Hail Mary, full of data the Lord is USB….
Sorry, but I just had to post this which I found posted on Gizmodo by Sean Fallon
- unfortunately, that headline is mine. Sorry.
Digg Google?
It appears that Google Labs is testing a new-fangled search page where users can “vote” on all those links that pop up after a keyword query. You can click “like” or “don’t like” and then this moves the voted rating up and down - Just like Digg.
This Google experiment only works on your browser and will not influence other Googelites, so when it recognises one of your search words your preferred sites will be returned.
“This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results,” Google explains. “When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.”
The page also includes a “Know of a better webpage?” link, where you can recommend additional links. Again, these changes will pop up the next time you search on the same keyword. Naturally, you’ll need a Google account, and you’ll have to be logged in for all this to work.
My question is, how useful is this? If you’re searching for something, I’m guessing you haven’t come across it before. If you like what you’ve found you’d bookmark it.
But as it has been pointed out to me this experiment could be elaborated upon. Google could in fact use your votes to influence search results across the web in that Web 2.0 stylee.
Word of this experiment has popped up here, but it’s not open to the web at large. According to a Google spokeswoman, only a “small percentage of people” were invited to participate. But even for these folks, it will be available for “a few weeks” only.
News lifted from The Register
DS Vision
If you’re thinking about buying a DS Lite there’s now another reason to go and purchase one. Dai Nippon Printing has partnered with AM3 to offer a new way to get content / media onto Nintendo’s ever popular handheld. The system, dubbed DSvision, will enable DS / DS Lite owners to purchase various material via the web, including books, comics, movies, music, etc., and then transfer the files over to the DS. The product package will reportedly include a 512MB microSD card, a DS cartridge adapter and a USB adapter to use with your PC. It looks as though the hardware will hit the shelves in Japan for ¥3,980 (£20) after New Years, but the web-based content delivery system won’t go live until Easter-time 08.
News from Engadget
Camphones, camphones, everywhere - but which one to get?
I’ve been set a task. A young lady has asked me to find her a cameraphone that will last, live in the bottom of her capacious hand-bag and preferably be a candy-bar type hand-set. She is not that interested in smart phone add-ons.
I’m thinking 5 megapixels, good design and ease of use should be the keywords here. So, lets have a gander at what’s out there shall we?
LG KU990 Viewty
Here is the first in the line; great looking and it’s being pushed as the complete visual package. It has, of course a 5 megapixel camera which is de rigeur and also a stack of features you’re more likely to find on your stand alone snapper.
There’s a 16x digital zoom, video recording at a mind-blowing 120 frames per second and playback at a DVD quality 30 fps. So that’s quite a bit then?
As with all the latest LG range it’s quite a looker – but we’re interested in gadgetry as well as design here. Could it be relying too much on its looks?
There’s a few things that might let the Viewty down. For instance, you operate the zoom by rotating your finger around the lens. This makes it quite tricky to hold steady and take quick pics without getting your paws in the way – and that’s whilst sober!
Images themselves do indeed make other lesser mobile snappers look a tad average, but up against the N95, they’re pretty comparable. Praise indeed from this N95 convert but the Viewty seems to be less impressive when levelled against the Nokia’s multimedia powers and the brick hard build of Sony Ericsson’s K850i which will be up next.
The touchscreen itself takes its lead from LG’s fashionista fone, the Prada. Similarly, it’s a fairly iffy affair and you have to make sure you hit it in the right place if you want it to be obedient. Scrolling through text messages can take a couple of ice-ages. Again, imagine texting after a few shandies……perhaps it’s a good thing to make drunk texting unviable?
Once you’ve got your targeting fixed on though texting is fairly easy to do. There’s a standard mobile keyboard on the screen, so you can fire off nonsense in no time once you’ve had a bit of practice.
The build is incredibly plasticky so if you’re not that gentle with your tech it’s praps best you look for something more like the……..
Sony Ericsson K850i
Chasing the Nokia N95, Samsung G600 and LG Viewty U990 in the 5mp race the Sony Ericsson K850i has been using the time enrolling on evening classes to make it a better photographer and it has come away feeling quite smug.
