That avalanche of TVs, fridges, iPod docks, and iPod dock fridges that some people like to call IFA 2008 but I call Satan's Hell on Earth, agonized to its end this week. About bloody time. To me, the star of this fair wasn't the Sony ZX1, the Samsung X360 or even Addy's bags, but one now-ancient gadget that saved my life not one, but two times at the show: my good old trusty iPhone.

It all started the first day, during the Sony press conference liveblog. Expecting Wi-Fi around the fair like last year, I opened my laptop and searched for networks to start posting the news as they were announced with text and images, like we usually do. Then it was the first time I realized this IFA was going to suck big time, starting right there: the T-Mobile Wi-Fi network, the one we usually connect to in the show, wasn't available at Sony's hall.

Fuck.

OK. No worries. There's another one, completely open, labeled Sony Event. "Great," I thought, "they are giving us Wi-Fi to work". I tried to connect. Nothing. There was no connection to the internet. Tried to connect again. Nada. Suddenly, the big screen in front of me lighted up:

Bloggers, you have Wi-Fi available. So feel free to blog the event live.

"No we don't, you son of Sir Howard!" Tried again and again and again. Restarted the computer. Some smelly frenchman next to me was getting amused by my desperation, giving me stupid advice about how to connect. I wanted to punch him. On the crotch. As the place was getting full and the event was about to start, I started to panic. I saw people trying to connect like me, also frustrated. It smelt pretty bad. And it wasn't the frenchman. I needed to start blogging in one minute. "OK, last try." No dice.

My only internet device was the iPhone, with its screen keyboard, the one that some people think is useless to actually type. The trick about the iPhone keyboard is that you don't have to try to be precise. Just try to hit the correct letters more or less, and let the prediction do all the work. However, even while I'm a good iPhone typer, doing updates over the slow GPRS, waiting for all our editing system to reload every time I saved, was going to be impossible.

Thankfully, Kit was in Lisbon awake and working. I fired up my AIM client and wrote to him "EMERGNCTT!" Shit. This spelled "d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r-!" Actually, it spelled "desastre!" because I had my spanish keyboard turned on. After I changed the keyboard to US English, I started to write at full speed on the iPhone, with Kit copying and pasting from his AIM screen to the post in Giz's editing system, saving instantly.

The whole process was only adding a couple of seconds of delay to the liveblog, so we were good. And the pictures? Straight from the iPhone camera and sent over email whenever I had a pause to take them. I would just start the camera, shot, send via email, get immediately out, and keep liveblogging via AIM while Mail was uploading the photo. Even the pictures were looking great because I was right next to the well-lit stage. No need for fancy stabilizers. I just held my breath and that was it. We did the same with the Philips press conference and, at the end, everything worked out perfectly.

I know that many other smartphones would have been able to do the same, but this time it was my good old iPhone, with the broken screen, and Jones on the background. The same iPhone that I hated and blamed for taking the worst pictures at the best rock concert ever saved my life at IFA 2008. I guess there's always a yin to every yang. [All IFA 2008 Coverage]

This just in case you didn't get the headline reference:

When we're talking office PC accessories today, there's boring, and then there's Dell boring. Regular boring gets you a quick trip to irrelevancy. Dell boring, on the other hand, gets your product onto the desktops of a million cubicle drones the world over. And that's probably where we'll see these pre-release products from Dell. The safe, non-threatening design reminded TechWareLabs of Logitech, which makes sense given the G3/G5 design cues, but we at Gizmodo practically fell asleep. The LED indicator is pretty, but unless you're a typist into some serious keystroke entry porn, we imagine you can easily hold off on buying these and just use them when they show up at work in a few months. [TechWareLabs]

The CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency are reportedly testing a social-networking site designed for use by analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Last we left Mitsubishi's LaserVue 1080p rear-projection monster, we had size and shape, but price was a mystery. The mystery was solved today, as BitStream discovered the massive HDTV will set you back $7,000 when it ships later this month. There's still no pricing info for the 73-inch LaserVue, which was also revealed in June. The 7k figure is comparable to what manufacturers are asking for similarly sized HDTVs in the space, but this one has frickin' laser beams. And unlike military lasers, these create a feast for your eyes, instead of your stomach. [BitStream via CrunchGear]

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. General David Petraeus, credited with helping staunch violence in Iraq, will hand over command of U.S. forces there to Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno on September 16, a military spokesman said on Sunday.

Another day, another golf cart size, three-wheeled solar-powered car with style ripped from the 1980's. At least with this one, the Solar Taxi, there's a record at stake, as Swiss "adventurer" Louis Palmer is taking the car on a trip across the planet without using a drop of gasoline. He'll be the first to do it, and we're hoping his example will inspire more alternative energy cars (hopefully a few have that elusive fourth wheel). The 35 MPH top speed is going to be a tough sell with us Yanks. Palmer, my man, haven't you heard? Women and men alike get hot and bothered by power and speed.

The Solar Taxi gets its juice from a $5,000 solar panel trailer provided by German company Q-Cells. Weather permitting, the trailer provides the Taxi with 60 miles of oompf. Longer runs are powered by a pair of $15,000 250-lb. recyclable batteries from Zebra Battery. They store energy from the sun and from whatever electrical socket Palmer can find at night (it's just like searching for a socket at a conference, but bigger, and people will still manage to trip awkwardly over the cord).

Altogether, Palmer said the rig gets about a 200 mile range between charges. As of this weekend, Palmer and his crew had traveled 27,000 miles across 28 countries, so that's a lot of stop and go driving—or is that charging?

