This amazing Lego mecha is, according to the authoritative Brothers Brick, the first walking Lego mecha that “also boosts aesthetics”. We take that to mean that it actually walks by picking up its feet rather than shuffling along like a burned-out meth-addict.

Either way, the IR-remote controlled bot, named Element Commune, is a fantastic build by Flickr user Legohaulic. Here it is in herky-jerky action:

V2.0 will actually be steerable (this one just stops and starts, “walking” in a straight line), and we particularly like the tiny t-rex arms at the front. We wouldn’t want to climb inside the full-sized versions, though. As Brothers Brothers commenter Kunert says, “That thing would go down like ED-209 in a stairwell.”

Element Commune: LP-11 [FLickr]

Legohaulic’s walking biped revolutionizes mecha building [Brothers Brick]

See Also:

• Real Life Gundam Would Cost $725 Million
• Artist Creates Steampunk-style Wooden Robot, Time Machine, and a …
• 10 Sci-Fi Techs We Could Build If They Weren't So Damn Expensive …
• Stunning Papercraft Transfomer Model was Inspired by Cookies …

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If you have watched too many episodes of Criminal Minds, you probably already have a panic room in your home, ready for when golf-club and baseball-bat wielding psychopaths invade your house. But what of the other place where you spend so much of your time? What if you car plunges down a steep ravine into the rushing waters below, or you flip your ride on its roof and hang, dangling helplessly from the seatbelt while the gasoline drips ever closer to the broken mirror focusing burning sunlight onto the hot asphalt? What then?

You will need the ExiTool, billed as a “seat belt cutter, window breaker, LED flashlight tool”. The ExiTool clips onto your seatbelt and there it stays, holding its steel blade, tungsten window-smashing nubbin and button-cell powered flashlight just where you’ll need it in case of hugely unlikely emergency. Not convinced? This awful video certainly won’t help, but it will make you laugh. It appears almost as a parody, as if a real informercial had been “sweded“:

The ExiTool will be available “soon” for “just” $27.

ExiTool [CRKT]

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Pentax has gone large with the new 645D medium-format DSLR. The 40MP monster has a 33×44mm sensor to fit all those pixels comfortably, and round the back has the DSLR standard-sized screen, a three-inch, 921,000 dot LCD. For a camera of this type the 645D is cheap, at ¥850,000, or $9,400.

Pentax has traditionally offered good cameras at low prices, and the original Pentax 645 film cameras were good entry level bodies for medium-format shooters (although second-hand TLRs were the cheapest way to go). The new 645D looks a lot like the old film body, a cube-shaped box with the protruding handle. In fact, all your old 645 lenses should work.

This camera is about studio work, and you won’t find fancy face-recognition gimmicks. There are still some unusual features, though. Built-in HDR, the choice of SD cards (dual slots) over Compact Flash and an in-camera HDR mode which will combine three images into one.

A size comparison of the 645D sensor next to a full-frame 35mm sensor

The exposure modes are great, and I want them in my camera. Alongside the usual shutter and aperture-priority modes, you get sensitivity-priority mode, which lets you set the ISO and the camera picks shutter speed and aperture. Also included is a shutter/aperture-priority mode, which lets you pick the shutter and aperture settings and tweaks the ISO to fit. Pentax is finally treating ISO as the third exposure variable, something impossible with film but obvious in digital. A gold star for Pentax.

Otherwise, things are conservative but smart. Both the top and rear screens have a tempered glass cover, the viewfinder is big enough to use (and covers 89% o the image), and the body has dust reduction. Sure, $10,000 will buy you an entire DSLR system, complete with multiple bodies, lenses and strobes. Compared to the competition, like Mamiya’s new $20,000 studio camera, it starts to look cheap. Available in Japan in May.

Pentax unveils 40MP 645D medium format DSLR [DP Review]

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Great news for bikers: the nerds at Google have added bicycling directions to Google Maps. It appears right alongside the other options, walking, car or public transit. It doesn’t work everywhere yet – I tried to find a way from my apartment to the local bike-polo court and Google Maps just told me it couldn’t calculate a route.

In San Francisco, though, everything is fine. I plugged in Wired HQ and the nearby Moscone center and got a straight three-block route. Too easy? Fine, what about Wired to Pier 39, tourist central (and home of a surprisingly good crab restaurant)? This, too, shows the same route for bikes and cars, but the alternative routes presented below are different. I guess that you get the most efficient route first, which is usually the same as you’d take in a car, with slightly more pleasant alternatives.

The service is, of course, in beta, and Google is soliciting feedback on the suitability of roads for biking. You can of course still do it the old-fashioned (and somewhat quicker) way: use the walking directions, which ignore road-rules and one-way streets.

