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OnePlus rolls out its own version of Google's Magic Eraser
OnePlus has announced a new tool called AI Eraser, which removes unwanted objects from photos.
Cornell students build spider-like robotic chalkboard eraser out of Lego, magnets, fun (video)
While you were trying to pass Poetry 101, Cornell seniors Le Zhang and Michael Lathrop were creating an apple-polishing Lego robot that automatically erases your prof's chalkboard. A final class project, the toady mech uses an Atmel brain, accelerometers for direction control, microswitches to sense the edge of the board, magnets to stay attached and hot glue to keep the Lego from flying apart. As the video below the break shows, it first aligns itself vertically, then moves to the top of the board, commencing the chalk sweeping and turning 180 degrees each time its bumpers sense the edge. The duo are thinking of getting a patent, and a commercialized version would allow your teacher to drone on without the normal slate-clearing pause. So, if designing a clever bot and saving their prof from manual labor doesn't get the students an 'A', we don't know what will.
Crapgadget: 'after school special' edition
School can be tough, especially when you're different. So what better way to keep the bullies at bay than to get your craptastic accessory freak on. In this special back to school bonanza of creeper tech, Hong Kong-based watchmaker o.d.m. mashes E.T. with a gummy bunny for a wrist-rocking return to infancy, Strapya World takes you by the baby's hand for iPhone 4 case comfort, while Dane-Elec's E-Razor USB stick goes undercover in a block full of erasing rubber. And if you're looking for a soundtrack throwback to match the solar-powered butterfly you've stuck in your Jansport, Brando's got you covered with its USB Cassette Capture & Player. Take a gander at the roundup below and make sure to vote for the crapgadget most likely to not succeed.
Fujitsu's HOAP-2 robot wipes whiteboards clean -- humankind next in line? (video)
They've taught them how to flip pancakes and shoot arrows, and now they're teaching humanoids to erase your whiteboard. That's right, the same folks who brought you iCub in a feathery headdress are back at it with Fujitsu's HOAP-2, a humanoid robot that looks like it's related to the Jetsons' maid, and can wipe a dry erase board clean via upper-body kinesthetic learning. While scientists force the robot's arm through a number of erasing movements, an attached force-torque sensor records the patterns, allowing HOAP-2 to mimic its previous actions, and voilà! You've got a blank slate. Sure, this little guy looks perfectly harmless in comparison with the bow-and-arrow-wielding iCub, but replace that eraser with a switchblade and the human race is in a whole world of hurt.
X-pire! software will add digital expiration dates to your photos, photo-related embarrassment
Wouldn't it be nice if photos you uploaded to Facebook, MySpace and Flickr just stopped being accessible after a while, saving you the almighty hassle of having to delete them yourself? Well, a few good Germans have come together to produce the X-pire! software, which promises to do just that -- make online imagery inaccessible after a given period of time following their upload. It's been around in prototype form as a Firefox extension, but next week should see its proper launch, complete with a subscription-based pricing model costing €24 per year. Yes, the observant among you will note that this does nothing to prevent others from grabbing those images and re-uploading them, but this software's ambition is humbler than that -- it just aims to give the less tech-savvy (or simply lazier) user a tool for controlling at least part of his or her presence on the web.
TUAW preview: Pixelmator 1.3 "Tempo"
We've praised Pixelmator here before (and we've even shared our love with the devs directly) -- I am by no means an image-editing professional (Photoshop and Aperture are way, way beyond my ken), but Pixelmator lands exactly where I want it to: it's a relatively lightweight application with just enough features to do the complicated stuff when I need it done.One of the big drawbacks of the software, though, is that performance-wise, it's never quite been up to par. Especially when pulling down big jobs like editing a lot of pictures at once or opening or closing really large pictures, Pixelmator has always lagged a bit behind. The team, however, wants to fix all that with their latest release, appropriately called "Tempo" -- they've made huge changes on the back end to try and bring performance up to where it needs to be for a solid image editor.They've made a number of other nice changes, too, including finally creating a "Magic Eraser" with some nice click-and-drag functionality for selecting and editing specific color areas. TUAW recently got our hands on a preview version of Tempo -- our in-depth preview starts after the break, and you can click through the gallery below to see the new features in action.%Gallery-32631%
WiebeTech's standalone Drive eRazer does what it says
If you've already got the optical media wiper you need to rest easy, you'll probably be able to escape insomnia altogether after picking up WiebeTech's Drive eRazer. Granted, we've seen more elaborate solutions to this problem before, but this little bugger is compact enough to lug around and enables users to erase sensitive data from 2.5- / 3.5-inch IDE, PATA and SATA drives without requiring any PC intervention. The company claims that it can write data at a "sustained rate of more than 35MB/s," which means that your 250GB HDD would be clean as a whistle in under two hours. Best of all, the Standard flavor checks in at just $99.95, and if you're still nervous about someone finding something in nothing, a Pro model -- which is "capable of more than one pass with random characters" -- is available for $50 more.
Art Lebedev gets campy Tersumus eraser
It's campy and silly and so Art Lebedev -- but seriously, who writes in pencil anymore? We haven't picked one up in, like, years. But you know that if we did, we'd be hot to use the Tersumus deleter to kill that GOTO 10 loop right fast.
Plextor announces Plexeraser destruct-o-drive
Plextor has announced a new CD/DVD drive that you'll want to keep safely out of reach of unsuspecting friends and family members, 'cause its sole purpose is to destroy whatever optical media you feed it. The Plexeraser appears to use the same technology that's been available in some previous Plextor drives, but this looks to be the first standalone model, and also the only one to come in a stylish orange color scheme -- no doubt intended to further emphasize the danger. Unfortunately, the Plexeraser takes a full six minutes to permanently wipe out all the data on a disc, making it about five minutes and fifty seconds slower than some other data destruction methods we can think of, and a lot less fun.[Thanks, Benjamin]
Military-grade "Guard Dog" hard drive degausser
When even a $13,000 hard drive degausser leaves you a little worried that someone, somehow might still be able to pick out a few bits of top secret data, you might want to turn to these guys at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, who developed a fool-proof drive destroyer dubbed the "Guard Dog" that works without electricity. Like most drive wiping devices, the Guard Dog employs massively powerful magnets that not only render hard drives useless, but VHS tapes, DAT tapes, ZIP drives, and any other magnetic media to boot. Of course, they didn't just use any old off the shelf magnet, instead designing custom neodymium iron-boron models that produce just the right magnetic field necessary to make that hard drive completely useless. The Guard Dog also speeds things up by letting you crank drives through a mechanism that'll wipe them as they pass through, even if they're enclosed in metal cases. The system was developed in conjunction with defense contractor L-3 Communications Corp who foresees producing hundreds or thousands of the devices for both government agencies and private companies, but probably not for individual use -- if you know how much 125 pounds of neodymium magnets cost, you'll know why.[Via Digital World Tokyo]
