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n3hat sends along an item from the Cincinnati Enquirer: “Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles… that he asked his family to bury him in one. His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can — along with a regular urn containing the rest… Dr. Baur, a retired organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble, died May 4 at 89… He developed many products, including frying oils and a freeze-dried ice cream, for P&G… But the Pringles can was his proudest accomplishment, his daughter said. He received a patent for the package as well as the method of packaging Pringles in 1970.”

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Last month I suggested that Blockbuster buy Redbox to help usher brick-and-mortar DVD renters into their digital future through automated kiosks. While they didn’t buy Redbox, this week Blockbuster announced plans to roll out…kiosks! But the big boxes will only be used to download content to digital media players. Shoot! So close! With Redbox eyeing an [...]

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Potentially throwing a wrench into future ocean fertilization trials, which are intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by storing carbon deep underwater, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity called for a moratorium yesterday on the practice of adding nutrients to the oceans.
While it may not carry any legal weight, the “de facto moratorium” could prove [...]

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murphee ends along a report from InfoQ: “Gemstone demoed [MagLev,] their Ruby VM built on their GemStone S64 VM, to an ecstatic audience. Gemstone’s Smalltalk VM allows OODBs of up to 17 PetaBytes, with none of the old ActiveRecord nonsense: the data is persisted transparently. The Gemstone OODB also takes care of any distribution, allowing the Ruby VM and data to scale across many servers (Cheerio, memcached!). There’s also an earlier quite technical interview with Gemstone’s Bob Walker and Avi Bryant about MagLev.”

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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

While we of course rock oh-so-very-hard on Rock Band’s drums, the pedal just never felt right under our weakling calves. The problem is naturally exacerbated for folks in wheelchairs, since there’s no way to avoid the kick drum or re-route it to another button — at least out of the box. Some folks at Kinetic Communications modded up a doorbell to work as the kick drum button and screwed it to a drum stick. Not the prettiest mod in the world, but it got their wheelchair-bound buddy drumming for about $20, and it shouldn’t be hard to replicate their instructions.

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Michael Arrington / TechCrunch:

Hey Twitter I Have A Few Questions Too  —  Lately Twitter has been cleaning house, raising money, doing interviews and actually talking to users.  In a blog post last week they did a Q&A session, directly answering questions about Twitter’s architecture.  —  So I have a couple of questions …

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Ken E. writes “Asus has backed down in the face of complaints from UK Eee PC 900 owners about the ultra-portable’s low-capacity battery. Confusing statements posted in online reviews led buyers to believe that they would get a larger capacity battery than they actually did — and they weren’t happy. Asus has, however, made a conciliatory gesture by extending a £10 high-capacity battery upgrade offer. Mobile Computer has the full announcement, plus quite a bit of background on how this fuss all got started. The batteries will be available June 10 and in the meantime Eee PC owners can download a BIOS update that Asus claims will add half an hour to battery life.”

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Chalk another one up for Sharp. The company has landed yet another partner willing to utilize its solar panels in order to make news, wow onlookers and give Mother Earth a modicum of a break. Napa Valley winery Far Niente has flipped on its self-coined Floatovoltaic installation, which was developed by Thompson Technology Industries and installed by SPG Solar. Nearly 2,300 Sharp solar panels were secured for the job, and we’re told that the array generates 400 kWs at peak output, which “significantly offsets the winery’s annual power usage and provides a net-zero energy bill.” Don’t expect that coveted bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon to be any cheaper as a result, though.

[Via CNET]

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Here comes a potential hiccup for companies in the business of ocean seeding like startup Climos, which just last week we reported was looking to raise more funding. Delegates at a U.N. biodiversity convention on Friday decided to call for a temporary ban on the practice of seeding the world’s oceans with iron, which can [...]

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MojoKid writes “A little over a week ago Netflix unveiled the Netflix Player, developed by the team at Roku, a set-top box for watching on-demand movies and TV. This interview with Tim Twerdahl, the VP of Consumer Products for Roku, goes into some detail about the guts of the box and the future of the set-top box. Of course the system runs an embedded Linux OS but interestingly also runs on a Nexperia (Philips) media processor.”

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Filed under: Wearables

This day and age, there’s really no excuse to have too little room in your average pair of cargo shorts for all the gadgets needed in a day. Convergence and shrinking PCBs have left us with do-it-all handhelds that can fit in the rear pockets of size 2 jeans on a size 4 gal, so really, you have exactly zero reasons to actually buy that abomination pictured above. If you must know, the FreeHand is a wearable neoprene pocket that keeps your keys, flash drives, RSA token and chump change within easy reach, and if you’re lucky, you may be able to convince the boss it’s being worn to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Folks who haven’t listened to a word we just said can ignite a Jackson right now — or spend $19.95 on this, same difference.

[Via Coolest-Gadgets]

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Dallas’ Southern Methodist University is now recycling energy with one of the first commercial electricity generators that use thermoelectricity—the act of drawing power from waste heat. The…

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Lucas123 writes “IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between Intel and Micron, announced it has developed a 32-gigabit NAND flash memory chip that is expected to enable the production of cheaper solid-state drives with twice the storage capacity of today’s products. The 34-nanometer, multi-level chip is smaller than Intel’s latest CPUs. Samples will be available in June with production by the end of the year.”

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Bell Canada may have to pay for violating net neutrality. A March 29 class action filing says Bell should reimburse its Sympatico DSL subscribers 80 percent of monthly subscriptions and $2,100 per susbscriber for traffic shaping, false advertising and privacy violations.
Bell had over two million DSL subscribers, and $3.6 billion data service revenues, in Quebec [...]

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Frighteningly enough, this isn’t the first (or second) time that we’ve seen scientists pat themselves on the back for creating a mind-reading machine, but a dedicated team from Carnegie Mellon has just announced a computer that “has been trained to read people’s minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words.” In a completely unsurprising move, gurus familiar with the development are suggesting that the breakthrough could be used to better understand how the brain organizes knowledge, and eventually, treat language disorders and learning disabilities more effectively. That’s all gravy from here, but when this stuff starts passing as evidence in court, you’ll know it’s time to seriously investigate a relocation to Mars.

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