My main computer is pretty fast, with a nice overclocked Core 2 Duo, speedy RAM and a kick-ass video card. Unfortunately it does have one piece slowing it down. While my hard drive is SATA (none of that ancient IDE crap here), I’d love to switch it out for a faster SSD drive. My main issue is that the speed gain just doesn’t justify the price. But what if price was no object? Just what could you do with say, 24 top-of-the-line SSD drives? You can open the entire Microsoft Office suite in half a second. You’d have transfer speeds topping out at 2GB. You’d even be able to make the kick-ass video seen above.
I’m a pretty tall person,which has its upsides and downsides. For instance, I don’t need any help getting things off of a high shelf. This also means that people will bug me to get their crap down from high places. When it comes to riding in a car, most of the time the shorter people are kind enough to sit in the back, knowing that I’d have no legroom back there. On the flip side, when I do get stuck in the back seat, it really sucks. Well if you’re the type that gets stuck in the back often, here’s something that might make your trip a little more bearable.
This Portable Car Seat Laptop Tray reminds me a lot of the tray on a child’s highchair. Heck, it even has someplace to set your drink. But the main purpose is to give you someplace nice to set your laptop, portable DVD player, or anything else. It mounts to the back of the seat in front of you, or if you’re extremely daring, the steering wheel. Seriously? A tray that can be mounted to your steering wheel. No, I see nothing bad about that. Nothing at all. Well wherever you’re wanting to mount it, it can be done relatively cheaply, as one of these will only set you back around $14.
There are about a bajillion semi-decent portable media players out there, and most of them are varying shades of “meh.” The ODYS MP X66-NEO (huh?) is no exception. It has a 2.8″ touchscreen, 8 gigs of memory, an FM tuner, does e-books, and has a microSD slot.
Oh, and it has a 1.3 megapixel camera that does stills and video.
Why? Well, because it can, and because the camera makes it different. Does it make it better? Probably not. And for what it does, I’d say the asking price of $125 is a bit steep, unless you desperately need another crappy little camera to carry around in addition to the crappy little camera you probably already have (and probably almost never use) on your cell phone. Hey, you know what else would make an MP3 player stand out from the crowd? A taser. Just you wait, it’s inevitable.
We were introduced to Shapeways and their custom 3D printing at CES this year. Today, they’re showing off a new technique that takes advantage of translucent properties of the 3D material. All you have to do is upload a digital photo, and Shapeways will turn it into what is basically a monochrome depth map and print it out in 3D. The effect is kinda cool, but unless you mount the image with a lamp behind it, the rest of the time it makes pictures of people look more than a little creepy.
Each 3×5 3D print costs between $40 and $50, including global shipping and a 10 day turnaround time.
And speaking of calculators, what better way is there to take advantage of that powerful graphing calculator you bought for university than by installing Bill Nagel’s custom Super Mario game. It’s not a port of any of the actual Super Mario games from Nintendo, but a recreation that includes 13 unique enemies, 64 unique background tiles, fast scrolling, power-ups like a growth mushroom and fire flowers and even a “somewhat-challenging” boss.
The game can be downloaded from ticalc.org, and if you need instructions on how to install it on your own calculator head on over to Brown-Eyed Albino’s Blog for a brief write-up and a link to a YouTube video.
Well, you know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so Sharp must be flattering the hell out of Apple with their new EL-N802 digital solar calculator. Hopefully that body is made out of actual aluminum, and not just plastic painted gray, but for just $25 from Amazon.co.jp, I’m not keeping my hopes up. FYI, it’s also available in an all black and all hot-pink color scheme.
Looks like Romain Jerome’s got a new addition to their Moon Dust-DNA line with this model confusingly called “The Truth About Roswell.” What truth is supposed to be revealed here exactly? That aliens have mastered intergalactic space travel (minus the landing part) but have absolutely no taste when it comes to watch design?
Like previous watches in the Moon Dust-DNA line, ‘The Truth’ features a dial with actual Moon dust and has an alligator leather strap that’s partly woven with fibers from a spacesuit from the International Space Station. But it also includes titanium and steel fragments from the Apollo XI spacecraft in the bezel, as well as rusted steel melted with fragments of the Soyuz spacecraft.
This particular model is limited to just 9 pieces, which will probably put the price tag well above the $15,000 that Romain Jerome was asking for the previous Moon Dust-DNA watch.
Most fake security cameras are pretty easy to spot, and while I think this particular one is a bit too plastic-looking to fool anyone, it does have a couple of features that might actually scare off a potential thief. On the front of the camera, just below the lens, there’s a single red tally light that continually flashes making it seem as if the camera is actively recording, or at the least, is being remotely monitored. But it’s also got a built-in motion sensor with a 6 1/2 foot range that will trigger the camera to pan back and forth for 15 seconds anytime someone passes in front of it. Of course with an LED, a motor and a motion sensor the camera does require 3xAA batteries to operate, so you’ll want to make sure they don’t run out or your clever ruse will be ineffective.
There’s no question that technology plays a big part in modern sports, particularly when an athlete relies on a piece of hardware like a pair of skis. But instead of improving how the skis perform, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are using RFID to improve how a skier’s performance is monitored during training. Typically, coaches and athletes have relied on videos of a run to analyze the weaknesses in a skier’s technique, but that approach lacks concrete data or accurate measurements.
But RFID transmitters attached to the front and back of a pair of skis in conjunction with receivers alongside the slope can be used to continually and accurately measure the position of the skis to within 3 centimeters. So at the end of a run not only do you have empirical data about whether or not a skier has drifted from the ideal path, or if they’re carving and cornering properly, but you can even tell if the skis were parallel to each other.
The new system appears to still be in development right now, and it will need to be perfected to the point where it doesn’t affect a skier’s performance or even drag during a run, but I’m sure down the road it will be responsible for the demise of a few Olympic records.
Related Tags: hard-drive, SSD, Videos
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