First shown at CES 2010 earlier this year (it’s amazing how much you still miss even after wandering the show for 3 days) the Mad Catz wireless litetouch keyboard, which is being sold under the company’s Eclipse brand, is now available with an official MSRP of $129.99. The 2.4GHz wireless keyboard features a touch sensitive panel on the right where you’d normally find the numerical keys, but don’t worry, the numerical keypad is still there, it just appears on the LCD instead. The display can also be toggled between a layout of media playback buttons, or a ‘MyEclipse’ mode with 12 customizable icons that can be used to access oft-visited websites and/or applications.
Just below the touch panel is an integrated trackball with left and right mouse buttons, allowing the keyboard to be used for surfing while splayed out on the couch, or with an HTPC, and the rest of the keys feature a low profile backlight allowing them to also be seen in the dark with minimal drain on the battery. And speaking of the battery, the Eclipse wireless litetouch features an internal rechargeable lithium-ion power source that’s good for about 20 hours of use between charges. Not amazing battery life, but understandable given the keyboard’s fancy LCD panel.
When one sits down to look at motherboards for a new system, there are a lot of things to take into consideration. You have to make sure you’re getting the right socket for your processor, that it’ll accept the right type of RAM, and whether or not you want to mess with integrated graphics. The last one is generally a no-brainer. Unless you’re building a workstation that won’t be doing any gaming or video-intensive work, you’re going to want to slap in a dedicated video card.
Asus is wanting to change this idea, and are taking the first steps by integrating (comparatively) high-end graphics cards into one of their motherboards. This week at Computex they showed off such a board with an integrated 5770 GPU, which can keep pace with most of the latest PC titles. What’s more, is that the board is equipped with a HYDRA chip, which allows you to plug in another graphics card and run them both together, similar to SLI or Crossfire mode.
What looks like an amazing set of speakers on a living room wall actually turns out to be a series of sound dampening foam tiles. The SP-Tiles from Typhonics are designed to pretty much do the same thing as the acoustical tiles you’d find on the walls of recording studios and other sound quality critical venues, but look a bit cooler doing it so you’ll be less apprehensive about using them in your home. They attach to the walls with good old-fashioned double-sided tape and a special wallpaper, which I assume is to protect the wall’s finish if they’re ever removed, and are available for about $54(¥4,935) a piece.
This rather plain looking, oak-framed mirror from Designers Anonymous features a series of LEDs that light-up to form the image of a hanging chandelier when switched on. Now to be quite honest, the fact that you can see the dotted outline of the chandelier in the daytime kind of ruins the effect for me, and given the mirror costs ~$840(£580) I would have preferred if the chandelier was completely invisible until the LEDs were illuminated. But I can be really picky when it comes to light-up mirrors…
I’m afraid there’s not much technical information on how this slick LEGO printer/plotter was created, all I know is that it uses a felt-tip pen and can be printed to directly from b3ta member squirrelfantasy’s Mac. And I’m going to assume the various minifigs, horses and LEGO palm trees are all vital to its operation.
According to Milhouse: “Perfectly level flying is the supreme challenge of the scale model pilot.” But after you’ve mastered those skills, how do you keep your RC hobby interesting? Well by spying of course! And this lightweight aerial camera from Chinavasion looks like the perfect a highly affordable tool for the job. The camera with mounting bracket weighs just 27 grams, so it shouldn’t affect your plane’s performance or flight time that much, but with a price tag of around $48 just don’t expect to be capturing IMAX caliber footage.
Video is recorded at 640×480 at 25 frames per second, and on a single charge the camera will run continuously for about an hour and a half. Still photos have a bit more resolution at 1280 x 960, and while the lens can be rotated up to 70 degrees, it’s not controlled by a servo so you’ll have to make your adjustments while on the ground. You’ve got 2GBs of built-in memory to play with which should be more than adequate for your average flight, and the camera’s also got a mini-USB port on one end for offloading your videos and photos to a PC.
When I stumbled upon the Tweeting Teakettle a couple of months ago, I thought I’d found the worst possible use for Twitter. I love how companies find new ways to prove me wrong. This time it’s not a small startup company, but a tech giant named Sony who has me convinced that Twitter will somehow bring about the apocalypse. It seems they are putting a good amount of effort into a device that will allow your cat to send tweets.
That ugly, bulky device that you see pictured above is a prototype of their Cat@Log, which will assist your feline friend in telling the world of their eating and napping habits. If you’re wondering why they used a stuffed cat, it’s because you’ll be hard pressed to find a cat that will let you put this thing on them, let alone stand still for a picture once it is on.
While it might look like a brain-bending puzzle, Mia Schmallenbach’s Meeting Knives set actually features a brilliant design allowing four different kitchen knives: a paring knife, a carving knife, a chef’s knife and a filleting knife to all stack inside each other on a single block of steel. The proportions of each knife were apparently determined by the Fibonacci sequence, a term I haven’t heard since my high school computer science classes, but the results are far from looking like they were designed by a mathematician.
And thankfully, this is one of those times when a cool looking product is actually available for sale. The Meeting Knives set is produced by Deglon out of France, and I managed to find an Australian website called Table Direct that is selling the set for about $920. I’ve also found a slightly more affordable version that comes with a wooden base instead, available from Chef Studio Boutique for about $483.
Just because a recording device fits in your pocket doesn’t mean the sound quality has to suck. And the Zoom line of flash-based audio recorders have been proving that with their unique dual microphones in an X/Y configuration which capture true stereo sound. The H1 Handy Recorder pictured here (available on July 30) is the latest model in the Zoom line, and with a weight of just 2 oz. and a price tag of $99, it also happens to be the smallest and cheapest.
It can capture up to 24-bit/96 kHz stereo recordings to its included 2GB microSD card, but supports cards up to 32GB in size allowing for over 50 hours of recording time if needed. It also runs off of a single AA battery which provides up to 10 hours of continuous operation, though an AC adapter can also be used if you’re in for a particularly epic scrum. Given the smaller LCD display I like that a number of the H1′s functions have been removed from the menu system and assigned to a dedicated series of buttons along the sides of the recorder. It not only makes them quicker to access, but also allows you to build-up muscle memory so you can press the right buttons without even having to look.
Related Tags: Hardware, Keyboards
Permalink | 
No Comments
