Gadgets Blog News

I’ve tried for many years to learn how to play the guitar. Unfortunately every time I get to the point where my fingers are finally moving the way they should be, life gets in the way and suddenly I have no time to practice. Needless to say, there is a perfectly good guitar and amp sitting in my office that rarely gets used. Here is one amp that anyone will be able to use, regardless of musical talent. The Mytunes MP3 Amp isn’t quite the same think as my little Fender amp. Rather than plugging in an electric guitar, you just hook up your ipod or other mp3 player and rock out to someone else’s music. It only has a 5-watt output, so don’t expect to hear this throughout the entire house, but it should be enough for your office. (Read the full post about ‘Plug your MP3 player, not guitar into this cool amp’…)

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by Ryan Block, posted May 25th 2008 at 4:35PM Suit up, space nerds, because the Phoenix lander is mere hours away from touchdown on Mars, and NASA’s blowing this thing out. Not only will you get a live video feed from their site, but apparently Mission Control ops will be liveblogging the touchdown and ensuing alien encouners / totally boring rock digging. (Read the full post about ‘Mars Phoenix lander to touch down on the red planet tonight’…)

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by Darren Murph, posted May 25th 2008 at 5:54PM Truth be told, we still can’t believe this is the first commercially available glow in the dark Xbox 360 chassis, but then again, glow in the dark hasn’t been remotely fashionable since Bill Clinton left office. Still, if history is beginning to repeat itself, you know you want to be first on the bandwagon, and there’s no better way to throw it back than with the XCM Glow Pearl case. (Read the full post about ‘Glow in the dark Xbox 360 enclosure takes you back to 1992′…)

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by Darren Murph, posted May 25th 2008 at 4:07PM RFID has long since been a pretty common find in your modern day hospital, but now GE and CenTrak are teaming up to make the technology even more useful in those long, winding hallways. Simply hailed as RFID “virtual walls,” the creation enables venues to “track tagged mobile medical equipment down to a portion of a single room.” By providing sub-room-level distinction, personnel can locate hardware within a monitored area as tiny as 6- x 8-feet, and although it’ll likely be used to locate cardiac defibrillators and portable ultrasound machines, patients could theoretically be tracked, too. The new tech will be shown off at the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumenta (Read the full post about ‘RFID “virtual walls” could keep tabs on hospital assets’…)

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by Ryan Block, posted May 25th 2008 at 6:26PM Well, doesn’t Tranquil PC seems pretty stoked about their new Atom-based Harmony home servers? Though they’re not exactly mind-blowing (to us, anyway), two new fanless models should be shipping in June: the T7-HSAi (left, with a single 3.5-inch drive or two 2.5-inch drives) and T2-WHS-A3i (right, with up to two 3.5-inch drives), both featuring Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, 512MB or 1GB RAM options, and running Windows Home Server. (Read the full post about ‘Tranquil PC announces Intel Atom-based Harmony home servers’…)

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Vudu, while maybe not attracting quite as much attention as originally hoped, are proving they are still alive in the small but welcomed movie set-top-box market. The Vudu box was originally launched back in the Fall of 2007, but sales may have been slow because of the limited availability, up till now it could only be found directly with Vudu or with Amazon.com. However customers can now purchase the Vudu box in one of 24 Best Buy outlets in California, which should help overall sales and awareness of the product. While the management from Vudu would not comment on the strategy behind the limited availability of Best Buy locations, its safe to assume that they are most likely looking to see just how well they will sell. (Read the full post about ‘Vudu landing at select Best Buy locations’…)

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by Darren Murph, posted May 25th 2008 at 1:30PMYou never really know what all will emerge from a simple interview, and thanks to a recent sit-down with Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth, we now know that a build of Ubuntu tailored for ultraportables (or subnotes, as it were) is just around the bend. According to Mr. Shuttleworth, the aforesaid software will be announced “in the first week of June,” and it’ll be called the Netbook Remix. (Read the full post about ‘Canonical CEO says Ubuntu Netbook Remix build coming in June’…)

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Solar power looks like it is here to stay, and we have so far seen solar powered cars being the Holy Grail in the fight to be independent of black gold, or rather, oil. Hybrid cars aren’t exactly catching on as fast as environmentalists prefer, and solar powered cars have not made the impact they were supposed to mainly because the technology is not yet there for a powerful, conventionally shaped vehicle that runs entirely off the sun’s rays. Never mind modes of transportation on land - here we have a solar powered speedboat that will slice through water pretty much in the same way an ordinary speedboat does, save for the fact that this one relies on the sun to power its electric engine instead. (Read the full post about ‘Solar powered speedboat’…)

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We have recently seen the images and those gave a nice look at what appears to be a cross between a slightly more grown up Treo and a Centro. Those images did also give us a nice side shot that showed what appeared to be an on/off switch for the Wi-Fi and these recently leaked specs are indeed highlighting Wi-Fi as a feature, something that has been long lacking with the Treo lineup. Of course as with any leaked specs, these are highly unconfirmed and come courtesy of a “good friend.” With that said, the details are set to include the previously mentioned Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g along with GSM, EDGE and UMTS HSDPA 3.6 support, a 2-megapixel camera, assisted-GPS, a microSD card slot which sadly is located under the 1500 mAh battery, a micro-USB connector for both power and sync, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR + A2DP, 256MB NAND-Flash with about 175MB available for the user, 32MB SDRAM, a 320 x 320 touchscreen display and running Windows Mobile Professional 6.1. (Read the full post about ‘Leaked specs; The Palm Treo 850′…)

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by Darren Murph, posted May 25th 2008 at 10:41AM Sure, you’ve seen a plethora of R500 shots already, but this ultrathin Portégé has somehow managed to keep its clothes on — until now. One curious owner just couldn’t resist the urge to operate, and after careful dissection, we’re left with a handful of snaps showing off the unit’s internals. (Read the full post about ‘Toshiba’s Portege R500 gets cautiously torn apart’…)

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