Filed under: GPS, Wireless
Just under a year ago, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced his hopes that one day he could pinpoint the location of his black Labrador, Koni, at any time of the day. Today, a dream has been realized. Mr. Putin has finally procured a satellite collar that will enable him to track the lab regardless of which of the eleven times zones she may be in while waltzing through Russia. Once the collar was slipped on, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov immediately said “she looks sad, her free life is over.” Putin didn’t miss a beat when snapping back: “In Soviet Russia, GLONASS track you!”
[Image courtesy of Picasa, thanks MJ]
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Filed under: Home Entertainment, Storage
No, this ain’t a Craigslist ad, this is just a bomb-diggity home server set to officially be released by Tranquil PC tomorrow. The SQA-5H is a cube-shaped server with five hot-swappable drive bays, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom 330 processor and 1GB of RAM (2GB maximum). Additionally, it touts a Quick System Backup for piping your stored data onto an external HDD, a “Mode” button for quick capacity checks and an optional SQA-EX slave unit which provides five additional drive bays connected with a single cable. Expect to find pricing details within 24 hours on the November-bound device.
[Via WeGotServed]
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Filed under: Cellphones
RIM’s BlackBerry Bold wasn’t technically supposed to have launched already — that’s the magic in being all vague about a release date, we guess — but we can safely say we’re absolutely relieved to finally have something out in the open here. Even if it’s not carved in stone, per se. An internal AT&T e-mail discovered today notes that the “latest ETA” for the release of the Bold is October 27th (with a price TBD), though we’d feel a lot better about that if it said “definitive release date.” At any rate, we’ll find out in just ten days. Ten. Days.
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Filed under: Laptops, Peripherals
We thought the AirMail was our most favorite niche case of all time, but the homegrown Ply Laptop Case is really making a case (ahem) for top honors. After hours upon hours of masterful plywood bending, sanding and carving, the wooden case you see above was created. Internally, the case is lined with cork to “provide additional heat resistance and protection,” and best of all, those with the requisite skills can make one to hold any size machine you can dream of. Now, if only there was a TSA-approved version…
[Via MAKE]
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Filed under: Laptops
We’ve seen plenty of
evidence of netbooks’ impact on computer round here (like the image above), and market research firm IDC has now found that the situation is much the same in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (otherwise known to market research-types as
EMEA), and it has some numbers to back it up. According to the firm, it estimates that there were more than two million netbooks sold in the EMEA market during the third quarter of 2008, which is a hefty chunk (more than 7%) of the 27.9 million laptops and desktops sold during the same time period. Of those, IDC found that ASUS and Acer had corned a hefty 80% of the market, with broadband-equipped netbooks offered by cellphone carriers also helping to boost those two companies in particular. Not surprisingly, it only sees things going up from here, and it estimates that sales could potentially double to a full four million in the fourth quarter of this year.
[Via Register Hardware]
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Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
ZeeVee’s ZvBox had a lot of potential on paper — after all, who wouldn’t be enthused about the possibility of bringing internet TV / DVDs / Blu-rays (via your PC’s optical drive) and all sorts of other multimedia to the TV via the coaxial wiring already in your home? Unfortunately, the box was hamstrung by two major issues: a lofty price tag ($499) and less-than-elegant installation. Still, the unit seemed to work well enough in our testing once we got everything up and running, but we never really found a way to justify the cost. Are any of you early adopters feeling the same way? Disagree vehemently? What could ZeeVee do (or have done) in order to make the ZvBox a more compelling purchase? We know you’ve got it in you, so let it all out in comments below.
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Filed under: Household, Networking
As the global economy curls up into the fetal position in the face of rising energy costs, we’re as determined as anyone to be as energy efficient as possible — as long as it’s completely convenient, of course. Mi Casa Verde hopes to help with that with Vera, a
Z-Wave / 802.11 hub with an exceptionally robust web interface for monitoring the energy usage of devices in your home as well as turning them off, setting up scenes, events and timers, and operating
locks and security cameras. Since it’s a low impact little device running a stripped down version of Linux, it operates on less power than desktop-based solutions — a benefit that Mi Casa Verde claims makes it one of the few systems that save more power than they use. Its retail price will be
competitive, with the box at $299 and a secure remote access gateway at $8 per month, but Mi Casa Verde is trying to entice would-be testers with a pre-street sale price of $149 and one year of free remote access service — that option will be available through October 31st, with the final product available to conscientious tree-huggers (tech savvy and otherwise, the company hopes) everywhere on November 15th.
[Thanks, Dmitry]
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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
In these green times, companies are looking everywhere to make a buck — er, save the planet. Philips Simplicity didn’t go much further than the sidewalk to find inspiration for its latest eco-friendly innovation, the Light Blossom, a self-sustainable street lamp that has triple-duty petals. They’re peppered with energy-efficient LEDs to illuminate the street, naturally, but also have solar panels on top and can spin around in a stiff breeze to recharge. At night they’ll emit a soft glow, intended to cut down on light pollution, but will grow brighter whenever a pedestrian comes by. It all sounds wonderfully efficient, but with lights popping on and off as you go, it could make that late-night walk of shame a little more conspicuous than you might like.
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Filed under: Laptops
A few Samsung laptops have managed to make it over here in the past under the guise of
other manufacturers, but it looks like the company’s new Q310 model here is now officially the first bearing the company’s name to show up at a US retailer
actually ready to ship, and, as we had heard, only the first of
more to come. There’s actually two versions of this particular model available (at Newegg, at least), the $1,049 Q310-34G and the $1,249 Q310-34P, the former of which packs a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo T5800 CPU and a 250GB hard drive, while the latter ups things a bit to a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo P8400 and a 320GB hard drive. Otherwise, you can expect 3GB of DDR2 RAM and integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics on each, plus the usual DVD burner, built-in webcam, 802.11n WiFi, and a 1280 x 800, 13.3-inch display — not to mention some of that snazzy red
touch of color detailing.
[Via Crave]
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Filed under: Desktops
We know the past couple years haven’t been kind to VIA-owned S3 Graphics — market share has declined, and NVIDIA and ATI keep introducing fancy new technologies, making it tough to keep up. That said, we’re inspired by S3’s ardent attempts to stay relevant in an industry that won’t easily make room for small competitors. The latest case in point: the company has released a photo-editing app to demonstrate the newly-programmed GPGPU (general-purpose computing on graphics processing units) functionalities of its DirectX 10.1 Chrome 400 line of discrete graphics cards. S3 claims its hard work has produced an HPC environment that can be used to reduce processing time for scientific and other applications from days to seconds — we’ll believe it when we see it, but you’ve gotta admire the tenacity.
[Via CustomPC]
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