It has also been working out as it’s beefier than the K810i with the new Sony keyboard design. It looks pretty cool but I was a bit aprehensive to its usability but the three touch-sensitive soft keys and a four-way navigation pad fencing the 2 and 5 buttons works incredibly well. You won’t need much time to adjust to this new layout – I like :0)
The heart of the K810i beats within - Best Pic and Photo Fix image wizardry, Xenon Flash and autofocus naturally all resurface - but it’s the new found photographic prowess that elevates it above it rivals. The K850i is the first phone to feature a dedicated power button that automatically and instantly opens a scratch resistant plastic protected lens cap. You also get an accessible three way switch that toggles between still photo, video recording and picture gallery while it’s the first Cyber-shot to serve-up ISO settings for adjusting to differing lighting environments. Told you it has been a good student.
Another camera characteristic is the bottom trap door that rooms the battery, SIM card and a hotswapple memory card slot that unprecedentedly welcomes both Memory Stick Micro and Micro SD formats. The K850i has also contracted the Apple iPhone bug and rigged the handset with highly responsive accelerometer motion sensors that automatically realign the display from portrait to landscape. Top of the class methinks.
The K850i would get you thinking “do I need a camera and a phone?”
Samsung G800
Samsung also has a 5mp camphone and they have also stuffed the G800 with an autofocus, flash and a 3x optical zoom.
With illuminated keys and brushed metal back it is a looker but it’s not a size 0 model. And while it’s carrying some extra weight it doesn’t feel as solid as my N95. Again, if you’re going to chuck it in the bottom a hand/man bag I’m not certain it would continue to cope with daily bashing.
Held horizontally, using your index finger to hit the shutter and the G800 really feels like digital camera. But we have a zoom design problem on this one as well. You have to stretch for it quite a bit. Far from being silky smooth, it’s also pretty slow and jittery.
With exposure tweaks, face detection and scene modes, the features rival a basic compact. Pictures have good colours and heaps of detail, but there is a stack of lag from the shutter.
The Xenon flash is excellent for close-ups but may be a bit underpowered for larger rooms.
Other bits on this machine include a radio, decent music player, picture blogging, HSDPA, a document viewer and secondary camera. And with decent-sized keys and a frightingly bright screen, it’s not that bad. It is, however, a little betwixt and between; it is a tad lardy as a phone, while slower than a lot of the new camphones out now. But if you can live with these niggles it is still quite a well-spec’d and handsome cameraphone.
Nokia N82
Like a candy-bar N95 this has pretty much everything. There’s the 5-megapixel camera, with Carl Zeiss optics and a slick xenon flash taken from the N95 so that’s that taken care of.
You can also record DVD-quality flicks, all of which can be saved on the supplied 2GB microSD card. Sweet. There’s space there for 900 high-res pics and 84 minutes of top notch vid. That should be plenty for most people I reckon.
Slap it onto the TV or your PC monitor and you can get multimedia slideshows going and crank out all those presentation skills at home as well as in the office. Oh, and as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an accelerometer for switching between portrait and landscape. Now that’s the kind of nifty idea we’re getting used to and love to see.
So – which one?
It’s probably still debatable whether you can replace a standard digital compact camera with a phone, but if you can my money is with the Sony Ericsson’s Cyber-shot range or the Nokia N Series.
I’ve used Sonys quite a bit and, as I’ve stated before, found them pretty much bullet-proof (although not cola proof!).
I’m loving my Nokia and now having got used to the little quirks after moving from Sony to Nokia I’m quite settled.
My new loyalty aside, I think, for the purpose of this review, I’d recommend the Cyber-shot as it’s the most like a camera with phone usability and will have Sony’s reliability and build quality.
So – the winner is the Sony Ericsson K850i!
Mobile Phone Kills in South Korea?
A burnt mobile phone is seen in this undated picture released by the Cheongju Heungdeok Police Station November 28, 2007. A 33-year-old South Korean quarry worker was found dead with a burning mobile phone stuck to his chest, police and the doctor who examined the man said on Thursday.
Pock-it
I realise that this isn’t really a gadget or such but I think that this redesign of something that certainly I’d feel hard to live without was worth mentioning.
The pad of humble Post-its is like gold in the modern office but this pushes the ante . It’s a Pock-it; same idea with a twist. Now, three of the sides are sticky forming a little pocket. Handy for business cards “Jeff called to sell you puppies - here’s his card”, “Here’s your stinkin rent!” at the end of the month and “I took £30 out of your handbag when you went to the loo - here it is back”………..
