Communications Technology

News Brews: Turn Depressing World Affairs Into Coffee

#betterthanharbucks

I like coffee. I like RSS. So naturally, I dig Benjamin Brown’s News Brews project, which crawls through RSS feeds and takes “the relative frequency at which different coffee-growing regions are mentioned” to determine their respective bean proportion in the blend. More »

Clickity-Clackity Steampunk RSS Reader

#pcs

Forget Google Reader or Feed Demon for your RSS needs, this modified telegraph sounder taps out RSS feeds using MagpieRSS PHP script to grab them and Morse2LED to make them tappable. It’s a little useless if you don’t know Morse Code, but it looks pretty sweet next to its steampunk keyboard counterpart. – Matt Buchanan More »

Apple TV Hack Brings RSS Feeds to Your Living Room

#homeentertainment

So now that Apple TV has gotten the mandatory Mario hack, the guys at twenty08 are giving Apple’s slim box another feature, the ability to read basic RSS1.x/2.x feeds. Once downloaded, the plug-in gives Apple’s box an extra channel, letting it display your favorite news headlines. ATOM feeds and video RSS support are coming soon. With all the new hacks, suddenly that $299 doesn’t seem so bad after all. – Louis Ramirez More »

Samsung SPH-72x Photo Frames: Up To 12-inch With Wi-Fi and RSS, Will Get You …

#gadgets

Later this year, Samsung will release 8- and 12-inch version of their new 800 x 480 pixel 7″ photo frames. They don’t only look like the lost son of an old Apple Cinema Display, but they are also Wi-Fi enabled and will automagically search for PCs with Vista, displaying photos, movies and MP3s stored on the PC via Windows Media Player 11. And images from the Internet, via RSS. More »

Asus ScreenDUO: A Place for Widgets, RSS Feeds and More

#gadgets

These little secondary displays seem to be cropping up lately—in fact, we were mooning over the WidgetStation just yesterday. Now here’s the Asus ScreenDUO, plugging into your USB port, syncing info from that PC, RSS feeds, or even letting you put a widget or two on its tiny screen. There’s no word on pricing or availability yet, but the more of these secondary displays we see, the more we want one sitting right here. – Charlie White More »

First Look at Chumby: the Huggable, Hackable Information Device

#gadgets

Chumby is an information device that, given its developer-approved hackable nature, is destined to become the Furby or Tickle Me Elmo of the gadget/geek world when it’s released en masse in March 2007. The Chumby doesn’t look like much when first plugged, but after registering it on Chumby Industries’ Web site, the possibilities are seemingly endless, thanks to widgets. Nothing more than mini-programs, Chumby’s widgets let you use the little device just the way you want: load up the appropriate widget, and the Wi-Fi-enabled Chumby taps into your Flickr account, displaying your terrific pictures on its 3.5-inch touch screen. Or, why not have it display the latest Google News—nay,Gizmodo!—headlines? More »

See SPOT Supply RSS Feeds

#gadgets

Make Magazine has a detailed—and we mean detailed—HOW-TO on how to get RSS feeds sent to your SPOT watch. I dig SPOT but I think it’s gone stagnant recently. This little hack, however, perks up my flagging SPOT-love slightly. More »