If You Don't Have Your Headphones Plugged in While Running this Application, You're a Terrible Human [Video]

Jul 14, 2012 12:30 AM  

The world is made up of two kinds of people: those sadistic monsters who leave the key-board clicks turned on on their iPhones, and the sane angels who keep that shit off.

If you put yourself in category #1, boy, do I have a product for you! Noisy Typer is a free, open-source software for OS X, developed by Theo Watson, of the Free Art and Technology lab (F.AT.).

Built on openFrameworks version 0071, Noisy Typer runs in the background and will replicate the click clack sound of an oldtimey typewriter, while you compose your emails and pen your memoirs on your word processing program of choice.

Noisy Typer has a distinct sound for letter keys, the spacebar, backspace, return, scroll up, and scroll down—so if you're jonesing for a little Mad Men action, you can just power up Pages (or Word, or whatever), hit the keys, close your eyes—pour some Scotch?—and make believe you're sitting right in there in the center of Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price.

...Otherwise, I'm not sure why you'd want to submit yourself to this kind of *cruel cacophony? [TheVerge via fffff]

*If you do, though, please be kind and keep your headphones plugged in at all times. Because you are probably the only terrible human on Earth who actually wants to hear this.

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Refrigerated Bathroom Drawers For When You Think You Might Be In There a While [Bathrooms]

Jul 14, 2012 12:00 PM  

A company called Perlick is now offering a range of 15-inch refrigerated bathroom vanity drawers for safely storing and extending the life of organic or other personal hygiene products, like makeup or even medication.

But let's be frank here. Sometimes when you're heading into the bathroom to take care of things, you really have no idea how long you're going to be in there. Occasionally it can take just a few minutes, but most of the time you'll probably be enduring an extended stay—so a refrigerated drawer where you can store refreshments and provisions is a brilliant idea. Hygiene issues aside, sometimes you need a little bit of extra energy to get you through the home stretch, and with a starting price tag of around $3,000, this seems like the best thing you can have in your bathroom next to an extra roll of toilet paper.

[Perlick via HomeChunk via Luxury Launches]

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Wireless Power Transferred Through Thick Concrete Could Mean Electric Cars That Charge While You Drive [Charging]

Jul 7, 2012 7:00 PM  

One of the biggest issues preventing the electric car from taking over the roads is their incredibly limited battery life. But researchers at the Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan have demonstrated a new system that could let electric cars constantly recharge while they're being driven.

Their research has resulted in a system that's able to transfer somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 watts of electricity through almost 4 inches of concrete, allowing the power source to be safely buried beneath a roadway. And specially adapted tires which are wired into a vehicle's power system could then harness that electricity and use it to top off the battery.

At the moment the system exists as a low-power proof-of-concept of the technology, and would require about 100 times more power to actually charge an electric car's battery while it was running. But they claim the components needed to ramp it up are cheaply available, and the system could even work with concrete layers almost eight inches thick if needed. [Tech-On!]

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