It’s coming up on three years since my original review of the Nabaztag. In 2006, it was just getting introduced to the US market. It was a new product from France, and the editors of the “I Want That! Tech Toys” show on HGTV approached me to see if I wanted to review it. I said yes, because the concept intrigued me, and I wasn’t disappointed. I thought it was a pretty cool gadget, in spite of the learning curve involved in setting it up.
A few months after being taped, the segment featuring the Nabaztag aired on HGTV. The rabbit did just fine, but I was way too serious. Note to self for the next TV interview: lighten up!
In December of that year, Violet (the makers of the Nabaztag) launched the new Nabaztag:tag, which could read RFID tags, had a built-in motion sensor, and could do a bunch more things. Since then, they’ve been busy improving the Nabaztag experience and introducing new things, like the Mir:ror, an inexpensive RFID reader ($50) that works in conjunction with RFID stamps (they call them ztamp:s) to do all kinds of neat things, like tell you the weather, update your Facebook status automatically, read books to your children, etc.
I have to say the new Nabaztag:tag looks a lot better than my original 1st gen Nabaztag. It has a shiny white finish and a better user interface. It’s probably easier to configure, too. I had some issues getting mine to go on the Internet back when I did the original review, which were thankfully sorted out.
All in all, I’m glad to see a product I reviewed and found cool is still around. Kudos to Violet!
The LG Viewty Smart (LG-GC900) smartphone comes with a touchscreen, 8-megapixel camera, and all the other goodies you’d expect from a late-generation mobile phone, such as a 3-inch WVGA screen with 800×480 pixels of crystal-clear resolution, 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and WiFi, 1½GB of internal memory and up to 32GB of expandable memory, and it is only 12.4mm thick. That’s thinner than a standard sheet of drywall, for those of you familiar with construction. It’s less than ¾ the width of my Nokia N95 smartphone. No pricing information is available yet. LG says the phone will first be available in European markets first.
Available for $130 from Hammacher Schlemmer, this nifty pen records up to 2½ hours of color video at a resolution of 352×288 pixels. It stores the video (AVI format) on its 4GB internal memory, and it interfaces with a computer through its built-in USB connector, which can also be used to recharge its lithium battery by plugging it into an outlet via the included adapter. Best of all, it also writes, and the ink sticks are refillable.
This is a precision-drilled acrylic board, onto which you can install the usual components that go inside a computer, such as a motherboard, video card, power supply, CD-ROM and hard drive. The kick is that everything’s out in the open so it can be easily serviced. Nice concept, but somewhat pricy at $76 bucks, no?
This is only a concept, but if it gets made, it’ll let blind people read books via the device’s special surface, which can change to reproduce Braille letters through electromagnetic impulses. Very cool.
A very clever design for an automatic bird dispenser! The cutting board has pre-drilled holes through which crumbs from your sliced bread fall and collect into a dispenser for your pet bird. Love it!
For $5, you get a cool little top that snaps onto a regular 9-volt battery to give you an instant flashlight. It has an on/off switch and comes with its own 9-volt battery, ready to go.
Here is proof positive that crap can be bought. Apparently it comes in 130g packages.
Alright, it’s not really crap. Well, it is — in Romanian — which translates to carp in English. This happens to be carp roe salad, with onions. Quite tasty, if you’re into that sort of thing.
There’s a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1944, entitled “Brother Brat“. It stars Porky Pig and speaks eloquently about child discipline. In it, Porky becomes the unwitting baby sitter for a Rosie the Riveter type super-woman who’s pulling long shifts at the factory, helping out with the war effort.
When she leaves her brat, Butch, with him, she also hands him a book, which she says always helped her. It happens to be a book on Child Psychology.
Porky takes the offer at face value, and believes the book will really help him. When baby Butch starts acting out, he checks the book for advice.
He soon finds out the book is no good, as he applies the wishy-washy, sound-good nonsense from the book to his real life situation and things go from bad to worse.
By the end of the cartoon, he’s running for his life, with an axe-wielding maniac baby on his tail.
Then Susie the Riveter comes in, notices the mayhem, and asks him if he used the book. Desperate, still running, he screams, “Yes, but it didn’t work!” Then Susie grabs the book and shows Porky how it’s done: “Maybe you didn’t use it right. It always works for me!”
The punchline is obvious, and yet it teaches all of us, to this day, a valuable lesson: sometimes the only thing that works is a spanking. As for child psychology books, I share the opinion of the animators — those books are a bunch of hooey, fit to be printed on toilet paper and used that way. I’m not alone in that sense. Most people shared this opinion when classic cartoons were made. Cartoon studios of all sizes lampooned child psychology books, including Disney.
Spanking has sadly become a tabu practice in this “enlightened” age. If you spank your child now, the state will take it away from you. Surely the state must know what it’s doing, right? Because governments in all developed countries have shown us they manage everything else to a tee, beyond reproach, right? Naturally, we ought to trust what they tell us to do with our children?
I see parents these days, stressed to the breaking point because of children who haven’t been properly disciplined, and they’re afraid to discipline them. They try talking to them, they try to reward them for good behavior, they try timeouts, but seriously, sometimes a child just needs a good spanking. The Bible knows what it’s talking about when it says in Proverbs 13:24: “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” It has the benefit of thousands of years of experience on its side when it gives that advice.
If you’re interested, my father wrote a couple of articles several years ago. One is on the duties of children toward their parents, and the other is on the duties of parents toward their children. The articles are a compilation of verses from various books of the Bible on those topics, and they’re not doom and gloom stuff — they’re thoughtful, fascinating stuff. To make things even more interesting, my father is a psychiatrist who is keenly interested in the proper development of one’s character and personality.
On an unrelated note, thank goodness for Google Video, which indexed the cartoon from Dailymotion! I wouldn’t have been able to provide you with screenshots from the cartoon otherwise, because I couldn’t find it in regular web searches. I don’t have it in my collection, and only saw it a few times on TV, including once on Boomerang recently. I encourage you to watch it.
Raoul Pop 