folding

q&a Mad Magazine has been running its back-page satire Fold-In since 1964. What many don't realize is that one man has been the driving artistic force behind every Fold-In since then: Al Jaffee.

Now 91, Jaffee is still painting the Fold-In monthly, and says he has no plans to give it up. It started as a parody of a regular feature called the fold-out in much higher-brow (and higher-profile) publications of the time, and caught the public's attention instantly.

He now has numerous collections and books out, including "Tall Tales," a collection of his syndicated comic strip from the New York Herald-Tribune that had a unique vertical orientation; "The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010"; and a biography by Mary-Lou Weisman called "Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography."

Jaffee hasn't missed an issue since he started, and his work is widely appreciated. In 2006, Stephen Colbert celebrated Jaffee's 85th birthday with the birthday cake equivalent of a Fold-In.

Since the Fold-In in this month's Mad answers the question, "What's the only thing unavailable on the Internet?" we figured we'd turn the tables on Jaffee and ask him some far less humorous questions of our own. … Read more

First a confession: a lot of audiophile speakers can't rock out. They're "voiced" to sound best with acoustic jazz or classical music. Nothing wrong with that, but when you want to party some of them can't cut loose. The new GoldenEar Technology Aon 3 is very much an audiophile-oriented design, so sure, it sounded clear and clean playing Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue."

But what really made me sit up and take notice was the way the Aon 3 knocked out the Drive-By Truckers "Go-Go Boots" album. This CD sounds like … Read more

Compact cars take on a new meaning when they can literally fold themselves.

Spain will begin producing an electric car next year that's about the same size as a Smart, but can collapse itself into an even smaller footprint when parked. The Hiriko, which means "urban car" in Basque, is the brainchild of researchers at the MIT Media Lab, and is designed to meet the needs of increasingly congested and parking challenged urban centers.

Seven Basque design firms worked with MIT to bring the prototype to production and turn it into a 100-inch EV that seats two. … Read more

Typing on an iPad is the kind of thing you can get used to, and even tolerate, but let's face it: nobody prefers an onscreen keyboard to a real one.

Accessory makers have tried coming to the rescue, many of them with decent products--most notably the CruxCase Crux360 keyboard/case and Logitech's Keyboard Case by ZAGG. But because they were necessarily no wider than the iPad itself, they had to make their keys fairly narrow--and that leads to cramped typing.

Logitech's new Fold-Up Keyboard for iPad 2 (and only iPad 2) leverages a clever design to provide a full-height, full-width set of keys that's no different than the desktop keyboard I'm typing on right now. Ladies and gentlemen, your QWERTY ship has come in.… Read more

The latest telescoping steering wheels extend and retract to make it more comfortable for people of all sizes to drive, but that doesn't help much if you have trouble getting behind the wheel in the first place. To make it easier to enter and exit vehicles, TRW Automotive is developing a collapsible steering wheel that retracts entirely into the dashboard.

Renderings of the new dashboard technology show a steering wheel with two handles attached to the steering column. When not in use, the handles collapse around the column, which retracts into the dashboard. By opening up more space in the cockpit, the retractable steering wheel should make it easier for people to get in and out of automobiles. The steering wheel automatically deploys into driving position when the driver starts the car, and like adjustable seats with memory options, the steering wheel position preference can be saved. … Read more

Just about every speaker you've ever heard uses cone woofers and dome tweeters that feature a coil of wire in a magnetic field that pushes the diaphragm back and forth to make sound. Lots of great audiophile-grade speakers use conventional drivers of this type.

Flat electrostatic panel speakers work on a completely different design principle. These speakers use a superthin, but large, surface area diaphragm, coated with a conductive material sandwiched between two electrically conductive grids.

Electrostatic speakers produce levels of distortion one to two orders of magnitude lower than conventional cone drivers in a box. Electrostatic speakers' clarity is extraordinary. The big downside is high cost, but electrostatic speakers have been popular with audiophiles for many years.

MartinLogan is America's best-known manufacturer of electrostatic speakers. I've heard previous generations of the company's speakers many times, and was consistently impressed by their sound. Its all-new ElectroMotion series of speakers will feature electrostatic and MartinLogan's proprietary Folded Motion drivers. … Read more

On those occasions when you have to carry your electric bike, instead of the bike carrying you, it certainly can't hurt for the two-wheeler to fold up nice and neat.

With this in mind, we give you the VeloMini fold-and-carry electric bike from ELV Motors, released Wednesday.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company already has a significant lineup of electric bikes, scooters, and hybrid motorcycles. The VeloMini adds to the array a 32-pound electric bike that reaches a top speed of 12 miles per hour.

The lithium-ion battery that powers the VeloMini gives the bike a range of about … Read more

If you like the basic concept of Chatroulette--video chatting with random strangers--but are tired of clicking "next," "next," "next," and men behaving lewdly, a start-up called ChatImprov says it has an alternative.

ChatImprov, said CEO Lee Lorenzen, is a service that offers video chatting between random strangers, but in a way that is designed to offer participants more engaging, interesting encounters than can usually be found on Chatroulette. Though it hopes to achieve that goal through a series of measures, the most direct is by creating a ratings system called ChatRank.

Simply put, Lorenzen … Read more