Devices Site

Posted Feb 19th 2008 12:04PM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Features, HDTV, Home Entertainment
Finally, hd dvd users now have the empirical evidence they’ve been looking for to prove that the universe really is conspiring against them. We figured we’d make ourselves useful over here and give you a list of things you can do with your poor, obsolete HD DVD player — starting with taking it out to dinner, excusing yourself to the bathroom before the check comes… then getting the hell out of there.

Gimmes

• eBay
• Doorstop
• Entertainment center cup-holder
• Destroy it. Office Space style.

Oh, the humanity

1. Mail it to the office of Howard Stringer in protest of Blu-ray’s victory.
2. Plug it into your clothes dryer’s 240-volt outlet. Woops, honey! My bad, guess we have to buy a Blu-ray player now.
3. Finally, replace your Betamax player.
4. Buy the Blu-ray player of your choice, put it in the box, attempt to return it as “defective.”
5. Channel it through Whoopi Goldberg and make some pottery with it.
6. Put a Blu-ray disc in the tray and then call up Toshiba when it doesn’t work. Repeatedly.
7. Put it in a time capsule, just to confuse future generations.
8. Buy a few dozen of ‘em and build a little hut for your Blu-ray player.
9. Lock it alone in a room with a few lethal weapons… let it die honorably.
10. Use it to upscale DVDs, which is all you ever used it for anyways.

Of course, feel free to leave your own suggestions in comments.

This R2-D2 cake might not be able to salvage you from a threatening situation against the Sith, but it is capable of saving you an earful for getting your other half a birthday/anniversary cake late, especially if she is a massive Star Wars fan. Created by master pastry chef Mark Randazzo who hails from Brooklyn’s Mark Joseph Cakes, this edible R2-D2 features his signature domed lid and lots of blue and silver icing that will send any dentist running scared.

It appears that the 2008 Toy Fair in New York has brought out the best in everyone, including Playskool. This year, the famous preschool toy company has unveiled the KOTA, a soft walking Triceratops dinosaur that very little kids can actually ride.

Not only can it walk, but it can talk. Apparently, it can make “authentic” dinosaur roars, but I’m not sure how Playskool knows what an authentic dinosaur roar sounds like. (Have they been around that long?) Needless to say, there are eleven areas on the KOTA body that will cause a reaction in the head, tail, or horns.

Children can hold on to a handle on the back of the head as they ride, and I’m assuming its OSHA approved and KOTA doesn’t travel at high speeds. KOTA will even make “fun jungle sounds” as it walks. To add to this fun, the kid rider can flip a switch on the handle to hear adventure-themed songs.

Not only will the KOTA walk and speak, but it will also eat. If a kid gives KOTA some of the included leafy greens, it will munch and eat them. Let’s hope it doesn’t digest them.

The KOTA takes 6 D batteries, and should be available this Fall for about $300. Just between you and me, I hope that KOTA goes all Jurassic Park on us and try and eat that new Elmo. Tickle that!

Source

Posted Feb 19th 2008 5:07AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Misc. gadgets
var Looks like we’ll be able to watch first hand as the US attempts to blast its failed spy satellite from the heavens on Thursday as rumored. That’s the first picture of the tumbling spacecraft as taken from the Kumamoto observatory in Japan. That picture was taken with a 20 second exposure but it may still be visible with the naked eye. A certainty if that thousand-pound, hydrazine fuel tank lands in your backyard.

[Thanks, Kaztm]

Colorware has announced the availability of the MacBook Air in your choice of 35 different colors. Just in case the aluminum casing of the Air was not exciting enough for you, Colorware now has a wide variety of options for you to choose from. The Air will be available in black, along with 34 other individual colors and just in case you cannot decide which color works best for you, Colorware also offers the option to mix and match colors between seven areas of the notebook. The custom paint will begin at $500 if you already own your MacBook Air or $2,499 if you purchase the macbook air from Colorware. Each custom job will take about 3-4 weeks to complete and ship.

In addition to the latest offering on the MacBook Air, Colorware will also customize many other items. They have also announced an engraving service that will become available in a few weeks.

Read [Colorware]

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Posted Feb 19th 2008 6:50AM by Thomas RickerSigh. You know the drill. A couple hours of downtime and then we’ll see nothing (maintenance), or new products that range from the mundane (Aperture 2) to the golly (32GB ipod touch). We already saw the iPod shuffle drop by $30 this morning before Apple pulled the plug on the store. Perhaps the $100 drops on the iphone and touch are just minutes away? It is Tuesday after all.