Google Maps [Google]

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Warpia’s new Easy Dock could do with a new name and a prettier box, but the promise of the product is an enticing one: rid yourself of (almost) all cable-clutter. The wireless-USB kit consists of a USB stick that plugs into your notebook and a base station that plugs into everything else: your monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse. Apart from hooking your laptop up to the mains once in a while, you never need to snake cables across your clean desk again.

The Easy Dock will be $150 when it ships in a few weeks (we will be testing one out). I’m pretty excited as I have been looking for something like this for a while. Once the drivers are installed (for OS X and Windows), the OS should just see the peripherals as USB devices. But how well does the display work? The specs say that it supports monitors of up to 1400×1050 and will display HD video up to 720p, at a color depth of 32-bits.

We wonder if hard drives can be hooked up, (we’ll test that one out) and just how the display copes with movies and fast-moving games. If it all works as promised, the dock could be great for keeping your desk clear, or it could let you stream movies direct from your laptop to the big screen and speakers. One day, we hope, this tech will just come standard inside every USB device.

Easy Dock [Warpia. thanks, Natalia!]

See Also:

• Imation Ships First Wireless USB Hard Drive
• WiGig Tempts With High-Speed Wireless Data Transfer
• Iogear Announces Wireless Kit for Monitors and Projectors
• WUSB
• Cheap, Home Made Wi-Fi Tether
• Review: Kensington Docking Station Makes Mobile Computing Almost …

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Product: Remix Remote Earbuds

Manufacturer: V-MODA

Wired Rating: 6

V-Moda’s new Remix Remote earbuds are a fender bender at the intersection of form and function. While the design is loud and eye catching the audio impact is fairly negligible.

The black and silver ‘buds fit comfortably in ear and deliver mediocre sound: mids and highs are decent but lows are crappy and there’s little separation. They’re also supposed to invoke the sense of listening to live music. That isn’t quite true; never once did the Remixes fool us into thinking we were in a concert hall. What is true? How well they deflect outside noise. During our testing we completely missed someone shouting at us on the street as we were rocking out to ’90s pop tunes. (Janet Jackson what?!)

The earbuds also double as a hands-free set. There’s a lightweight, built-in remote that lets you easily switch between music and calls with the touch of a button. However, the included plastic supports (for securing the buds to your ears while running) cause the remote to rise to just a few inches below the chin. This proved to be a bit awkward; the remote bangs against your chest if you’re out for a jog.

Call clarity was good on our end, but callers consistently had a hard time hearing what we were saying.

At best the Remixes are a hundred-dollar headphone upgrade — certainly better than the standard issue crud buds Apple doles out with its products. At worst, they’re fancy looking, yet curiously effective, earplugs.

WIRED Want to tune out the rest of the world? Shove these in your ears. Easy to toggle between headphone and hands-free mode.

TIRED We’ve heard better sound from similar priced earbuds. Woeful mic fuzzes the punch line of your awesome jokes.

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We’d be naive to think manufacturers were twiddling their thumbs while Apple pimps out its iPad. Sure enough, there could be as many as 50 tablet devices from competing manufacturers worldwide this year, according to mobile microprocessor company ARM.

In anticipation of the upcoming tablet invasion, ARM has rented out more space at the Computex electronics trade show in Taipei to accommodate the new devices, according to ComputerWorld.

“The first tablet devices will launch in the second quarter by [mobile network] carriers,” said Roy Chen, ARM’s worldwide mobile computing ODM manager, during a press meeting in Taipei. “You’ll see a lot more in the third quarter.”

ARM licenses its microprocessor technologies to many manufacturers for their mobile devices, so we can trust that Chen has some inside knowledge about upcoming tablets. (The iPhone’s processor is ARM-based, for example.)

Chen noted the majority of the tablets will launch in China, but that “companies everywhere” are delivering tablets as well. He didn’t name specific companies. However, in the United States we’re aware of upcoming tablets from HP and Dell. And before the iPad even lands, startup Fusion Garage plans to release its JooJoo tablet.

Wired.com last year predicted that 2010 would be the year of the tablet after hearing from industry sources that several major manufacturers, including Dell and HTC, were planning to launch tablets.

See Also:

• Dell Names Secret ‘Slate’ After Non-Existent Apple Product …
• Would You Buy an iPad? Wired Readers Weigh In
• HP’s Windows 7 Slate Strikes at the iPad
• Why 2010 Will Be the Year of the Tablet
• The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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Quirky’s new crowd-sourced widget, the Cloak, is a rather clever and good-looking iPad case. The rubber and plastic construction goes with the already established book-cover metaphor, and adds a few twists.

We predict a huge market for iPad cases. That may seem obvious, given the amount of protective sheathes out there for iPods and iPhones, but the iPad seem to need a little more coddling than these smaller machines. I’m a strictly commando kind of guy: I slip my gadgets bareback into my pocket, but even I will be buying or making an iPad case. First, it’s bigger, and you can’t reserve a key-free jeans pocket for it. Second, this device begs to be propped up, either for watching movies, typing or just listening to podcasts in the kitchen.

