PS4 Teardown: Beautiful Outside, Tidy Inside

The PS4 has landed and it's great—but what lurks beneath its slick, slanted frame? Fortunately that's not something you need to keep wondering, because iFixit has gone and torn the console down so we can all see the guts within.

In fact, iFixit is carrying out the teardown out live, overnight—that's how excited they are about finding out what's inside the box. So, we'll update this until things are complete but, in the meantime, here are some highlights:

The hard drive user-replaceable (it lurks beneath a simple plastic cover) and is just a standard 2.5-inch SATA drive. Upgrade away, so long as the new drive is no thicker than 9.5 mm and no smaller than 160 GB.On the downside, the PS4 will not support external USB storage.The thing is largely held together with Security Torx screws, so you better get some tools if you need to take the sucker apart.The power supply is rated at an AC Input of 100-240 volts: take it anywhere, it's universal!iFixit found that a potential problems with the HDMI port, similar to that spotted by our bros at Kotaku, where a small metal obstruction in front of the port can stop video output if you're not careful when you first plug in your cable.Weirdly, the PS4's motherboard is installed upside-down (and is very big and very green).Its EMI shielding is tough to remove, but seems to work well as a cheese grater.It has a very big fan—though we already knew that. It's designed to run smarter and quieter than the old PS3.Overall, it's incredibly tidy on the inside.Updating...

[iFixit]

Related The next gen is here! Or half of it, anyway. Sony's PS4 has come in first the haphazard sprint to the new-console finish line. And yeah,… Read…

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às 11:51

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How the hell did they cram an aircraft engine inside this van?

This rather nondescript van is being powered by something much more beastly than your usual pistons: an actual airplane turbine engine. Seriously, over in Russia they crammed a real gas turbine engine inside this van (it fills up the whole van, basically) with gigantic hoses, an humongous fuel tank and a sweet control panel. It's so powerful that it's used to help power planes.

English Russia relayed some details from ZhZhitelya, who documented this monster machine of a van and it's basically used as a generator for smaller planes. These airplane cars allow planes to not use their main engines while on the ground and still provide air conditioning, electricity, etc. to the cabin.

Here's some translated text that explains the purpose of ramming a turbine engine inside a small van:

Look, almost all the aircraft you will see a small hole behind - this nozzle APU. Why not put some engine easier or a bunch of batteries and starter motor in the car?... Now it becomes clear purpose of these hoses and this [van]. The auxiliary power unit may be damaged, or you may need to provide the voltage or quickly warm up the plane after a long winter parking. In these and other cases, the [van] with a gas turbine engine in the cabin to help.

Whatever the reason, what a fun ride.

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às 07:15

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Huge Machines Hurl Artificial Storms Deep Inside This NASA Hangar

The colossal wind tunnels at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have been used for decades not only to test the aerodynamism of planes, but also to subject submarines to simulations of turbulence and drag in aquatic environments.

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Seen in these archival photographs, courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress, the wind tunnels—Langley was home to more than ten—relied on a truly massive system of fans and ventilation ducts, powered by (in one case, seen below) 8-foot rotary blades that could whip up artificial weather in a matter of seconds.

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The photos collected here, all taken from publicly available archives but cropped and touched up for Gizmodo, span decades in the life of the Langley wind tunnels, from the first plane tested there, in 1931, to exterior shots of the facilities from the mid-1990s.

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Surreally, as mentioned above, the tests undertaken included subjecting an Albacore submarine to wind tests, with atmospheric turbulence and full-scale, storm-grade simulated weather standing in for ocean drag. One environment simply replaced another in this strange theater of the elements: a gargantuan chamber in which engineer-sorcerors unleashed imitation storms against model objects.

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Seen from outside, the facilities were like giant iron lungs: a huge nest of pressurized rings in which surrogate weather could be cultivated. In a sense, they held their own compressed version of the sky.

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Inside, on the other hand, it is all film noir and chiaroscuro: long tunnels and claustrophobic scenes of one-point perspective disappear into the distance with miniature humans standing in for signs of scale.

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They are like out-takes from German expressionist cinema or a classic film by Orson Welles: pathetically out-scaled humans, stranded amidst huge mechanical environments, scifi prisons they seem to barely understand.

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The existing architectural documentation gives away little of the extraordinary spatial quality that would ultimately result; they are complicated diagrams, sure, and they are fascinating to look at, but they are hardly memorable, compared to the photographs, and they conjure up little of the extraordinary weirdness of the final structure.

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A few more photos can be found on the Library of Congress website—miraculously, still online even during the government shutdown—including other wind tunnels run by NASA at the Langley location (or just do a search for "wind tunnel").

Before you click over to see more, here are a few more exterior views of the entire Langley site, including one shot straight and center up an interior corridor so scale-less it is like a Modernist cathedral to air, and one or two glimpses of a wind tunnel under construction.

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Thanks to Nick Stango for his help with images!

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às 18:37

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Van Parks, Bubble Emerges, Man Inside

You know what they say about people who live in glass houses—but what about plastic bubbles? For the next ten days, a British artist named Alex Schweder is occupying this teensy inflatable home—that attaches to a van via scissor lift—at the site of Philip Johnson's famous Glass House in the name of art.

For over 50 years, architect Philip Johnson’s Glass House has been a beacon of minimal beauty nestled amongst the idyllic rolling green of New Canaan, Connecticut. The transparent pavilion has views for days—there’s nothing but clear panes standing between inside and out—but the adjacent Brick House is pretty much its polar opposite, with only a few circular windows along one side.

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Now, this new temporary structure entitled Rehearsal Space has been added into the mix. It's part pope-mobile, part Arrested Development stair-car, part David Blaine-suspended-over-London-in-a-Perspex-box, part Tilda Swinton sleeping at MOMA.

Schweder aptly describes his work as “performance architecture,” but that implies a kind of sit-back-and-watch passivity on the part of the viewer/inhabitant. In fact, most of his projects encourage physical participation and a kind of active engagement, whether it’s asking visitors to step onto a massive latticed seesaw or squeeze through a blow-up door frame. In a way, it's just enhancing the basic relationship we have with all the "standard" buildings we interact with everyday, simply by making us consider our surroundings from a new perspective. This piece actually popped up as part of the Denver Biennial of the Americas festival a few months back as a rentable hotel room (for quite a fee).

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In this instance, the effort is part of Glass House director Henry Urbach’s plan to build up the “cultural center” identity of the site, as opposed to it simply being viewed as a museum (though it does already host regular conversations and a pretty extensive events calendar). Schweder’s project is a bit of a precursor to a creative residency program that Urbach hopes to establish in the next few years, as the National Trust for Historic Preservation raises funds to fully rehabilitate and restore Johnson’s lovelies.

The Glass House in all its glory.

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An interior of the Brick House.

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às 23:08

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