Designer: Pu Tai, Ayda Anlagan & Paul Blease
PMP’n Chinese Style with the RAmos RM970
A White ChristMesh? The Mesh Pulse
Say hello to the Mesh G92 Pulse Pro. Ok, it’s not going to wow you with its cutting edge styling but, saying that, where it lacks in looks it gains in performance thanks to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card hidden beneath the unassuming exterior.
The GeForce 8800 GT is the hottest property in gaming right now, thanks to its low price and hardcore performance. The G92 Pulse Pro also comes with the fastest Intel Core 2 Duo CPU available — the 3GHz E6850 — and 2GB of RAM, so it’ll barge its way through anything from gaming to video editing.
The £799 asking price also includes a 500GB hard drive, LightScribe 18x DVD rewriter, SLI-capable motherboard, and an included 22-inch widescreen monitor that runs at 1,680×1,050 pixels. We also like that it comes with a wireless Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse combo, plus 2.1-channel speakers and a subwoofer.
Preliminary 3DMark 2006 benchmarks reveal a score of 12,265 — or ‘bloody fast’ in human-speak.
If you’re after an inexpensive gaming PC with a solid specification for Crimbo, this is definately worth sneeking a peep of, more over, it’s available to buy on the Mesh site now - and they do pay monthly deals! If you can’t quite stretch to that, how about checking out its quad core fitted stablemate that’s £100 cheaper?
Google Street View - Coming to London town!
Pull up those trousers, put out that sneaky fag and take your hand off your secretary’s backside — Google Street View is ramping up in the UK. Dvorak reported a while ago that one of Google’s special Street View vehicles had been spotted within London. We think that — like German tourists — if there’s one, there’s probably more following closely behind.
Google Street View, for those of you who don’t know, is Google’s initiative to photograph the roads and buildings of cities from the perspective of a pedestrian. It’s a useful service, but there’s no secret that it raises questions relating to privacy: people have been caught smoking by Google cameras, only to have their family discover their filthy habit as a result.
When Google first launched Street View earlier this year, it covered just five cities in the US (ten more were added later in the year). This leads us to believe Google might not just focus on London. We could see Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Bognor Regis Street Views launched at once. But no-one’s actually seen any other Google vehicles, so it could just mean Google is experimenting in London and we’ll not see anything here for a long time.
If you see any Googmobiles driving around the city with cameras mounted on their roofs, snap a photo and send it in to edit AT cnet.co.uk.
Source: Dvorak Uncensored via
Tube Phone - NokO2yster
O2 has officially announced the launch of the rumoured “Tube-Phone” as a six-month trial across London.
500 O2 customers will be given the already-launched Nokia 6131 NFC handset installed with the “O2 Wallet” and 200 quid pre-loaded by the nice folk at Visa, who already offer an Oyster card.
As well as use their Oyster-enabled handsets as payment for tube and bus travel around the capital, the same way they would with an Oyster card, the guinea-pigs are being invited to go shop.
“Contactless” payments will be part of the trial at retailers including Books Etc, Chop’d, Coffee Republic, EAT, Krispy Kreme, Threshers and YO! Sushi.
There will also be the option to get information and other data from smart NFC-enabled posters and other points of info.
The trial is due to end in May, obviously by which point full feedback will have been provided, and analysed to look to a wider roll out.
Hopefully with better handsets.
RC Knights - Have at you!
I’ve seen the battle grannies and the pretty cool battle tanks and copters but now it’s time to get medieval on yo ass!.
I think these RC Knights look great and probably are a lot more fun than charging up to someone with an overgrown toothpick in full armour for real.
All the fun of days of yore can be yours without the pain for just £24.95 from Gadgets.co.uk
Mices to blow opponents to pieces
With 3200dpi gaming mice becoming the standard, Razer needed to step it up. Personally I find my, now standard, 3200dpi mouse plenty much enough. I4U reviewed Razer’s 4000dpi Lachesis as being ”….very accurate and tracking is great, particularly in Crysis”. Keep in mind though; this review was performed whilst playing on a 30-inch screen!
If you’re on a considerably smaller screen, you’d probably find yourself in the case of the missing cursor. Fortunately, you can adjust the resolution on the fly, and profiles are stored in the mouse’s 32KB of onboard memory. The major drawback’s actually the scroll wheel, which he wishes was more like the one on Logitech’s G9. That aside, it pulls a pretty solid 9.0 rating.
This mouse costs $80US so you’d probably benefit from a test-drive before parting with your hard earned.
