Gadgets Blog News

by Chris Ziegler, posted Apr 11th 2008 at 8:06AM Our first thought when we heard the news that there was an NES emulator in the works for the Sidekick series of text machines was one of pure, unabashed elation. The classic Hiptop form factor is pretty much exactly what the doctor ordered for effective old-skool gaming, after all — and let’s be honest, any time Nintendo playtime comes to a new platform is cause for immediate and overindulgent celebration. Our second thought was, “wait, what?” It’s pretty unclear how the emulator would be loaded with legally-obtained ROMs and we have our doubts that Nintendo signed away the rights to any binaries, so we’re a little confused about the word that this would be officially offered through the Danger’s Software Catalog. (Read the full post about ‘Danger testing out an NES emulator for Sidekicks? Sadly, no.’…)

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If you’ve been doing your part for the environment by transitioning from regular light bulbs to energy-saving fluorescent lght bulbs, you might be interested to know that you can get energy-saving light bulbs that do more than just provide light. Kitchen Contraptions spotted this 15 watt ionic bulb, which produces 60 watts of ight and contains an ionizer that cleans the air around the bulb. The claim is that the ionic technology picks up airborne particles that contaminate your room and cause odors. The bulb provides 10,000 hours of lighting, 10 times longer than standard light bulbs.

There’s been controversy over the last few years about whether ionic air purifiers are effective.

(Read the full post about ‘Energy saving, air purifying light bulb from Viatek’…)

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When you were a kid, did your parents always hassle you about turning off the lights when you left a room? Well now that you have your own place, you probably understand exactly why they would tell you that. What’s more is that you also likely have a lot of gadgets around your desk that still use power even when you’re not using them. This is why Watt Stopper created the Isole IDP-3050.

This rather ordinary-looking power strip is designed to save power by shutting off gadgets when you aren’t around. The small wired box is actually a passive infrared sensor which will kill power to most of the outlets when you aren’t around.

Two of the outlets are not controlled by the sensor, which would be ideal for plugging in your PC.

(Read the full post about ‘This power strip turns off unused gadgets’…)

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I’m not much of a photographer, so I’m not sure I’d want to use up/ruin a whole wall with any picture I’ve taken, but I can definitely see My Foto Wall doing well. This new site allows users to upload a favorite picture, which will then be turned into wallpaper. Not virtual wallpaper - the real thing. A typical wall will cost £295 ($586) to decorate, so you may not be covering all your walls this way, but for a unique design, I can’t think of better way to customise a room. You can crop and cut your your chosen photo to scale, and if you put in your wall/room measurements, you’ll get an exact quote. I think a nature shot would work best, but if you want that Demi Moore-inspired pregnant pose on your living room wall, go right ahead: it’ll be a talking point, at least. (Read the full post about ‘Make your wallpaper really personal with My Foto Wall’…)

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Asus has added a new addition to their product line, and for a refreshing change it does not fit in the Eee family. The newest addition is the Essentio CS5110 desktop PC, in which Asus is claiming that it is “the world’s smallest Desktop PC equipped with a fully embedded discrete graphic card,” which is an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics card with 256MB of memory. With the graphics aside, the CS5110 seems to be a decent offering, and one that would work equally well for a home PC or a media-centric PC in the living room thanks to the low 23.9dB sound output when idling. The CS5110 also has an S/PIDF out which offers up 7.1 audio as well as HDMI support. (Read the full post about ‘Asus officially announces the Essentio CS5110′…)

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First the bad news. The number of unique viruses will reach 1,000,000 (1 million) by the end of the year. More bad news. About 25% have been generated in the last 6 months out of all generated in the past 20 years. Ugh.

The good news is that the number of viruses/malware making it through to user inboxes is down to 1 in 1000. Five (5) years ago, it was 1 in 40. Naturally, we need to get that down even more. So would you please stop adding your name to those weird mailing lists and yell at your friends for putting you on those mass forwarded e-mails!

(Read the full post about ‘Viruses, Malware, Badware everywhere’…)

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Given the latest craze of UMPC’s, most people would assume that if you want an optical drive it would have to be external. However Kohjinsha has announced the SR8KPO6S UMPC that features not only a built-in double layer DVD drive but also has a tablet style pivoting display. The SR8KPO6S also offers a 7-inch touchscreen display with a 1024 x 600 resolution, 1GB of RAM, 60GB hard drive, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth, 1.3-megapixel webcam, built-in card reader, runs Windows Vista and is powered by an Intel 800 MHz processor. The SR8KPO6S measure in at 9.2 x 7 x 1.3-inches and weighs just 2.4 pounds, also included is a standard keyboard, stylus, as well as buttons and controls to use when in tablet mode. (Read the full post about ‘Kohjinsha intro’s the SR8KPO6S UMPC, with built-in optical drive’…)

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Today, Microsoft announced their new traffic system.  Yawn right?  Well, maybe not.  Seems their new system has a trick up its sleeve that other traffic systems, cams or other don’t.

While driving into work, an MS guy thought he’d beat the freeway traffic and hit the city surface streets.  The result?  Predictably, they were worse.  From that came a machine system that “learns”. 

According to Microsoft, their traffic system that will be available from their maps.live.com site, dubbed Clearflow will apply machine learning of complex traffic problems.  They system looks at both highways and surface streets and routes the fastest.  They system claims to learn how long it takes the surface streets to back up once the highway does and computes the time differences.

(Read the full post about ‘Microsoft to get us out of jam, traffic jam that is’…)

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Sony have introduced two new Blu-ray recorders with hard drive storage space, that feature a one touch video transfer to portabale devices.

(Read the full post about ‘Sony BDZ-A70, BDZ-T90′…)

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uWink sounds like the name of an online dating service, but it’s a restaurant concept from Nolan Bushnell, founder of both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese.  So you’d expect arcade games at such an establishment, but uWink takes it a step further and has the games built into your tabletop!  You and your dining companions can have fun playing games while waiting for your food and after finishing your food, and most of the games are free!  Also, large wall projections let patrons from different tables play against each other.  What a great idea for if you want to book the restaurant for a private function, and yes uWink can customize the games too!  I guess that’s where the “wink” comes in, since you can meet people from other tables. (Read the full post about ‘uWink brings technology to the table’…)

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