The Cloak’s front cover flips around to the back to prop the iPad up in landscape mode, and when upright, the inside of the same front-cover has a u-shaped plastic kick stand that flips out. The main hinge actually has click-stops, controlled by a button on the spine, which lets you set an angle without the iPad slipping and falling flat.

That’s quite a lot to pack into one case, and the price isn’t bad, either, at $36. As always, you commit to order, the productions lines spin-up when the minimum order is reached and you are charged when the product ships. Hopefully you’ll have yours in time for the April 3rd iPad release.

Cloak [Quirky. Thanks, Tiffany!]

See Also:

• First iPad Stand Steps into View
• Kickster Adds Stand, Handle and Case to iPod Nano
• Powercurl Cord-Winder Makes Magsafe Heatsafe

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MacHeist, an annual Mac software promotion, is nearing the end of its NanoBundle sale. At the last minute, the bundle just added our favorite Twitter app Tweetie.

Other apps in the MacHeist NanoBundle include Flow, an FTP app, Tales of Monkey Island, a five-episode adventure game, and RipIt, a DVD ripping utility, among others. With the retail prices of the eight apps added together, the collection is worth $280 but will cost you $20 as a bundle. A percentage of your purchase goes toward charity.

The standout app to us, of course, is Tweetie, a hugely popular Twitter app that’s normally priced at $20. What’s more, buying the NanoBundle will ensure you a free upgrade to Tweetie 2, due for launch in the next few months. MacHeist customers will also get access to Tweetie 2 beta next month.

Wired.com last year profiled MacHeist, an annual software sale that helps third-party Mac developers gain exposure. The promotion was originally conceived by software developer John Casasanta (above, left), entrepreneur Phillip Ryu and software developer Scott Meinzer. A team of roughly 30 people help create missions, videos and web puzzles to generate buzz for the software promotion.

Developers participating in the sale have the option to take a percentage of the bundle’s overall sales or to accept a flat payment.

“What MacHeist has accomplished is amazing,” Ambrosia president Andrew Welch told Wired.com in 2009. “They’ve created their own national [shopping] holiday for Mac users … like Black Friday.”

As its name implies, the NanoBundle is a mini sale leading to the bigger MacHeist event, which is scheduled for later this year. The NanoBundle sale ends Wednesday.

NanoBundle Page [MacHeist]

See Also:

• MacHeist’s League of Extraordinary Dropouts Reinvents Software …
• MacHeist Is a Bundle of Joy
• Macworld: MacHeist’s Shareware Sales Soar Once Again
• Slideshow: MacHeist Is a Bundle of Joy

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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The first rule of the iPhone developer program is: You do not talk about the iPhone developer program.

Before you create software for the iPhone, Apple demands that you sign away a laundry list of rights, including the ability to sell rejected apps through other channels, the ability to sue Apple for more than $50, and the ability to reverse-engineer or modify the iPhone or its SDK — and even the right to talk about your agreement with Apple.

The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (.pdf) spells out all these requirements and more. Previously secret, the agreement has been acquired and published with the help of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported Monday evening that it gained access to a March 2009 version of the agreement. EFF noticed that NASA had developed an iPhone app, so the cyber-rights foundation then used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the agreement from NASA. The space agency judged that the FOIA trumps the Apple agreement, so they turned the Apple document over to EFF.

The contents of the agreement are hardly surprising, The EFF’s Fred von Lohmann summed up the highlights:

• A ban on public statements, forbidding developers to speak about the agreement.
• Apps made with the iPhone software development kit can only be distributed through the App Store, meaning rejected apps can’t be served through the underground app store Cydia, for instance.
• Apple indemnifies itself against developer liability surpassing $50, meaning if developers get sued, Apple will be liable for no more than $50 in damages.
• No reverse engineering, or enabling others to reverse-engineer, the iPhone SDK.
• No messing with Apple products. That means no apps that enable modifying or hacking Apple products are allowed.
• Apple can “revoke digital certification of any of Your Applications at any time.” No surprise there: Your app can be pulled even if it’s already been approved, which we’ve already seen happen a number of times.

“If Apple’s mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition … than the PC era that came before,” von Lohmann wrote. “It’s frustrating to see Apple, the original pioneer in generative computing, putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads.”

Though the agreement may appear one-sided, Apple’s nondisclosure agreement for developers was more strict when the App Store first opened. Apple imposed a nondisclosure agreement in 2008 forbidding developers to discuss developing for iPhone OS 2.0. Developers were turned off by the NDA, because it stifled them from discussing programming tips with one another. Apple later dropped this part of the nondisclosure agreement, saying its purpose was to protect its intellectual property.

iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (.pdf)

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

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