It has only been about eight months since the first stories about the keychain-sized Raspberry Pi computer appeared, but word came last week that the finalized device has gone into production and will be available next month for the price point of $35. That’s a little bit more than the originally hoped-for price of $25, but a model with no network adapter and less memory will be available at that price point later this year. As general purpose computers are giving way to locked-down devices with embedded computers, the availability of very-low-end computers that still have enough horsepower to run Linux and be used for all sorts of purposes, is not unimportant.

So what goes better with a tiny computer than a 1 terabyte flash drive? How about if that flash drive is on your Swiss Army knife? Though everybody complained that there were no big announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Victorinox, the maker of Swiss Army knives, did announce that they were upgrading their knife-with-a-flash-drive to include the “world’s smallest high-capacity SSD”. There’s even a “flight-friendly” option so you can pass through airport security…although if the TSA catches you packing a tiny computer AND a big storage device, they’re likely to decide you’re a terrorist anyway.

If you liked the post about the cute Boxie and Tweenbot robots the other day, you might get a kick out of this story about a Stupid And Useless Robot competition that was held a couple of years ago. The Japanese electronic toy company Maywa Denki sponsors an annual competition to see who can come up with the stupidest and least useful robots (or at least they used to…from their website it doesn’t look like they’ve had one in a few years). The linked Weird Asia News article includes a video from 2008 showing some of the entries in that year’s contest. Some of them, like the cat-licking robot are pretty funny.

Fast Company posted this story about MIT Media Lab grad student Alexander Reben’s project to design a simple robot that relies on cuteness to get people to interact with it and help it. The original plan, according to Reben, was to construct the finished robot out of white plastic, but people were turned off by the plastic and found a robot made out of cardboard boxes to be much cuter. Which, OMFG, I totally lost it when I watched the video and heard the robot manipulating..asking people for help.

Me, watching the video of Boxie

As a couple of the commenters in the FC story note, the idea is pretty much blatantly ripped off from a project by artist/designer Kacie Kinzer called Tweenbots. Kinzer made up some simple robots that she set loose in New York City to see if people would engage with them and help them, and she got some very interesting results not very unlike Reben’s. Be sure to watch the video on the Tweenbots site to compare to the Boxie video. Reben’s Boxie robot turns the kawaii dial up to 11 by relying on the oversized robot head and eyes and the childlike voice, but the resemblance to the Tweenbots is uncanny.

For contrast, consider this project from Martin Buss at the Technical University of Munich. Buss’s team constructed a much larger and more sophisticated robot complete with complex 3-D imaging and speech recognition. The robot’s mission was to get from Point A to Point B using only directions provided by random encounters with people on the street. It used an algorithm to analyze directions from spoken words and body gestures, but still relied on empathetic reactions from people to solicit interactions. And even though the robot wasn’t as cute as a frickin’ kitten, it still got people to help, and only got one set of wrong directions. Of course, it may have helped to be in Germany, where people are 1. dazzled by engineering and 2. more conformist about social rules like giving directions. A big ugly robot like that in New York probably would have been jacked for its tires and set on fire in a trash can in about three minutes.

Larger version here

When Bluetooth was originally conceived back in the late 1990s, it was expected that the most likely use of the technology would be for small peripherals like keyboards and mice as a way to eliminate cable spaghetti on the desktop. But early Bluetooth devices weren’t very good, and so the technology lost out to IR and low-power RF on the desktop. The niche that Bluetooth finally won was the mobile phone headset. But maybe Bluetooth has one more shot at being the preferred protocol for keyboards and mice: chipmaker Broadcom has devised a Bluetooth chipset that uses such little electricity that a keyboard could run on a single pair of AA batteries for 10 years.

The average downstream speed for broadband connections in the United States is a paltry 3.9 Mbps, but earlier this year ARRIS, one of the companies that provides cable modems to the broadband service providers, demonstrated a fiber optic node that was capable of up to 4.5 Gbps throughput. The demo was intended to show off the capacity of the fiber network more than any particular device, but it’s nice to dream of a day when American broadband might not come through a beanblower.

