This is a radio that sneezes. Once every six months, it take a deep breath, and expels all of its frustration with your horrible taste in music along with the pent-up dust that’s been accumulating on its microprocessors. This prolongs the life of the radio, and for other types of electronics, will also keep them running cooler.
Your laptop computer has fans inside of it already, and as you may have noticed (for your computer’s sake, I hope you’ve noticed) while pumping hot air around they also tend to suck up dust. You can artificially sneeze it out with some canned air, but wouldn’t it be so much better if your computer would just have a good sneeze all by itself once in a while?
Sometimes luxury doesn’t come in the form of a diamond-encrusted cellphone or an expensive sportscar. To some people, luxury can be as simple as being fanned with a palm leaf all day, and now such a luxury doesn’t require you to hire anyone besides a handyman to install one of these slick LoftWing ceiling fans. The fabric covered wing is made from high strength carbon fiber rods and its gentle sweeping motion will cool a large room with less electricity that a conventional spinning ceiling fan. A German-made electric motor quietly powers the fan’s mechanism (which is machined from lightweight 6061 aircraft aluminum) and the wing is available in custom colors to match an existing motif.
Instead of lugging around a separate box for capturing HD/2K streams off of a digital video camera, the makers of the Cinedeck decided to incorporate that functionality into a playback monitor that can still be mounted on the camera itself. Via its HDSDI or HDMI inputs the device captures editable, platform agnostic, 10-bit 4:2:2 or 12-bit 4:4:4 CineForm digital intermediaries in MOV or AVI wrappers, MPG2 MXF, or whatever codec you happen to prefer.
Footage is captured to solid state hard drives for added security and reliability, and the 3 1/2-inch thick recorder is essentially a compact PC powered by an Intel Core2 Extreme quad qx9300 processor, allowing you to install and use your favorite Windows-based NLE editing software with a dual-boot OS option. Now you’re probably thinking to yourself that the Cinedeck seems targeted at professional cinematographers and videographers and probably comes with a professional-grade price tag, but just keep in mind that your $7,995 investment doesn’t cost money, it makes money!
I admire what SUCK UK is trying to do here with these pre-doodled pads of sticky notes for the non-artistically inclined, but half the joy of opening a fresh pad of stickies is knowing you’ve got a blank canvas for whatever kung-fu fight you can imagine, no matter how crappy your stick-men fighters might look. It’s like getting a brand new copy of The Catcher In The Rye in high school and finding it’s already got an animation of an awesome motorcycle jump inside. That and they’re $3+ a pop, with 3 animation styles to choose from.
If you’ve never read The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’d suggest picking it up. No, watching the movie definitely doesn’t count. One of the coolest ideas (of which there were many) in the book was the Babel Fish. It was a fish that was inserted into your ear, and magically translated any spoken language into one that you would understand. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Yahoo has a text translation service that shares the name.
So why am I babbling about the Babel Fish today? Because it would seem that Google is working on a bit of technology that will work in a similar way (but thankfully without inserting a fish in your ear). Their new speech-to-speech translator will take a person’s words and translate them on-the-fly while on their phone. The software would be installed on the speaker’s end, so that it can adapt over time to the person’s individual voice and speaking patterns, thus resulting in a better translation.
It apparently wasn’t important enough to make the announcement roster during Samsung’s CES press conference, but the TicToc was on display at their booth and is a clever alternative to Apple’s iPod Shuffle. A built-in motion sensor makes switching tracks as easy as shaking the player, and it’s smart enough to cue up a slow song if shaken slowly, or a fast one if shaken vigorously, should you so desire.
On one end there’s a large button that’s used to power the TicToc on and off, but it’s also used, in conjunction with gravity, to adjust the volume. Hold the button with the player upside down and the volume will decrease, and vice versa. To be honest the gimmick actually seems like kind of a pain to use, but I’m sure it will appeal to the player’s target demographic which is somewhere in the tweens.
According to reps at their booth, the Samsung TicToc will be available later this year in 2 and 4GB capacities supporting MP3, WMA, OGG and FLAC audio formats with 12 hours of battery life. I’m going to assume it also comes with the syncing cradle pictured above, though the designer plastic sleeves used to customize the player’s appearance will be sold separately.
In a totally obvious move that has only taken years to implement (thanks Apple!), ZoomMediaPlus has released an SD card adapter for the docking port on iPhones and iPod Touches that allows you to transfer content between an SD card and the device. This is a useful accessory for a whole bunch of reasons… Carry it along with your digital camera to be able to view and upload pictures on the fly, for example. Or stuff a bunch of movies onto a big SD card for traveling. Using the zoomIt app, you can transfer files in both directions, which gives you the option of bypassing iTunes’ ludicrously draconian file sharing restrictions.
Personally, I hate iTunes. It’s slow, it’s bloated, and it makes it exceptionally difficult to do even the most basic things. I’d love to use the zoomIt’s accessory to be able to transfer, say, a couple songs onto my iPhone without having to suffer through iTunes. So obviously, the big outstanding is going to be file compatibility. The zoomIt website says that you can “view, listen to, and share all of your photos, music, video and files” which also includes PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and PDF files. If this works as advertised, I’d be more than willing to pay $50 (with a $10 pre-order discount) not to have to rely on iTunes ever again. Available in April.
Today Openmoko announced the availability of the Spring 2010 software update for their WikiReader device. In addition to now including math equations which are rendered as crisp bitmap images, and updates to its database of 3+ million Wikipedia articles, the Spring 2010 update also improves the on-screen keyboard with animated key presses similar to the iPhone, fluid scrolling and a much needed, and much appreciated, back button for returning to previously searched articles. WikiReader owners can download the update for free, but if you’re less tech-savvy there’s a yearly subscription service which includes two pre-loaded microSD cards for $29.
And look for our review of the WikiReader, with the updated software, in the coming weeks.
The first thing you probably said to yourself after seeing the MotKey was, “Wait a minute, didn’t LaCie already release a key-shaped USB flash drive?” And the answer to that of course would be yes. But LaCie’s keys feature slimmer form factors, stainless steel finishes and larger capacities. But what the MotKey has going for it is a rubberized finish and a design making it look more like a key to your car, perfect if that’s a feature at the top of your flash drive wish list. It supports Windows, Macs and Linux systems and presumably any other OS or device that claims flash-drive compatibility, and is available in a 4GB version for $14.95 or an 8GB version for $24.95.
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