If you don’t want to have a huge and ugly tower casing sitting in the middle of your living room as a HTPC, then this HDMI SATA Hard Drive HDD Media Player ought to do the trick. It comes with a 3.5″ HDD enclosure, capable of holding a hard drive up to 500GB in size. Supported file formats include MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, DivX3.X/5.X, AVI, ASF, VOB, DAT, MP4, MPG, MP3, WAV, AAC and JPEG, BMP, GIF. Check out the other specifications right below.

• HDMI OUT: 576/480p, 620p, 1080i
• 5.1 channel audio, AV, Y/Pb/Pr, VGA and S-Video OUT
• 3.5mm Earphone Jack:
• USB: 2.0 connectivity
• SD/MMC Card Reader
• One Touch Backup (Windows Only)

You gotta get your own hard drive with this though.

John Sculley is famous among Apple fans for wresting control of the company from Steve Jobs in the mid-1980s.

That his Wikipedia article is written in a somewhat unencyclopedic tone should be forgiven. After all, how else would we know how he saved Apple from Steve’s futile visionary ideas?

The boardroom coup, we learn, was a matter of making real businessmen out of the valley boys:

"People joked that the difference between Apple Computer and a Boy Scout troop is that the scouts have adult supervision. Well, Apple now did."

The denouement of the man-child Jobs’ career was deserved and apropos:

 

"Jobs became non-linear: he kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7 am. After one such meeting in 1985, the Board of Directors lost patience and stripped Jobs of all operational responsibilities, three months after Jobs’ 30th birthday"

Daring stuff for a wikipedia article, but the truth will out! Sculley even knew how to hang with the casual Cupertino crowd:

 

"Sculley was visibly dressed-down from the Pepsico days: he often wore plaid shirts, loden-green cords, and penny-loafers without socks: straight from The Official Preppy Handbook, which explains the ways insiders dress down."

But what of Apple’s project bloat and empire-building of the early 1990s? These were, as Wikipedia reveals, a "strategy" which backfired: when he was gotten rid of, it was due not to any concrete reasons, but merely his apparent inability to "manage the product line."

He also invented the internet:

 

"Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator would eventually be fulfilled … by the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s."  

Funny stuff. In reality, by the time Sculley’s reign at Apple ended in 1993, the company was a shambling mess, wasting money on futuristic fancies like the Newton Messagepad while trying to market actual computers the way Dupont markets industrial chemicals.

Sculley went on to become the CEO of a company that he claims not to know was under SEC investigation, and ultimately to hocking a snake oil scam gadget called the "Wine Clip."

Unbesmirched by his own failures, he now is a partner in Sculley Brothers, a private investment firm — assuming Wikipedia is to believed.

The amount of portable devices is so huge that sometimes it seems like there is already nothing that can be made smaller. Yet creative designers think that even portable devices can become much smaller. What about you? Have you ever thought that a mouse can be even more portable?

An absolutely new mouse design has been recently offered. This gadget that is named Jelly Click takes mouse portability to the extreme. All the electronic circuitry lives on a small flexible board. The body itself is just soft plastic. When the concept is inflated it looks like a usual mouse. But you can easily let the air out and roll the gadget up. So, whenever you need your mouse, just inflate, attach the USB cable and enjoy the usage. It’s quite an understandable fact that such a structure has some important advantages. First of all it would be almost impossible to do any damages to such a device because it’s very light. Another advantage consists in the fact that due to the used material this mouse will be water resistant. So you can use it even in the extreme conditions.

To my mind this gadget represents a successful attempt of combining usefulness, portability, solidity and originality. However taking into consideration the fact that everybody is accustomed to using usual mouse it would probably be, at least at the beginning, strange to use this gadget.

Related:

• USB Mouse with VoIP technology
• Inflatable Neutron - rest and listen to music with comfort

Posted Feb 19th 2008 1:53AM by Darren Murph
Filed under: cellphones, Wireless
It seems that Sprint and Clearwire have been hooking up and breaking it off for nearly as long as Qualcomm and Nokia have been brawling, but just weeks after hearing that the two were on speaking terms once again, we’re now learning that a deal may be closer than ever. Reportedly, both firms are “close to announcing the formation of a WiMAX joint venture funded in part by a $2 billion injection from Intel,” and if the agreement is indeed landed within the next few days, it would “create a new company that combines Sprint’s licenses in the 2.5GHz wireless spectrum and Clearwire’s spectrum in the same and adjoining air waves.” On paper, the deal seems to make sense for all parties involved, but at this point, we aren’t about to assume that’s enough to actually see this thing through.