The era of USB 3.0 will soon be upon us. Devices are slowly being talked about, and compatible motherboards being announced. Of course unless you’re planning on building a new machine in the near future, you’ll either have to live with your old 2.0 ports, or buy an add-on card. Asus has announced such a card that not only gives you two of the latest USB ports, but also a pair of SATA 6.0 ports.
The card allows you to experience the full power of both new standards, provided you have a free PCI-E port on your motherboard. Sure, it’s probably still a little early to really start thinking about USB 3.0, but this is a case where I really don’t see an issue with it. The card is only $30 (USB 2.0 cards were at least twice as much when it came out) and you’re going to get SATA 6.0 ports to boot. According to Asus, the card will be out “soon.”
If you do any kind of computer graphics, animation or design work on a daily basis there’s a good chance you already use a Wacom tablet. But while that Intuos or Cintiq (you lucky bastard) might be ideal for your workstation, their size makes them not so ideal when you’re on the go, working on a laptop, or anywhere with limited space. And it’s those times when Wacom’s more affordable Bamboo line really shines.
Not only does their compact size make them easy to stash in a laptop bag, but they provide similar functionality to their larger counterparts for a lot less money. And they’re the first Wacom tablets that can also be used with your fingers, including multi-touch gestures on a Mac or a PC. As someone who’s used a Wacom tablet pretty much every day for the past 7+ years I was curious how the company’s new Bamboo line stacked up against their more professional models. And if you’re curious too, you can find my full review after the jump.
Good news for sedentary sports fans with frustrated aspirations of grandeur. Thanks to the wonders of technology (and UK-based firm Real Time Race) they should now be able to take part in some of the worlds biggest sporting spectacles. Well, kind of.
The basic concept is designed to allow gamers to take a virtual place in real environments and events – all with naught but an internet and web browser enabled device.
Real Time Race says the technology could be applied to “skiing, mountain biking, equine eventing and water sports etc,” but that sounds a bit pants, and fortunately they’ve been focusing on motor racing so far.
Prior to a big race, the track environment will be captured by a Google Streetcar-alike vehicle, which along with 360 degree cameras sports a gizmo on the back which fires lasers all over the place to work out how far away everything is. The data is then processed and makes its way to a browser where it should play something like a conventional video game map.
The (real) cars participating in the race will also be captured, as well as fitted with navigation systems which transmit their position on the track, allowing couch-bound speed freaks to test themselves against the best in the world.
The technology still appears to be in the proof of concept rather than “actually fun” stage, and the car handling and physics are woeful, but it does seem rather promising all the same.
If you can stand the massive and utterly gratuitous use of exclamation marks and apostrophes, you can read more and download a demo here.
I’m always suspicious of anyone who buys nightvision gear and isn’t a member of any official military or law enforcement organization. But I’m sure there’s some legitimate reason why a civilian would need to be able to record video in complete darkness, and that seems to be this camera’s forte.
A ring of IR LEDs around the lens will illuminate your subject no matter how dark it is, and while the paltry 32 MB of storage allows you to record just 2 minutes of 640×480 resolution video, the storage can be upgraded with a 2GB SD card. The camera also works in regular daylight of course, automatically switching to nightvision mode when there isn’t adequate light, and is available from Firebox for ~$113.
It might be specifically designed for kids and the elderly, but the clean design and oversized keypad of the iNO CP09 mobile phone makes me want one for those times when I need to stay in touch, but don’t want a lot of bells and whistles. In addition to the easy to read buttons, the CP09 features a basic, though detailed, monochrome LCD display with an orange backlight, as well as an FM radio with a standard headphone jack on the bottom of the phone. And in the event of an emergency, there’s a dedicated ‘SOS’ button on the back which sounds an alarm and contacts a pre-programmed phone number when pressed.
Nothing goes better with the blues than random computer files, so the FlashHarp miniature harmonica includes a 4GB flash drive with a USB connector hanging off one end. It was actually created to provide a convenient way to deliver harmonica lesson videos for those wanting to learn to play, and it’s available from Etsy seller ‘BackyardBrand’ for $54.95.
There are a number of reasons why a person might want to jailbreak their iPhone. This list includes data tethering, using it on another carrier and running unauthorized apps. Of course if you aren’t careful, you could leave your device vulnerable to a rather simple attack. Recently a number of people discovered a rather troubling message on their jailbroken phones, informing them that they had indeed been hacked.
The message, seen to the right, was left on a number of people’s phones with a link to the hacker’s website. Originally the hacker was asking for €5 in exchange for a fix, though he has now simply posted the fix on his site. So how did he pull it off? It’s simple really.
He used port scanning on the T-Mobile network (in the Netherlands) to find iPhones running SSH. This is something generally necessary when jailbreaking an iPhone. Armed with the knowledge that many people don’t bother changing the default password, he was able to gain access to a number of phones. He then changed the wallpaper to make it look as though there was an SMS alert being displayed.
It’s good that the hacker changed his tune and made the fix available for free. It does bring up a very, very valuable point. Regardless of what we’re talking about, be it desktop, phone or server; change the root password!
Printers are this close to becoming obsolete technology. I mean, paper in general is just a terrible idea these days… All kinds of catastrophic things can happen to paper (fire, loss, airplanes, etc.), and not only that, but it can kill you. I do admit that on occasion, having a printer comes in handy, like the few times a year when I need to print a boarding pass or some labels, and this is why the PrintBrush is basically my fantasy printer: it’s small, it’s fast, it’s silent, and 99.9% of the time I can pretend that I don’t actually own a printer at all.
The PrintBrush is a real product, not a concept, and you really do just wave it back and forth over a piece of paper like in the video. It’ll cover a full size sheet of paper at 600 dpi (black and white only) and uses Bluetooth and rechargeable batteries to print without any wires whatsoever. The real beauty of the PrintBrush is that it’ll print on any flat surface you like, meaning that you can print addresses directly onto letters, for example. It even prints on fabric. It works using some kind of crazy accurate optical sensor, sort of like the thing that optical mice use, except way better ’cause it can detect tilt and rotation in addition to translation. Supposedly, the PrintBrush is due out in early 2010 for $199 USD… They have working examples, which is good, and a production plan, which is good, and some dates, which is good, but their last press release is eight months old so as cool as the PrintBrush is, I wouldn’t hold your breath on this one.
The word on the street (meaning Peter Kafka from AllThingsD) is that Apple has been going around TV networks over the last few weeks pitching a $30/month subscription service that would make it possible to watch TV through iTunes. It’s not clear exactly how this would work. For instance, we don’t know whether this would make live programs available live or as a later download, nor whether you’d have access to the same kind of programming that you get currently from cable companies. This of course would depend on how many networks jump on board, a selling task left up to iTunes boss Eddy Cue. Rumor has it
“that if anyone jumps first, it will be Disney (DIS), since CEO Bob Iger has shown a willingness to experiment with Apple and iTunes in the past: In 2005, Disney was the first player to sell its programming on iTunes, via a-la-carte downloads. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest single shareholder, a result of Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Jobs’s Pixar animation studio. Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.”
Whatever happens, Apple’s in a hurry as they’d like to launch this early 2010.
The question is, would you pay $30 for a service like this? Would you ditch your cable company? Everything is moving to the web as it is, so this seems like a natural and perhaps inevitable evolution for broadcast… but is it too ambitious, too soon?
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