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A company called Kimura Metal is set to release the eMARK Super Mobile Keyboard, which it claims is the world’s thinnest. And it’s spill-resistant to boot.

The eMARK is just 1mm thick (although it does, apparently, have stretch marks, in some places ballooning to a positively porky 5mm) and can laugh in the face of an overturned mug of coffee or beer. It doesn’t do Mac OS, though, which is a real shame. This silicone/vinyl contraption goes on sale at the end of the month for ¥2,980.

An image of this product can be found here.

(Via Impress [Japanese]; MT here)

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Want to hear what 5Hz sounds like? A new woofer technology unlike any other and a new product category for home audio. This is the first home audio woofer delivering true response to DC. The Thigpen rotary woofer is the worlds first true infrasonic home audio or home theater woofer. Conventional subwoofers roll off rapidly below 20Hz. With no cone the rotary woofer achieves high efficiency at very low frequencies.

Most subwoofers have a difficult time producing acoustic output below 20Hz at audible levels. They generally require large amounts of equalization, distortion rises rapidly, and even the most expensive available cannot produce significant output below 10Hz. Subwoofer electronics usually contain a cutoff filter which sharply rolls off content to the subwoofer below 20Hz to protect the speaker. On the other hand, the rotary woofer has enough acoustic output to move a open door back and forth .5” between 1 and 5Hz! It has enough output to find resonance frequencies of walls and ceilings in a room. It requires no equalization to achieve flat response to below 1Hz.

Microphones have low frequency capability that far exceeds the low frequency output of current subwoofers. In many cases infrasonic information is in a movie soundtrack or recording, it is not being reproduced by the sound system.

Read the rest of the article here

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TOKYO — Sony, Matsushita and three other Japanese electronics makers plan to develop a join standard for new Internet televisions that will make it easier for people to see video available on the Web, a Sony spokeswoman said Thursday.

The TVs aim to make accessing video and similar online content easier than with computers, spokeswoman Mina Naito. The other companies involved are Sharp Corp., Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd.

The companies plan to start selling the new televisions as early as next year, the Nihon Keizai newspaper reported, without saying how it got its information. Naito said the timelines and other details of the products have not been disclosed.

The five rivals set up a joint company last month called TV Portal Service Corp. to develop a common standard for connecting the Web, Naito said. Sony and Matsushita are the lead shareholders, each with 35 percent stake. The others have 10 percent shares.

The Internet TVs will features a remote control that allows online access with the touch of a button and will also eliminate the need for a personal computer keyboard to make the gadget more user-friendly, the Nihon Keizai said.

The new televisions will use Linux operating systems instead of Microsoft Windows, it added. That feature is aimed at cutting the time needed to boot up and reducing the risk of virus infection.

Together, the five companies expect to sell 10 million to 20 million units by Japan’s 2011 changeover to terrestrial digital broadcasting, according to the report.

By HANS GREIMEL Associated Press Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

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If you can’t sleep at night without knowing that those vacation photos you have stored on your thumb drive are absolutely, positively secure, this 007 USB Flash Drive is for you. Combining the digital security of encryption with the decidedly analogue security of a bike lock, the 007 keeps your data doubly safe. The combination lock not only keeps would-be data thieves from getting to the thumb drive, it also will physically lock the drive to an object, such as a desk, via the steel cable. If they somehow figure out that the code is your birthday, once they plug it into your computer they’ll need yet another password to access the data. That’s a lot of protection, so you’d better have something important enough to be worth keeping under such lock and key in those photos. This seems to be just a concept right now, but who knows, it could hit stores someday. — Adam Frucci

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Source: SciFi.com

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