Common Paradox Tech Blog

Here are a few things you don’t have time to do when your car plunges into an icy lake: remove a Leatherman multitool from your glove compartment; unfold it; cut through your seatbelt; refold it; smash through your window.

Thankfully there’s the ExiTool, a clever little gadget that attaches to your seat belt for quick access when your shit goes “glug, glug, glug.” It includes a high-carbon stainless steel slicer, a tungsten carbide smasher, and, just for good measure, an LED light.

Sure, having an open blade attached to your seat belt all the time isn’t ideal, but it’s definitely more ideal than being trapped in your car at the bottom of some murky body of water.

The ExiTool will be available soon for $27, so if you’re the type of person that worries about this thing it’s probably a worthwhile investment. [CRKT via The Awesomer]

In today’s remainders: The Onion visits CES; Recompute makes a cardboard PC; a robot spins on its head; and a helmet inspired by an armadillo.

Raw Onion
America’s Finest News Source visited CES this year and reported on the gadgets that excited them most. Among them: Bose Noise-Delaying Headphones, Texas Instruments’ Graphic Bassoon, and an MP3 that uses nanotechnology to let you feel Taylor Swift breathing lightly on your neck. They must not have been following our coverage that carefully, though, because not one of their imaginary highlights is as ridiculous as this very real product. [The Onion]

Cardboard: Check. Motherboard: ?
Recompute’s cardboard computer is now in production, which means that someone, somewhere is furiously cutting and folding huge slabs of cardboard. We’d heard about the eco-friendly idea before, but the non-cardboard guts of the machine—hard drive, processor, motherboard, RAM, etc.—are still yet to be announced, so there’s still no way of telling if Recompute’s admittedly unique idea is one to get excited about. But the real question here: what are they going to ship it in? [SlashGear]

Dance Dance Evolution
This break dancing robot is definitely fun to watch, but when you think about it, isn’t a regular old person spinning on their head a lot more impressive than a robot spinning on its head? The robot doesn’t even know it’s spinning on its head. It arguably doesn’t even have a head! While I’m not crazy about robots being programmed to do perform pastimes that take years for us humans to perfect, you have to wonder if robo-reflexes prevent robo-break dancers from accidentally kicking babies mid-roundhouse? Anyway, they might have mastered break dancing, but we still have the Foxtrot. For now. [Engadget]

Egg Head
The Tattoo, a concept developed by Julien Bergignat, is a polypropylene helmet that can be rolled up for easy storage, say, in a backpack, or a trash can. The helmet is 100% recyclable and also looks about 100% unlikely to protect your skull in any way if you get hit by a car. The Little House on the Prairie look isn’t going to win you any style points, either. I just hope this ill-conceived example doesn’t keep us from looking to the armadillo family for design inspiration in the future. It can work. [The Design Blog]

Most people seem determined to prove that cell phones are out to fry our brains, but could a call or two a day actually join red wine in the united federation of healthy vices? Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch, but a new study has found that lab mice that were genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s disease performed better on thinking and skill tests after exposure to cell phone style electromagnetic waves. “Electromagnetic waves prevent the aggregation of that bad protein of the brain” said Gary Arendash of the University of South Florida.

The study looked at the effects of cell phone use for two hours per day over a seven to nine month period, and the results were actually the opposite of what researchers were expecting. “We had expected cell phone exposure to increase the effects of dementia” claims Arendash. After decades of research there is still no cure, and few effective treatments for Alzheimer’s which is the most common form of late life dementia with over 35 million people suffering from the disease.

The evidence that cell phone radiation is safe continues to mount, but I suppose only time will tell.

Most people seem determined to prove that cell phones are out to fry our brains, but could a call or two a day actually join red wine in the united federation of healthy vices? Okay, perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch, but a new study has found that lab mice that were genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s disease performed better on thinking and skill tests after exposure to cell phone style electromagnetic waves. “Electromagnetic waves prevent the aggregation of that bad protein of the brain” said Gary Arendash of the University of South Florida.

The study looked at the effects of cell phone use for two hours per day over a seven to nine month period, and the results were actually the opposite of what researchers were expecting. “We had expected cell phone exposure to increase the effects of dementia” claims Arendash. After decades of research there is still no cure, and few effective treatments for Alzheimer’s which is the most common form of late life dementia with over 35 million people suffering from the disease.

The evidence that cell phone radiation is safe continues to mount, but I suppose only time will tell.

The United States Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued recalls on Acer’s AS3410, AS3410T, AS3810T, AS3810TG, AS3810TZ, and AS3810TZG laptops, all 13.3″ models, due to bad internal wiring of the microphone. Apparently three incidents of short circuiting have been reported, causing the laptop’s plastic cases to melt.

For more information, check out the CPSC website or contact Acer. [CPSC via SlashDot via Engadget]

Oops. It appears that old fashioned, power hungry incandescent lights have one major advantage over LEDs—they get hot enough to melt snow. Unfortunately, cold weather cities are discovering this glaring oversight the hard way.