The trip is scheduled to conclude in December, but Palmer won't be finished just yet. He's also in the middle of planning an 80-day solar powered race around the world for sometime in 2009. [ABC News]

Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung forsees a short future for Blu-ray

Ars Technica is now backtracking from its initial prediction that iTunes 8 won't be a hit in Apple's Let's Rock September 9 event. Not only iTunes 8 will be available then, but they say Apple will also release the iPhone 2.1 update that in theory will fix its huge password security flaw. Jacqui hints that the 2.1 update will have new secret features that are absent from the beta. Repeat with me: COPY PASTE COPY PASTE COPY PASTE. And fix the bloody thing. [Ars Technica]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.According to the company, the GeoEye-1 satellite is the highest resolution commercial satellite orbiting the planet right now. It reached orbit yesterday, but in reality, it's not an ordinary commercial satellite: it's fully controlled by the Department of Defense's U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And two guys named Larry and Sergei.

Part of the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency NextView program, the SUV-sized GeoEye-1 launched yesterday in a Delta II 7326 rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California—without exploding. Hours later, GeoEye's ground station in Norway confirmed that the rocket had delivered its payload right on target. The satellite was alive, fully armed and operational on its 423-mile orbit above the Earth.

Built by General Dynamics, the GeoEye-1 is equipped with a next-generation camera made by ITT. This camera can easily distinguish objects 16 inches long, with 11-bits per pixel color. In other words: this thing can see the color of your shorts. It will be up there, looking at your pants every single day, the time it takes for it to complete one orbit. And it will keep doing that for more than ten years, its expected life.

Of course, there's nothing new here until you notice the huge Google logo on the rocket, signaling the fact that Sergei and Larry own the exclusive rights to the GeoEye-1 images. Yes, no other company will be able to access this information, only Google. And they will be there, available for the public in Google Maps and Google Earth.

But don't fret, tin-foil hatters, because Google won't be able to access the highest resolution images because of US government regulations. Sure, the other guys will, but then again, their big bad satellites can see closer than this one. Still, you can rest safe that your underpants will be safe from public scrutiny. For now. Unless you do like me and keep flashing them around. [GeoEye, Wikipedia, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency via Cnet]

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian workers cut through a railway embankment on Sunday to bring heavy earth-moving equipment to the site of a rock fall which killed at least 31 people in a Cairo shantytown.

We've been kind of laser crazy here at Gizmodo lately, and with good reason: Deployable solid state lasers could be landing in military hands as early as 2009. We simply wish to be at the forefront of the pew pew revolution, with the hope that any burning sensation our writers feel in the near future is the result of an unforgettable night out, not a disgruntled weapons grade laser system operator. But that last little diatribe brings up a good point, specifically in regards to what, exactly, laser warfare is going to look like. Sci-fi tends to glamorize laser weapons (pew pew, you're dead), when in reality the experts say getting "shot" with will probably feel more like napalm (*sizzle sizzle*, protracted death).

Wired's Danger room notes that the U.S. Air Force has effectively shifted away from the instant death scenario as of late, and focuses instead on how long it will take to cook a human with a laser (allegedly, everything is still top secret).

[F]rom what we know, the Air Force considers laser effects on eyes and skin, for the most part. Skin damage is very much easier to achieve than penetration; simply raising skin temperature to (say) 80C/ 180 f to a depth of a couple of millimeters will cause serious blistering (second-third degree burns). If 40% of the body is burned in this way, then the target will be disabled and may die.

[...] So instead of "zap-and-you're-dead" in normal science fiction style, with a hundred kilowatt laser, it's more a matter of spraying the target all over to ensure they're done. The description of the ATL as a "long range blow torch" is probably quite accurate.

I suppose it's fitting that a new slogan for tomorrow's battlefields came from a Colonel: Original recipe, or extra crispy? [Danger Room]

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran will hold its 2009 presidential election on June 12, when conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is widely expected to stand for a second four-year term despite criticism over his economic policies.

Halloween fog machines? Been there, inhaled that. Bubble machines? Still pretty cool, soap in the eye or not. But what if humanity had created a machine that combined the venerable fog machine with bubbles? Interest piqued? Consider it done!

According to the Bubble Fogger's Amazon listing, this marvelous contraption creates fog solution-filled bubbles and casts them out into the Halloween kitsch-filled ether that is your home in October. When the bubbles pop, most likely in your eyes or on stain prone furniture, they become fog. The kit includes both the bubble and fog solution, and will set you back $40. As far as over-priced, short-lived Halloween crap goes, that's kind of a bargain. [Amazon via Random Good Stuff]

It’s a Google block this morning! The GeoEye-1 satellite successfully launched yesterday and will be able take high-resolution shots and distinguish objects on the ground as small as 16 inches. US restrictions will prevent images that sharp on Google, however.

But the search titan does have the exclusive rights among online mapping sites to the GeoEye-1 images, which it will use in its Google Earth and Google Maps offerings. It even got its corporate logo emblazoned on the launch rocket, right below Boeing's.



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TechRadar has an article detailing five jobs at Google that most people don’t know about. It’s not quite the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker but it’s close.

We've interviewed people working for Google in London and Bangalore as well as spoken to the chap responsible for Googlifing the search giant's European offices; you'll even find out what part of the office is made from faux leather leiderhosen! And then there's the chap who founded meditation classes at the company.

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Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google 10 years ago today and there’s plenty of coverage. I linked to a few below so don’t ever say I never gave you anything.

Wired
CBS Video
GigaOm
NYTimes
BBC Video
TechNewsWorld

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