Tangentially related, one of the reasons broadband providers might want to be able to offer all that bandwidth is because of the steady drain of cable television customers to all-online video. Contributing to that process: set-top box maker Boxee is rolling out an HDTV broadcast signal receiver that plugs into their box as a dongle, allowing customers to pick up all their local television station HD signals over the air and view them through the Boxee device. Until the day comes that local stations shrivel up and blow away, having access to them will continue to be a significant plus for cable TV. Frankly, though, this Boxee thing really just makes me all the more curious to see if the rumored Apple Television will really happen.

Fast Company reports that a comapny called Tribogenics is working on a hand-held x-ray scanner that somewhat resembles both in form and function a tricorder. The technology behind it stems from the discovery that x-rays can be generated by static electricity, making it much easier to produce them without the high-voltage equipment most hospitals use. The lower-power x-rays also significantly reduce the radiation exposure risk to anyone who operates the equipment. No commercial products yet, but this promises to be a genuinely disruptive technology when it does hit the market.

I wonder if they’ll submit it for the Tricorder Prize competition.

It’s interesting to note that we use just a little bit less energy now than we did 40 years ago, but the real takeaway is to see how much of that energy use comes from electronic devices. Electronics are huge energy vampires, drawing power even when not in use. This blog mentions a new TV from LG that reduces energy consumption over its predecessor model by 75%, and this blog talks about a new TV from Toshiba that uses no power at all in standby mode, using capacitors instead to retain enough power to keep the “instant-on” function. So maybe we’ll see that purple pie slice get smaller and household electrical footprint go down in the not-so-distant future.

Via Singularity Hub comes word that Square, the smartphone credit card swiper, is going to be sold at Wal-Mart. The device has been available through other electronics retailers for a while, but, as with everything else in retail, once WallyWorld gets its hands on something, it goes to a whole new level. Square makes it easy for almost anyone to accept credit card payments. You don’t even need to be a business to use their service, and they charge less than other credit card processors. Making the readers available through the world’s largest retailer is a brilliant move to grab a big share of that market.

The Register says that the end of the road is officially in sight for music CDs. According to their report, the record labels plan to stop issuing albums in CD format by the end of 2012, moving to all-digital-download distribution. Unquestionably this has been an inevitability for years, but I was surprised to learn from this story that they still sell so many more CDs than downloads even at this point. Of course, part of that may be because so many people don’t BUY digital music.

Also totally over: 3D. Not just 3DTV, which never even got off the ground in the first place, but the bloom is off the rose for 3D movies too. In the end, 3D has failed AGAIN for the same reasons it has failed every other time: it’s expensive, it doesn’t work all that well, it gives people a headache, and the content sucks donkey balls. To me, the bigger surprise was that anyone really thought this time would be any different.

This may be a little hard to read, so here’s a bigger version. It’s a chart showing what people do with their smartphones. Notice anything missing?

It was just a month ago when last we looked in on Google TV and discovered that it was selling so poorly that returns were actually outnumbering sales. The failure of Logitech’s Google TV-based product “Revue” actually cost the CEO his job.

Now, when Google fucks up with one of their half-baked software ideas like Google Wave and Google Buzz, they usually give up and fold the tent, but this time they are picking up the tent and taking it somewhere else. To Merry Olde England, in fact, because, heaven knows, NOBODY in England has had a chance to read about this turkey on the Internet (or, as they spell it in Britain, the Intre-Net). As this Fast Company story from earlier this week says, many of the features that Google TV offers are already familiar to British television viewers who have participated in the several interactive television experiments that the BBC has engaged in, so they may not be impressed by the “enhancements”. Given the decided lack of enthusiasm on this side of the pond, I wouldn’t put all my quid on it doing any better in Blighty.

It sounds like a dumb blonde joke or a post from Not Always Right.com: just hold up your credit card in front of your webcam to pay for something online!

Except apparently it’s not a joke anymore. TechCrunch reports that a startup called Jumio has launched a plugin for WordPress that does exactly that. The guy who got screwed over by Mark Zuckerberg is one of the angel investors, and hopefully THIS TIME he remembered to have a lawyer read his contract.

I’m still not 100% sure this isn’t just a really, really late April Fool’s joke. But at least I *do* know this isn’t how you copy that file on your screen: