose these products would be more suitable for a home computer than for a work computer since flowers might look too whimsical for work.  But I think they’d make the computer look more cheerful!  The Windows XP Control Panel includes a couple of flower wallpapers, so if it’s OK to have flowers as the background for your screen then it should be OK to have flowers on the sides of the screen too.

Via [geeksugar]

Mother’s Day is just around the corner, and maybe you’d like to give your mom a digital picture frame.  But here’s something to think about, in the U.S. News & World Report issue for the week ending May 5, 2008, Marianne Lavelle writes,

“Look at just one of the new energy guzzlers: the digital photo frame.  This always-on gadget burns a barely noticeable $9 extra a year into the average household electric bill, says the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.  But the impact could be staggering.  EPRI estimates that if every household in America owned one, it would take five medium-sized power plants just to keep those family photo slide shows rolling in the nation’s living rooms.  ‘I call these electronics the sleeping giants in our homes,’ says Thomas Reddoch, EPRI’s director of energy utilization.”

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If you’re reading this blog, then it’s likely you already are a regular rider of the RSS train. But RSS isn’t something everyone in the general public knows about, as only an estimated 5-percent of web users subscribe to websites using RSS. Hence the idea for RSS Awareness Day, which takes place on May 1, 2008 (which happens to be nine days before the first National Train Day, to continue with the train theme). In observance of this day, you can blog about RSS to help get the word out about this technology. 

According to Wikipedia; RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and along with the orange RSS icon became widespread in 2005/2006. RSS is defined as “a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts.” Which when used with either programs such as NewsFire or NetNewsWire or web-based readers such as Google Reader or Bloglines subscribers can have all the content from their favorite blogs available in one location, making it easy to get all the news. 

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It doesn’t look like the participants in the McAfee S.P.A.M. Experiment have received grand jury summonses in their inboxes yet, but it’s something they can look out for. According to the FBI’s press release about the email,

“At first glance, the e-mail appears authentic. It contains a court case number, federal code, name and address of a California federal court, court room number, issuing officers’ names, and the court’s seal. The spammer directs recipients to click the link provided in the e-mail in order to download and print associated information for their records. If the recipient clicks the link, a malicious code is downloaded onto their computer.
The e-mail also contains language threatening recipients with contempt of court charges if they fail to appear. Recipients are told the subpoena will remain in effect until the court grants a release. As with most spam, the content contains multiple spelling errors.”

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If you know any high school girls (preferably juniors or seniors) in the greater Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, or New York City metropolitan areas who have a talent for computers, spread the word to them that there’s this award they can apply for.  It’s the NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) Award for Aspirations in Computing, and it’s sponsored by Bank of America.  Important dates to remember are April 30, 2008 (deadline for online self-nominations) and May 2, 2008 (deadline for receipt of supporting documentation), with award notification in early May 2008.  Up to 5 winners will be chosen in each of the 6 metropolitan areas, and each winner gets $500 in cash and a laptop!  I don’t know the specifics of the laptop, but I would imagine it’s a nice souped-up one.
It would be great if NCWIT could also offer scholarships for lower-income girls who have limited computer access, but this is a good start.  I just hope this doesn’t wind up like Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which became Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day.  As if boys need any help breaking the glass ceiling.  No boys allowed, that’s what I say!

Read [NCWIT]

As the ads for the drug Cymbalta say, “Depression hurts.” A new study out of the University of Bristol suggests that doing a web search for information about a certain permanent solution is not a good idea.  The search engines that were used were Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.  For each search engine, 12 searches using simple terms were performed, and the top 10 results of each search were taken for a total of 480 search results in the study.  Sadly, only 13% of the results were about suicide prevention, and the top 3 hits for each search engine were pro-suicide (the fourth was Wikipedia).  According to the researchers, it appears that safety controls by ISP’s aren’t as effective as they should be and that rather, search engine optimization is the way to go.

The 12 search terms were not given in the Reuters article, and obviously search terms make all the difference as to what results turn up.  However, since the researchers were trying to put themselves in the shoes of someone contemplating suicide, the last thing they would think about is how advanced the query is.  I could also see why they used only the four search engines and didn’t include some of the original search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, and Excite to get some more results, because the four search engines are what people most likely use.  But of the four search engines, MSN ranked highest for suicide prevention and support sites, so to me this is saying that going with an underdog yields more responsible results.  Of course though I think everyone would agree that if you rely on the Internet for information, it’s best to go directly to a trusted health website and bypass the search engines altogether, or if you don’t know of any dedicated health websites, to get help offline the old-fashioned way.

Read [Revolution Health]

uWink sounds like the name of an online dating service, but it’s a restaurant concept from Nolan Bushnell, founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese.  So you’d expect arcade games at such an establishment, but uWink takes it a step further and has the games built into your tabletop!  You and your dining companions can have fun playing games while waiting for your food and after finishing your food, and most of the games are free!  Also, large wall projections let patrons from different tables play against each other.  What a great idea for if you want to book the restaurant for a private function, and yes uWink can customize the games too!  I guess that’s where the “wink” comes in, since you can meet people from other tables.

The technology also extends to the food ordering process.  Terminals at each table display the menu along with photos of each item and a list of ingredients, so you know what you’re getting and can order the food to your exact specifications.  This is great for folks with food allergies and other dietary needs.  Everything is done using the terminals, from ordering the food to asking for refills to paying your check.  As for the food itself, you’d think it’s an afterthought, but apparently it isn’t as it’s prepared by accomplished chefs.  So uWink’s got the technology and it’s got the food, I can imagine it’s hard to score a table!  uWink is opening their second L.A. location next month, but it’s a concept other parts of the country could embrace as well.

Read [LAist]

eMusic, together with the Music Intelligence Institute, presents this Music Intelligence Quiz developed by experts in the music field. It consists of 30 multiple-choice questions covering many genres and eras of music. The maximum number of points is 180, and there are 5 levels of music intelligence: Top 40 Radio Listener, Air Guitarist, Birthday Party DJ, Mix-Tape Master, and Musical Magician.

What’s great about this test is that, unlike other assessments out there, you are not obligated to provide a name or email address or register in order to see your results, although after you view your results eMusic invites you to check out some music suggestions based on your music intelligence level, but that’s fine. You can provide some demographic info (year of birth, gender, location) which is no big deal, but that would be cool if you could see some sort of results breakdown by these factors, or if you could get a badge to post on your social networking profile. Perhaps in the next version. Anyway I feel that this test is fair and accurate, as my music IQ turns out to be 126 which makes me a Mix-Tape Master. Try it yourself, but no cheating and no taking it over and over again to try to improve your score!

Read [Seen This]

This new boombox by jWIN has all the requisite features of your standard boombox: CD player, tape deck, and AM/FM radio. There’s also a built-in microphone so you can make your own voice recordings, but where are you going to get the blank tapes in order to do that or to record off of the CD or radio? I mean, as it is Maxell has already even stopped making blank CDs, let alone a cassette tape. So I can see the tape deck only being useful for playing whatever pre-recorded tapes you still have around.

jWIN however, has brought this boombox into the present by including a USB port, an AUX input, and an SD/MMC card slot. So that’s four total ways you can listen to your digital tracks; using an mp3 CD, any device with a headphone jack, a SD/MMC card, or a flash drive. Now if this thing could somehow also play HD radio and had a little TV instead of the tape deck, getting it would be a no-brainer!  Still, this would be a fun thing to bring to your next picnic or barbecue. The price is $59.99, and it’s available in your choice of black, green, or orange.

Product [jWIN]