Author: Ty Dunitz

It’s still sort of interesting to ponder about the passing of the telephonic torch – that the shorthand ‘phone’ now typically refers exclusively to mobile phones, and that you have to clarify ‘home phone’ when discussing the landlines of Luddites still clinging to the past. Just give it up, guys. Mobile is the way. And speaking of such mobile ubiquity, check this out: an origami phone. Designed by Chengyuan Wei to be quick n’ drrty disposable, the phone is a single sheet of foam that folds into a more-or-less handset-shaped configuration – perfect for those months when you can’t even afford pay-as-you-go….

Sit back, and relax. For the rest of your life. Quite possibly the coolest Kinect hack yet has come from Microsoft itself – in the form of this Kinect-powered motorized armchair, built using the soon-to-be-released Kinect PC SDK. With a flick of the wrist, the chair reclines, adjusts, and even becomes mobile, all while you laze about. If this blatant incarnation of slothdom isn’t the reason technology made it to this point, nothing is. Behold! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RewJHNkjog0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-ZJWqmaes Alright, so the operation of this thing is still a little…

Before today, I didn’t know about Bacon Day, but henceforth, I will never forget. It turns out those celebrating this obviously-best meat-based holiday like to celebrate by doing things like construct weapons from their favourite cuts of flesh-of-the-innocent. Here, we have a rocket launcher made of bacon. A rocket launcher made of bacon. A rocket launcher made of bacon. At 36 inches, this is some serious hardware, sending sausages (what else?) flying at high velocities by the power of 8 AA batteries alone. Awesome. You’d be disappointed if I hadn’t brought a video, but I’m not in the business…

Hold onto your TV Hat – Simon & Schuster are publishing the official biography of Steve Jobs. Written by TIME editor Walter Isaacson, the man behind the biographies of other revolutionary geniuses such as Ben Franklin and Einstein, ‘iSteve: The Book of Jobs’ will chronicle Big Steve’s formation, leave from, return to, and command of Apple’s intense legacy. The biography will be based on information gleaned from three years of interviews Isaacson personally conducted with Jobs, his family, friends, enemies, co-workers, and everyone in between. Suffice it to say, this will most certainly…

Steve Wozniak has admitted he’s return to Apple ‘if asked’, reports Reuters. ‘I’d consider it, yeah’, said Woz in an interview this week when asked if he would ever return to the company to take a more active role. With Jobs on indefinite hiatus, perhaps that isn’t the craziest idea. Woz called Apple’s success in recent years ‘unbelievable’, but wished Apple would commit to a more open strategy, so he could ‘get in there and add [his] own touches’. ‘There’s just an awful lot I know about Apple products and competing products that has some relevance, some meaning,’ said Woz during the interview. ‘They’re…

I once heard that ships in bottles are built in a collapsed state outside the bottle, and then simply ‘unfolded’ once slipped inside. My heart broke when I learned of such cheatery. Hats truly go off, then, to Julia Morley, who honest-to-Odin built this Lego ship in a bottle legit-style – with really long tools on sticks and stuff. Julia used Lego’s Bricksmith software to design the ship using only pieces that would fit through the mouth of the bottle (duh), and then over the course of three days, painstakingly pieced it together with the aforementioned tools on sticks. The end result is deceptively…

Straight outta Asia comes the rumour that the seventh-gen iPod Nano may, in fact, be getting its camera back. Fans of the Nano likely remember a time before Big Steve decided the unit had to better live up to its name by being condensed into an unnecessarily small space. That time bore unto us an iPod that was light on stature, but big on the ability to take pictures – an ability that was heartbreakingly removed from the bite-size current model. However, Apple.pro has leaked a photograph which seems to do little but confirm the existence of an impending camera on the next Nano, which will retain its current…

Sometimes, processor speed isn’t everything. Sometimes you want something kitschy and slow, that moves at 8 or fewer frames per second. You know how hipsters listen to cassette tapes for no other reason than they suck more than MP3s? This is like that, but more iPad-y. Ukrainian artist Svetlana Shokhanova has done a bang-up job of recreating the iPad experience with nothing but plasticine and a cute, shuffly indie tune, and the result is something I honestly wish we could see without the aid of stop-motion technology. honestly, tactile screens can’t come fast enough….

You’re already watching the video, so let me break it down: this is Rolltop. It’s a laptop that rolls out. Pretty simple. And probably not the first one of these you’ve ever seen – but as the technology actually exists to make this a possibility now, it serves to make something like Rolltop all the more exciting. What makes Rolltop especially rad, though, is that unlike many of these videos that typically represent only forays into wishful thinking by ambitious design students, the Rolltop team is actively vying to reach production. So the real question here is not ‘if’, but ‘when’ – or perhaps even…

Maybe not. Apple has now officially announced WWDC 2011, and the rumours are flying out of the mill faster than can be caught. Though Jobs n’ Friends have promised a ‘preview of the future of iOS and Mac OS X’,it remains to be seen whether or not any hardware will be making the scene. The iPhone 5 might be a no-show – and according to the Loop, that’s a guarantee. Can WWDC be a rockin’ good time without a hardware announcement? Obviously an iPad 3 is an impossibility, as the second generation’s been out less than a month… or maybe it’s been a month. Time flies, y’know. Macs are approaching the morgue in…