Obviously, if the lights are not melting snow, motorists are going to have trouble seeing the signals after a storm. So far, this problem has resulted in dozens of accidents and at least one death. Solutions are being tested in several states that range from weather shields to heating elements to water-repellent coatings. In the meantime, city crews must continue to stay on top of the problem and dust off the lights by hand. [Yahoo]

If I were to tell you that Netflix sleeves and discs were hotbeds of contamination and disease because they were handled by so many people from delivery to DVD player, you know what I’d be? A filthy liar, that’s what.

This is the exact opposite of Netflix discs, which are actually quite clean, comparatively speaking.

You see, those red sleeves and the delectable range of DVDs they contain are relatively free of any funky viruses or deadly bacteria, this according to an interesting slow news day report out of KLTV 7 East Texas.

As part of the report, six Netflix discs and sleeves were sent to an infectious disease expert at the University of Texas for a good swabbing. After some time in the incubator, the petri dishes were removed, and the samples—thankfully for this Netflix user—were no more covered with bacteria than a sample would have been had the good doctor touched them with his bare hand:

“They were fairly clean,” said [Dr. Richard] Wallace [in an interview with KLTV]. “If I took my fingers and laid them on the top of the plates, this is what you’d grow.” As for the disks themselves, Wallace said he found nothing that could potentially cause disease.

So keep on using that copy of Benjamin Button as a coaster. You’ll be relatively safe in doing so—just don’t eat off of it. [KLTV East Texas via Hacking Netflix]

While we have no evidence to suggest that the failure of Palm Profiles to successfully sync contacts to newly activated webOS devices is a widespread phenomena , it is widespread enough to be a cause of concern.  These recent developments, compounded with the Danger fiasco last month, should serve to reinforce the importance of data redundancy, even in the days of "cloud computing." To echo Dieter’s sentiments on the issue:

Our advice: your key data should always be in a minimum of three places:

1. Your Pre (where it’s persistent as long as you don’t erase anything)

2. A cloud service (Palm, Google, Exchange, etc)

3. Someplace ‘else.’ For most of us that will be your desktop, where hopefully you’re pulling down your data from Google or Exchange. If you’re using Palm’s profile exclusively, we suggest you take a look at one of the several desktop sync apps that are available now.

Aside from using third party programs like Mark/Space’s The Missing Sync or Chapura’s PocketMirror, there really isn’t an easy to take the contact information stored in the Palm Profile and export it for use in other services, such as gmail or Yahoo.  There is a utility in the works by DrewPre that’s intended to fill this void, as first reported by Derek earlier this week, but it has yet to be released to the public as of this writing.

Those who want to back up their data without parting with money are still in luck, however: utilizing the tools and resources already made available to us by members of the webOS community, it is possible to back up the contents of your Palm Profile, and even export the contacts contained therein to the cloud service of your choice.

Here’s how.

read more

Technological progress is amazing. Case in point: When I was learning to drive, my safety monitor was a “mom.” It barked orders at me as I navigated Massachusetts streets, oftentimes recklessly at high rates of speed. In the future? Computers!

At least, that seems to be the safest route, if some amazing test results from a study into teen driving and accident prevention are any indication.

The test involved an in-vehicle data recorder (IVDR) system that monitors unsafe driving events, such as sharp turns, heavy acceleration and abrupt braking. Originally developed by GreenRoad, a San Francisco firm that specializes in trucker safety, the system takes this information and “grades” the driver. Red, yellow and green lights inform drivers how well they are driving at any given time.

The system sounds pretty simplistic, but the data suggests something remarkable. In those cars with the system, dangerous driving events were cut in half.

Impressive, but we imagine angsty teens will still find some way to complain about “the man” and mom and dad’s snooping. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. The system is accelerometer-based, and the software could easily make the jump over to smartphones, said Swedish engineer Per-Olof Svnesk in an article at New Scientist. You’re already secretly looking at your kid’s cellphone anyway, parents, so why not install a safety app in there while you’re at it? They may even think it’s cool, so no snooping necessary. [New Scientist]

The rest of your body may be mangled beyond recognition in a serious motorcycle accident, but your hand will be pristine from the wrist up when the police find it in a nearby ditch thanks to the Handroid glove.

Seriously though, this is some bad ass body armor for you hands. It features a rugged exoskeleton that cushions impacts and prevents hyperextention of the fingers, a scaphoid protection system to prevent injuries to the bone that connects the thumb to the wrist, honeycomb gel impact protection, wrist guard shrouds, and the BOA lacing system for a superior fit.

Pricing information has not been announced, but look for it on store shelves in March. While you’re at it, you might want to protect your whole body with some of the super-advanced looking upper and lower body armor from Knox. [Knox via Uncrate via DVICE]