Technofart » Smelly News

Exploding Toilets – “The fire would have been just under your buttocks” says company rep

Flatulent One — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:16:40 +0000

Toto, a Japanese manufacturer of high-end toilets with such added features as ambient light, fart killer, pulsating massage spray, power dryer, and MP3 player, have decided to recall 180,000 of their Z-model units after 3 cases of the toilets spontaneously catching fire.

No one has yet been injured, but the potential for serious injury is obvious:

“Fortunately nobody was using the toilets when the fire broke out and there were no injuries,” a company spokesman said.

“The fire would have been just under your buttocks,” she added.

It certainly would have…..

Toto Homepage

Thanks, Gizmodo

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The Ear Scope GXL : You KNOW Someone Is Going To Stick This Up Their Butt

Flatulent One — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 01:31:27 +0000

***Update: there’s a video (at the bottom)

It’s an earscope, i.e. mini-camera on a wand with a fiberoptic link back to an LCD monitor, that is specifically designed for home use by Joe Consumer. The idea is that, for those that want the ultimatly clean ear (i.e. people with OCD like Monk), you can pay $199 (look what I found on ebay!!!) to have the capability to stick the little fiberoptic wand into your ear and watch in real time so that you can pick away every last bit of wax. Now, as the title says, you KNOW that people are going to get this thing, they’re going to initially use it for its prescribed purpose, and then….they’re going to get curious

The above photo shows the unit with the standard viewer, but as I said there’s also a LCD TV that can be attached to the unit so that you can share the MOST intimate parts of ‘you’ with your friends:

Do you have ANY idea what people are going to do with this thing?

Every orifice on the human body will be subjected to this LED-lit camera-probe thing, small children will ‘examine’ the family cat (or dog) and the animal will most certainly NOT be pleased with the free medical care it is receiving, it will end up going inside the Thanksgiving Turkey, the mechanical innards of all sorts of devices that it was never intended to examine, and who knows what else!

I’ve just looked high and low to try and find the video clip of the TV commercial for this thing–if anyone has it please leave a comment with the link and I’ll put it in this post (with credit to whoever found it, of course)!!

***Ah-ha! The public has responded (someone sent this into Engadget):

Thanks to Gizmodo for this one; also, here’s the link to what I think is the original story: here (Japanese site that appears to be advertising it)

Stumble It!

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Most Dugg Stories Ever, or: What I Found When I Searched For ‘the’

Flatulent One — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 06:03:36 +0000

In the process of doing some research for possible future articles that might make the front page of Digg, Reddit, Fark, et al I became curious and wondered: just what are the most dugg stories ever??

Tried searching Digg without entering any search terms, nope wouldn’t let me do it, so I searched for ‘the’, and this is what I got:

(click here to go straight to the search results)

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Windows Vista Rips A Big Smelly One

Flatulent One — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 03:33:58 +0000

This is a nice little blooper from a Microsoft presentation where they’re showing off Vista’s speech recognition capabilities.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scientist Develops Caffeinated Doughnuts – Bagels Are Next

Flatulent One — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 03:14:10 +0000

Dr. Robert Bohannon, a molecular scientist in Durham, North Carolina, has developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods without the bitter taste normally included due to the presence of caffeine–each tasty pastry would contain about as much caffeine as two cups of coffee (can you imagine getting a large cup of coffee and a couple of these doughnuts on accident, thinking they were regular doughnuts? ooops!)

Currently, the jacked-up confections aren’t on the market yet, but Dr. Bohannon has already been approached by Krispy Kreme, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Starbucks.

Thanks to Yahoo! News for this one.

Just out of curiosity, let me ask: who out there would buy these?

Personally, I’m used to getting my caffeine jolt from coffee, and that’s where I think I’d like it to stay,

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Hitler Speaks

Flatulent One — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:06:11 +0000

When soldiers discovered Hitler’s private home movies, in the Berlin bunker where the Nazi leader took his own life, the tantalizing clips they unearthed, featuring leading members of the SS in a more relaxed mode, remained silent for 60 years.

Now, leading edge lip reading software has enabled German experts to re-voice these films and provide us with a chilling insight into Hitlers private world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hitler was not initially a good public speaker, and at an early Party speech he was booed. Ironically, the public speaking coach who helped Hitler transform his public speaking was a Jew.

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The Personal Supercomputer – It’s Here, Yes You Can Buy One

Flatulent One — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 09:18:23 +0000

Having somehow found myself at the Top 500 Supercomputers website, I see an ad on the left for a ‘personal supercomputer’ and immediately think “you have got to be kidding me, no they did not”–out of sheer morbid curiosity, I click.

Yes, they did. A company called ‘Tyan’ makes a computer, they call it a ‘PSC’ for Person Super Computer, the model Typhoon PSC (B2881) which looks like a small cooler or perhaps a pet carrier–it has up to eight AMD Opteron HE processors, 16GB of RAM, up to 4 SATA hard drives, and sucks up to 1400 watts of juice.

Tyan Typhoon PSC (B2881) Homepage

Tyan Typhoon PSC (B2881) Tech Specs

Now, the Typhoon isn’t the only player in the market; there’s also another one that I found (the only other one I could find) called the EdgeXPS 6850 4-way Dual-Core- 6U (XPS-6850), and although it doesn’t bill itself under the catchier title of ‘Personal Super Computer’ like the Typhoon does, that’s essentially what it is. It takes up to four Intel Xeon 3.33GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 3 Terabytes of internal storage. Now, what makes this one particularly fun is the fact that you can go to their website and configure your own, adding on ridiculous amounts of processing power, RAM, storage, etc. and you get to see how high you can make the price go–it starts at a base price of $5,326 and so far I’ve managed to get to $60,120–it’s kinda like a game and surprisingly addicting, anyone who wants to try and beat my $60,120 can do it here:

XPS-6850 Website

So I suppose the question is: would you buy one if you could???

I imagine a lot of people who could, would, simply because…well, it IS pretty cool. Plus, you get to say you have your own ‘Personal Super Computer’–that does sound kinda nifty doesn’t it?

“My supercomputer can pwn your supercomputer!!” Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

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