Gearfuse

“Walnut and Paper Drum Machine.” It sounds like the subject header from some shitty spam e-mail. But thankfully, this DIY project is both faux-meat product-free and very real.

So, here’s what you have to do. Steal a bunch of walnuts from your squirrely forest friends, grab a sheet a paper and a webcam, and head over to download the free drum machine software. Technically, you don’t have to use walnuts, but without them, this wouldn’t be much of a walnut drum machine, now would it?

Link [via] (Thanks Paul!)

If you’re one of the lucky people who own a first-gen PS3 model (back when WiFi wasn’t standard and shit), your system has what’s called an Emotion Engine chip. Think of it as an extra heart for your PS3 that allows you to have a full Playstation 2 inside. Sony removed it a few years back to cut costs and now only a very limited number of titles are supported. To boot, Sony is also selling a lot of PSX games on the Playstation Network, so the incentive to add the EE back into the system is low.

But there is hope. According to a patent filing from last year (December, specifically), Sony is working on a way to compile and decompile the Emotion Engine. This will allow PS2 backwards-compatibility through software emulation, thus keeping us fanboys happier than ever.

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Back when the iPhone 3.0 OS was first announced, one of the biggest features was that applications would feature push notification. Since the iPhone lacks multitasking, this would allow a program to act like your email and push updates/IMs/messages to your phone without it actually being active. Last night, AOL released the OS 3.0 version of AIM and we’re all very excited here at Gearfuse. Push IM is something I’ve longed for, especially since I’m always communicating via AIM. Both the free and paid versions have it and so far, it works pretty well. In the coming weeks, I’d expect to see a lot more push apps available.

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The big question floating around the Webnets today is that AT&T will charge $55 for an iPhone Internet tethering plan. What’s not clear is if this $55 will include the $30 iPhone data plan. If so, it’s not a bad deal. But if AT&T is trying to tack on an additional 55 bucks to customer’s already high bills, that just isn’t going to fly with most people. Either way, those of you who haven’t hacked your iPhone to support tethering will have to wait until the end of summer to find out.

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The above video shows a gentleman loading up a Commodore 64 with some software off an old-ass floppy disk. This C64 software is actually homebrew Twitter software used to send tweets. Believe it or not, you can actually tweet (albeit it very slowly) with it. It’s amazing how you can do so much with a C64 and the C64 Ethernet Card. Too bad I have no interest in learning legacy system programming. I have a hunch you feel the same way.

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This is a move that’s crucial to Microsoft staying a big player. Despite the many faults of its Windows OS, it’s still the most widely used OS in the world. With that comes many virii and up until now, third-party protection has been the only choice, usually through McAffe or Symantec. But now, Microsoft is privately beta testing a new anti-virus tool that will eventually be released free of charge to Windows users. If the tool, currently codenamed “Morro”, works well, companies like Symantec will be forced to act quickly to keep themselves from going under.

It’s a good day to own MSFT stock.

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Dell, HP, Apple and plenty of other computer manufacturers are flipping a shit today. Know why? It’s because China is nothing but a pro-censorship, communist country that shelters its people from truth. Starting next month, all computers going into the country will have to contain software that filters websites that China deems “unhealthy.” News, video and plenty of other websites will now be censored, leaving the Chinese population in the dark about what’s really happening in the world.

The New York Times has an in-depth look at what’s going to happen as a result of this. Be sure to check it out, especially if you’re heading over there anytime soon.

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So. Today was Apple’s WWDC keynote. Phil Schiller delivered it without Jobs. Let’s cut the commentary bullshit out and go straight to the announcements:

iPhone 3GS announced – faster 3G, faster processor, 3-megapixel camera – $199 for 16GB, $299 for a 32GB model. Drops June 19th.

15-inch Macbook Pro line gets SD card slot, built-in battery

Snow Leopard – $29 to upgrade (WOW!) for existing users, $49 family pack, countless UI upgrades, Quicktime X with better editing features, faster, lightweight, concentration on 64-bit apps

TomTom app for GPS. Additional car kit available soon

iPhone OS 3.0 coming soon – free update, features MMS, copy and paste and everything previously discussed

iPhone tethering for everyone except AT&T customers, which is bullshit

P2P file transfer with iPhones

That’s the essentially all the big stuff that got announced today. If you want to know every last goddamned detail, hit up the boys at Gizmodo for their play-by-play.

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Remember the Game Boy Camera? I do very vividly. You could buy an optional printer and print out all these wacky photos that looked like absolute shit. It also had some mini-games and a sequencer for making beats if I recall correctly. Now the camera that made everyone nauseous is making a comeback on the iPhone. Developer Epicore has released a $0.99 app called GB Camera. It emulates the same 2-bit color scheme and should make for some really cool photos now that you can, you know, share them with people instead of letting them rot on your Game Boy.

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You’re running out of hard drive space. You need to install the latest Blizzard title, so you frantically start dragging all your shit to the Trash. All of a sudden, you realize your mother got you an external hard drive for your last birthday and that you need not delete all those pictures of your first cat. In the next incarnation of Mac OS X, you’ll be able to click a button that lets you “put back” the files to their original position. A welcome feature to us lazy Mac users for sure.

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