There are already a bunch of options for getting yourself rescued from the wilderness (where there are bears that want to eat you). Most of these options are fairly situational… A cell phone is great, but you need reception and batteries. A flare gun is great (and fun!), but it only works once. A signal mirror is great, but you need to have sun. What you really want is something simple, reliable, portable, and effective, which (it turns out) means big inflatable rescue balloon.
The Rescue Balloon not only has a creative name, but comes rolled up around its own little cylinder of helium. If you find yourself not being able to find yourself, simply panic, stop panicking, inflate the balloon, send it up, and wait for rescue. The balloon doesn’t really work at night (maybe a future version might include a little LED or something?), but I imagine it holds onto the helium long enough to function for at least a day or two. Now, if they’d just make the balloon a little bit bigger, maybe it could actually, you know, rescue you.
Oh, and for the record, they’ve had these things for scuba divers for ages… If you surface and can’t see the boat, you inflate a tall skinny balloon to make yourself more visible in the water. Genius!
Realizing that these computers are here to stay, Little Tikes has taken their expertise with building kid-resistant miniature picnic tables and riding toys, and has created the Young Explorer workstation. With a $2,599.99 price tag, the Windows PC with a 160GB hard drive and just 1GB of ram has comparable specs to a netbook, though there’s clearly a tower sticking out the back of the desk. So either you’re paying a premium for the 19-inch LCD display, the included software and all that plastic wrapped around it, or the specs on their website are a little of out of date.
Either way, if you’re worried about the young ones covering your regular PC in peanut butter and/or jelly, the Young Explorer is almost like buying kid insurance for your own gear. Oh, and apparently it also helps kids learn basic computer skills before they even hit school. Now I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s more important to foster a kid’s imagination and encourage them to get outside and play, or just get them used to cubicle life at a young age.
This NEC TurboExpress unboxing video, by Pcenginefx, puts every other unboxing video ever created to shame. Of course if shallow depth of field, and amazingly ahead of their time handheld gaming systems aren’t your thing, you probably won’t enjoy it. But if more iPad unboxing videos looked like this, I wouldn’t be sick to death of them already!
Not long ago we received in the SFX Evo from Splitfish for the PS3 and Windows PC. After spending some time with the Evo I will admit that the controller did grow on me. In the beginning I felt a little overwhelmed by the initial setup required to use some of the functionality such as the Programmed Motion Over-ride (pMo), motion controls. Also I was a little put off by the 6 AAA battery requirement, but after a quick trip to the local pharmacy and a little practice I found that I was quickly able to enjoy the perks provided by the Evo.
The individual controllers themselves are also a little big, but I have large hands and they felt very comfortable. Someone with smaller hands might not feel quite the same way. The motion control feels very tight and the sensitivity is adjustable on the fly with the flick of your thumb. Generally I found it most comfortable to turn on the motion to the right chuck and let it control the camera, while turning the pMo on to take over a commonly used control. Another fun function of the Evo is the ability to map up to 12 key combos, quickly allowing you to lay down some major combos in your favorite fighting games.
For years people have been using radar detectors in their cars to avoid expensive speeding tickets. Those are great, but generally won’t protect you from automatic speed cameras and red light cameras. What you need is something with a database of current locations that house such cameras. For that, GPS Angel has released their new V4 Red Light Camera and Speed Camera detector.
The new GPS Angel device uses SiRF Star III GPS technology to pinpoint your location and run it against a database of known speed trap and red light camera locations. It then uses visual and audible alerts to warn you of them. You can even program it to alert you when you’re speeding through school zones, playgrounds and other high-risk areas where you can get penalized further for speeding.
HP was kind enough to send us an HP Touchsmart 600-1055 to review. They asked us to determine whether their offering could become an “Entertainment Hub”. It’s a lofty goal, one that’s shared by pretty much anyone these days. Microsoft and Sony certainly are trying hard with their Xbox and PS3, but HP’s approach is different. These were their exact words:
[We'd like you] to see if the TouchSmart PC is deserving of being called an “Entertainment Hub.” In addition to serving as a touch-enabled desktop PC, the TouchSmart can stand in place of several entertainment devices like a DVD player, TV, Blu-Ray Player, etc. It also has an HD widescreen display, TV Tuner, game console connectivity and several new built-for-touch applications from Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Rhapsody and more.
In order to do this, we’re going to split up this review into three pieces. Today, we look at the Touchsmart 600 being used as a TV/PVR, in Part 2 as a DVD/BluRay player and Part 3 as a CD/Digital Music Player/Stereo player.
Don’t feel like reading or watching my video? No problem, here’s the verdict: as a TV to play Xbox in HD on, without HDMI? Not so much. As a TV and a PVR? Absolutely.
Read on for all the details and to find out how to win your own!
You know what’s better than spending thousands of dollars to remedy the problems that have led to cracks appearing on the walls of your home? Spending just $6 on a sheet of stickers that will turn those cracks into random pieces of art. I mean who feels like worrying that their home is on the verge of collapse when they can look at butterflies and doves? And I imagine they’re just as effective at dealing with that giant crack in your windshield too.
Canon just announced a couple of new prosumer video cameras that record directly to compact flash memory cards, but those already using the company’s HDV and Mini-DV camcorders don’t have to feel like they’ve been left out of the solid state storage party. Canon’s also announced the FS-CF and FS-CF Pro solid state video recorders which are actually made by a company called Focus Enhancements. They connect to the camera via its firewire port and are able to record up to 2.2 hours of 1080i HDV footage to a single 32GB CF card. Using a 64GB card will of course double your record time, but I assume Canon’s using a 32GB card as an example since the device’s removable Li-on battery pack is only good for about 3 hours of recording.
The FS-CF and FS-CF Pro both support HD framerates ranging from 24P up to 60i in both QT, M2T and MXF OP Atom formats, but can also generate MPEG-4 proxies which are easier to share online. You’re also able to review recorded footage on the device’s color back-lit LCD display, and browse through a thumbnail gallery of your videos using a convenient scroll wheel. (The Pro version also provides a web interface.) And when it’s time to edit, you can either remove the CF card in order to transfer the footage to your NLE, or simply connect the device to your workstation via USB 2 and use it as an external drive. The FS-CF and FS-CF Pro are expected to be available sometime in late April for $995 and $1,295 respectively.
Over 3 billion people use solid fuel (like wood) for cooking. This is not ideal, since the toxic smoke from indoor cooking fires kills 1.6 million people per year while wafting up into the atmosphere where it does all kinds of other bad stuff (in total, it’s about 50% of the nastiness of CO2 when it comes to climate change).
What do you care about all this? You don’t! What you do care about (maybe) is sweet camping gear. The BioLite stove is portable, efficient, and powerful. It burns pretty much anything you care to toss into it, uses only half as much fuel as a regular fire, and boils water significantly faster than a conventional petroleum fuel camp stove. The reason that we’re posting about it, though, is that what makes the stove perform so well is an attached thermoelectric generator. The generator uses heat from the fire to power a small fan that improves combustion efficiency by blowing air back into the stove, and there’s enough energy left over (1-2 watts) to charge portable electronics through a USB port.
The BioLite camp stove is a bit bulkier than some other camp stoves and weighs a pound and a half, but you don’t have to carry fuel, and unless you’re camping in the arctic, you probably won’t run out of stuff to burn. It should be available sometime this year for around $80.
Incidentally, the BioLite stove also reduces smoke emissions by 95%, which saves lives and the environment. But, you know, whatever… (There’s a larger version for the developing world for $50).
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