mY rAndOm StuFF

Leave it to those ambitious, young grad students to show us the objects of our desire that we didn’t even realize we desired. Thanks to Jordi Parra, an Interaction Design student at the Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden, we now have a futuristic new music player that lets you listen to Spotify from the comfort of your living room. (Only if your living room is in Europe, however, as Spotify is not yet available in the U.S.) At first glance, the player — which Parra made as part of his final design project in collaboration with Spotify — looks like a digital lovechild of Jonathan Ive and the brilliant Swedes at Ikea. Perhaps the coolest feature of the product’s design is its inclusion of 192 LED nodes, which display volume levels, battery life, and Internet connectivity on the device’s face. Not too shabby for a degree project! How does this bad boy work? The player uses radio frequency identification (or RFID) technology: place one of the colored RFID tags, which contain your playlists, onto the magnetized volume knob, and voila! As soon as the tag sticks to the knob, the antenna/Arduino in the player reads the tag and plays your hot jams. You stop those hot jams by simply removing the tag. Kinda cool, right? Read more at techcrunch.com

Portable fuel cell chargers have been around for years, but each seems to have lasered in on a single important quality thus far, such as a reasonable price, an easy refilling scheme, and a decent amount of power — but never all of the above. Well, it doesn’t look like MyFC’s Powertrekk is the full package either, but it does have a pretty sweet looking case, which holds not only a disposable sodium silicide container to generate the hydrogen gas (which then gets recombined with oxygen in a proton exchange membrane to produce 1000mAh of usable electricity) but also a 1600mAh lithium-ion battery which can provide up to one amp of juice. This way, you’ve got a backup battery if you misplace your cans of fairy dust, and a buffer for the fuel cell too, allowing you to keep those volts in powder or electrochemical form instead of carting around combustable hydrogen — which is always a nice bonus when you think about it. Shame there’s no word on price quite yet, but you can see how it all works in a video after the break. Read more at www.engadget.com

So the story goes that some store-bought Norwegian butter was eaten away to reveal a very special Android-powered surprise at the bottom. It looks to us like the butter could have possibly been packed back in after the fact to create the effect, but even so: if you’re willing to sacrifice a Tattoo in such spectacular fashion, you deserve a little recognition. Read more at www.engadget.com

Geez, it’s been a long weekend of almost incessant Galaxy Tab II teasing, but the time has come: Samsung’s finally releasing the official details of its 10.1-inch, Android Honeycomb tablet to the world. Contrary to the leaks, the tablet is called the Galaxy Tab 10.1 — grabbing its moniker from the screen size, obviously — and like the rest of the upcoming Android 3.0 tablets it’s powered by a dual-core Tegra 2 processor, will be available with 16GB or 32GB of storage, and has a front-facing 2 megapixel camera as well as a 8 megapixel imager around back. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but we’ve got the nitty-gritty too — find specs, full impressions and even some video of the slate in action after the break! Oh, and don’t forget to stop by the galleries below to see the new Tab 10.1 up close and then face off with Sammy’s original Tab, not to mention the Apple iPad. Read more at www.engadget.com

Well, several years after the Air Force certified the C-17 to fly on coal-based synthetic jet fuel, it’s gone and certified the cargo hauler to fly on biofuel. In fact, the Globemaster III is the first Air Force plane to be cleared to fly using “hydroprocessed blended biofuels known as hydrotreated renewable jet fuels” mixed with standard JP-8 jet gas. This comes just under a year after the Navy cleared the F/A-18EF Super Hornet to fly using biofuel. This certification is part of an effort to find an alternative fuel source for all Air Force planes that emits fewer greenhouse gasses than JP-8. The service plans to have the entire fleet of aircraft certified to fly on a50-50 mix of biofuel and JP-8 within the next 22 months. In the last decade, the Air Force certified its fleet to fly using the so called, coal-to-liquids fuels. However, the service abandoned efforts to use coal-based blends operationally after questions arose over how environmentally friendly any fuel based on coal can really be. Government agencies are barred from using any alternative fuels that emit greenhouse gasses than standard petroleum-based fuels. Among the many objectives of the Pentagon’s efforts to operate its vehicle fleets on alternative fuels is to wean the DoD from its dependence on foreign oil. Read more at defensetech.org