Gadget Access

I’m not a particularly “crafty” person myself. Oh, I can be sneaky, for sure, but when it comes to hand-made crafts… not so much.

But I totally admire anyone who can create something beautiful from a ball of wool and a couple of zippers (or whatever) and lately I’ve been intrigued by the huge variety of online resources for craft fans. Most well-known is probably Craftster: the craft fan’s Facebook, this site is a place to network, pick up new ideas and learn new skills. Ravelry is a similar site aimed solely at those who knit and crochet. It’s invitation-only at the moment but is growing fast.

Then there are the multitudes of blogs devoted to everything from scrapbooking to sewing and much more besides. It’s all about making things for fun rather than necessity and there’s often a heavy dose of irony involved (Craftster makes this explicit: “No tea cozies without irony,” their tagline proclaims).

There’s a good chance that if you have a laptop, there’s an empty PC Card slot just waiting to be used. Sure, you could always add some extra USB ports or a 3G card, but if you don’t need anything that fancy, why not do something simple with it like turn it into a secret stash?

This tiny Stash Card will let you keep a few very small items stored away in your laptop. Perhaps a spare key, or a few bucks. I wouldn’t stick anything of value in it, as it can be swiped just as easily as your laptop. For $8 you can’t really go wrong.

Source: CrunchGear

I suppose that the military has been looking for more remotely piloted aircrafts since the MQ-1 Predator, and it appears they have been going to colleges for their next one. They have given the University of Michigan a $10 million dollar grant to come up with a “six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat”.

I don’t know if the picture to the left here is their prototype, but you have to admit that it certainly looks neat. Not only is the COM-BAT (it’s official name?) designed for reconnaissance, but the military wants it to “gathers data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time”.

This means no more going into enemy territory as blind as a bat. Okay, that was a bad joke, but it was too hard to resist. However, if you had an infrared lens in that COM-BAT, you could send a whole fleet of these things in, and the people you’re spying on may be none the wiser.

Believe it or not, this COM-BAT is planned to have energy scavenging potential, so it could be powered by wind and solar energy. That means it could stay in the air indefinitely, provided it has enough wind and sun. Other planned features are miniature microphones, as well as detectors for picking up nuclear radiation and poisonous gases.

Well, if this project doesn’t work, then maybe Batman would be interested in it. Just one of those coming at the Joker could be enough to make even him frown.

Source

AT&T has announced a repackaged version of its successful mobile content shop, and is branding it Media Mall 2.0. The Media Mall 2.0 will have a new feature called “try-before-you-buy.” This feature allows consumers to try the mobile content first directly from their cellphone before having to make the purchase. The redesigned Media Mall 2.0 will provide AT&T subscribers with a selection of 90,000 games, full songs and ringtones.

Mark Collins, vice president of Consumer Data for AT&T’s wireless unit envisions that the Media Mall 2.0 will be a one-stop shop for mobile content and applications. Hence the need for the remodeling.

“By remodeling our mobile storefront, we’re giving customers more choices and helping developers reach an ever-growing number of mobile consumers, “ said Collins.

AT&T is currently working with developers to create unique versions of mobile applications and content that would go along well with AT&T’s wide variety of devices. The AT&T Media Mall 2.0 is currently at a beta construction stage. Its storefront will be continually expanded to give developers an opportunity to reach the 70.1 million mobile phone customers of AT&T. The Media Mall 2.0 will open to AT&T subscribers beginning in April 2008.

Read [AT&T Media Mall 2.0] Via [Webwire]

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Posted Mar 20th 2008 2:39PM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Laptops
Pencil thin laptop? Check. Floating with drop shadow? Check. Catch phrase in Helvetica Light? You bet. “Thinnovation” may have become “The art of thin,” but there’s no mistaking the implication of this new Lenovo web ad for the ThinkPad X300. “No-compromise” and “Everything else is just hot air?” Them’s fightin’ words.

[Thanks, Amerist]

The red colored Zune 80 has made a re-appearance and it’s not even Valentines day, you remember the holiday that we see tons and tons of red device announcements. With just one small catch, the red model of the Zune 80 will not be offered in all the same locations as the regular Zune models and can just be purchased at Zune Originals. Keeping with the standard pricing, the red Zune 80 will retail for $249, you can also choose to have it customized for an a few extra bucks. No word on if this is going to be a permanent offering or just for a limited time.

Product [Zune Originals] Via [Zune-Online]

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Western Digital has busted out its latest hard drive - the 3.5″ Caviar SE16 which offers a whopping 640GB of storage space thanks to 320 GB-per-platter technology. This technology has already been used in its line of products since January this year and looks set to being the foundation of Western Digital’s entire 3.5″ hard drive family.

Some of the key features of this new SE16 hard drive are :-

• Top performance for Windows Vista - WD Caviar SE16 SATA and EIDE drives are certified for Windows Vista and are top performers on the Windows Vista Experience Index.
• 16 MB Cache - Bigger cache means faster performance. A massive 16 MB cache combined with advanced acoustic and power-reducing technologies make these ultra-fast drives the perfect solution for the fully loaded PC.
• Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) - The latest generation of WD Caviar SE16 drives employs PMR technology to achieve even greater areal density.
• IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
• SecurePark - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non-operational shock tolerance.
• StableTrac - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations (750 GB only).

The WD Caviar SE16 640GB has been slapped with a recommended retail price of $139.99, making hard drives all the more affordable these days, giving you more storage space bang-for-your-buck than ever before. Guess if you are looking for some sort of storage solution for quite some time already, it wouldn’t hurt to check out the WD Caviar SE16 640GB model and place it under your watch list.

Product Page via Press Release

Posted Mar 20th 2008 11:35AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Handhelds
Sure, Philippe Starck may not care for the Kindle, but an open letter posted on Amazon’s front page suggests he’s in the minority. We already knew that the company was having a difficult time filling orders, but we had no idea the wait for buyers would warrant what amounts to a public apology from Jeff Bezos. Apparently, the online superstore is drawing heat for six-week delays on delivery for some customers, and is scrambling to get itself into an “order today, ship today” scheme. The original release of the device sold out in just 5 1/2 hours says the letter, which might explain why no one is hacking it — no one has it.

[Thanks, Michael]

Posted Mar 20th 2008 9:51AM by Darren Murph
Filed under: RobotsRemember those cyborg insects that seemed so much like a pipe dream just two short years ago? Yeah, those frackin’ things have somehow survived into adulthood, and are closing in on being ready to infiltrate enemy camps and extract vital information. According to a recent update on the DARPA project, the insects — which have “modified body structures and micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) embedded” within — have lasted into adulthood, and now those behind the endeavor are hoping to enable remote control of the bugs via “mechano-sensor activation” or something similar. Additionally, scientists are hoping to harness the energy emitted during locomotion to actually power the internal MEMS. Sure, as long as these critters can be swatted down with a newspaper, we’re solid, but we aren’t too sure we dig where this could be headed.

[Via Wired]

Posted Mar 20th 2008 11:57AM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Displays, Peripherals It may not boast fancy OLED displays, let alone three of ‘em, but if you just want to get some basic status updates in convenient slide show form, it looks like this so-called “Gadget Display” should do the trick, and presumably on the relative cheap. While complete details are pretty light, the device apparently boasts a 2-inch LCD, which you can configure to display a range of information from a clock to CPU and RAM usage, although there doesn’t appear to be support for Vista Sidebar gadgets (at least officially). No word on pricing or availability, unfortunately, though we’re guessing it should be cheap enough to let you buy ‘em buy the bundle if you have some ideas of your own for them.

[Via Crave]