Gadgets that can digitally record things you write or draw on paper aren’t new, but Wacom just announced something far above the rest of the pack: the Inkling, which will be available in late September for a retail price of $200. It records an unbelievably nuanced 1024 levels of pressure, lets you write on any paper you want, can store thousands of pages at a time, and connects to your computer via USB to upload the pictures. But it isn’t just the craftsmanship and relatively low price point that’s making me squee like I just fell into a ball pit full of corgis. There’s also this:

You can import your drawing into Adobe Illustrator as a vector file. Frikkin’ vectors! This means that you can bend and tweak the individual strokes of your ink drawing as much as you like. It also means that you could scale up a tiny doodle and print it onto a billboard with no loss in quality. Once done, the resulting files can be opened in Photoshop, Illustrator, Autodesk Sketchbook or Sketchbook Designer on the Mac or PC. And even the case design is clever: The pen sits inside the oversized hinge, and the case itself is the charger (three hours of charging gives eight hours of use). [WIRED]

Now I know how Lonely Island Doctor Who feels. Oh, and there’s video. Of the Wacom Inkling, I mean, not of what I just did. (Well, technically, the latter may exist, but you have to subscribe to see more.)

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Colin Furze wasn’t deterred by an arrest on a firearms charge for his flamethrower scooter, so he went on to break a Guinness World Record by building the world’s fastest mobility scooter. But getting a Guinness World Record is totally like racking up sex offenses in that I don’t want to stop at just one. *rereads analogy* Yep. That’s exactly what I meant to say.

Furze set out to break another record for the world’s longest motorcycle, as seen in the video below. The previous record was held by a motorcycle which was about 46 feet (14 meters) long and traveled about 328 feet (100 meters). Furze’s modified motorbike is 72 feet long and traveled a mile at a top speed of 35 mph.

He was the only one riding at the time, but is planning to reinforce the aluminum frame to hold passengers while in motion. Which would be awesomely safe since he says it’s “impossible to steer” and needs six lane-widths to turn. He built it out of parts from one-and-a-half 125cc mopeds and a lot of aluminum. It takes three people to move the bike, which he says is worth £3,000. That’s either US $5,200 or eleventy billion dollars, depending on what the market did today.

[Sources: DVICE, SayOMG, DailyMail]

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Picture unrelated.

I put the real picture after the jump so as not to spoil the punchline.  That’s why they call me the Spoiler Alert Kid.  (Or it may be because I always yell “Spoiler alert!” right before climax.)

Cool Gear Reviews was sick of unboxing videos which obsess over the packaging of a product and say nothing about its features, making them useless to everyone except the person exited over their new toy, so he made his own unboxing video to show how it’s done.  It was a nice touch that a YouTube commenter left a note in Russian to explain to other Russians that the unboxing videos in our culture are made to “prove that the product was shipped with all the accessories”.  I can’t tell if that’s sarcasm, or if this guy doesn’t realize we make unboxing videos only so we can lord our immense consumer debt over others.

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Last October we wrote about the Panasonic Jungle, a portable gaming system which (it was rumored) didn’t do well during market testing.  Despite setting up a new U.S. subsidiary, Panasonic Cloud Entertainment (PCENT), to handle the development and release of the Jungle, Panasonic is pulling the plug on the whole thing:

“Panasonic decided to suspend further development due to changes in the market and in our own strategic direction,” the company said in a statement. [Reuters via Engadget]

We’re assuming “changes in the market” is code for, “Holy crap, the Sony NGP and Nintendo 3DS are going to kill us in market share”.  Also, “PCENT”?  Pee scent?  For real?  Now that they’ve abandoned the Jungle, “PCENT” can become what it was meant to be: the new rap moniker for R. Kelly.

This fence is not as advertised, sir.

The last time we wrote about invisibility cloaks was when metamaterials were used to conceal all of the visual spectrum except violet.  Now two different research teams have discovered that a much simpler material can be used to cloak objects.  The team at MIT concealed a piece of metal the size of a peppercorn and the team at the University of Birmingham went even larger, concealing a paperclip.  They used two naturally-occurring calcite crystals with opposite crystal orientations:

The researchers constructed their cloaks from two glued-together calcite crystals, which have a convenient optical property called birefringence–that means they can bend a ray of light in two different directions. Then they placed the objects to be concealed in a notch beneath the crystals. [80beats]

The good news is calcite crystals as large as 23 feet long have been found in nature.  The bad news is it only works under one light polarization, meaning — although it works at all angles — the light source has to be aimed dead-on. The picture to the right shows how the calcite crystal setup wor– oh, there’s Waldo!  That cheating bastard.

You might remember the trend of wearable computing, which is exciting to nerds and absolutely no one else, because we don’t need computers touching anything in our pants without articulated arms, er, at all. Well, Reebok is gleefully ignoring that, and going full steam ahead with “wearable computing”.

They’ve cut a deal with John Rogers, a pioneer of bendy computers, and MC10, his startup, in order to make sneakers that can tell you how far you’ve run, shirts that tell you your heart rate, and shorts that glow red whenever you talk to the hot girl at the gym to show your interest.

Here’s our question: what, precisely, will happen when this stuff is inevitably hacked and put on the Internet? There are things our clothes observe that are private, you know.

[ via the joggers at Engadget ]