O2 + iPhone = Silence
Now, I’m not sure if this is happening to everyone but a number of iPhone users here in the UK are reporting serious reception issues on O2’s network. It has been reported that an O2 iPhone would find itself with no service when sharing the room with other O2 phones with five bars and an unlocked iPhone on Vodaphone with full service; it seems that Apple’s UK support forums are getting similar reports. Users are also saying that replacement iPhones don’t exhibit the same problems, so the problem might be with the device itself — but that would be strange, seeing as iPhones in other countries don’t have the same issues. For its part, Apple appears to be replacing units as they’re brought in, and hasn’t made any official statement on the matter yet.
I know that there have been compatability problems between some phones and the service provider before (I’ve actually had salesmen telling me to wait until all glitches were removed between O2 and a previous handset). Anyone with an iPhone here in blightly having similar probs or is it all Apple flavoured lovliness?
Not Taking the Wii
MaxConsole’s suspicisions stemmed from two very similar articles about families paying up to £500 for the console in differing newspapers that they thought might suggest the story was sent out by public relations staff, rather than being a “real” news story.
A Nintendo official stated that: “We strongly reject and resent the accusation that we are ‘PR-ing’ stock shortages.”
“We are doing all we can to ensure that the unprecedented demand for Wii can be met as far as possible in the run up to Christmas.”
Pin Secure Enclosure
Sure, we’ve seen several newfangled hard drive enclosures and flashdrives with fancy biometric security options, but why put yourself at risk of having a finger lopped off (or worse, simply copied, Mythbusters style, when you can lock down your data with a simple PIN and still keep that MI6 vibe? IOTEK’s ezSECU ez850 is just your ticket, then — the USB 2.0 enclosure accepts any 2.5-inch SATA drive you might have lying around and works with Windows and Mac OS X — but won’t allow access to your data unless the right PIN is first entered on its old-school touchscreen LCD. There’s not much more to it than that — we’re hoping it at least beeps and plays a cheesy animation when it unlocks, but since we’re unable to find out if this thing is ever going to make it out of Korea, we’ll just have to keep making our own sound effects.
Via SlashGear
N95 = 1,000,000
I have one, my brother recently got one and now my boss has got one - and so does a heap of other people!!
Nokia has announced that since hitting the shops in April sales of its N95 handset have hit the one million mark within the UK.
“The Nokia N95 has more than lived up to the hype around its launch as one of the must-have gadgets this year – sealed by hitting the one million sales mark.” said Andrew Connell, head of multimedia, Nokia UK.
“The N95 not only looks good, but also packs a punch by
delivering on a groundbreaking features set that takes mobile communication to a new level in convergence devices.”
The 8GB Nokia N95 won the “Best Mobile Phone” of 2007 in the recent Pocket-lint awards.
Cut from Pocket Lint
i-Fly VAMP - Virgins Beware!
As some of you know, I’m a little bit gothy so I was quite delighted to find a remote controlled flyer that most GothGeeks would adore.
Futurama coming back atcha
Matt Groening (left), David Cohen, and Bender the robot at Groening’s studio.
Photo: Sian Kennedy
David X. Cohen is watching a short animation clip on a computer monitor. It’s a tight shot of two robots’ pelvises. They thrust their cube-shaped midsections together and swap a DVD from one of their disc drives to the other. This, Cohen explains, is footage of a sci-fi stage show, a suggestive all-robot version of Cirque du Soleil. “Nothing makes me happier than a scene with no living being in it,” he says.
Cohen has another reason to be happy. The segment he’s watching is from Futurama, the show that he codeveloped back in 1999 with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. (Cohen wrote and produced some of the animated sitcom’s most popular episodes.) With that pedigree, Futurama seemed like a can’t-fail proposition, but it was canceled five years ago. This footage, however, is new: Futurama is back in production, and the unexpected return is as curious as the story of its abrupt cancellation.
Set in the year 3000, Futurama’s interstellar sci-fi future isn’t a shiny utopia like The Jetsons or a dark dystopia like Blade Runner. It’s a time that seems wonderful or awful depending on how you look at it — just like the present. “On The Jetsons, there’s a machine that ties your tie for you,” Cohen says. “On Futurama, there’d be a machine that tied your tie, but it would malfunction and start strangling you.”
Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama’s undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen’s brave new world. “The network’s attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear,” Groening says. “They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn’t like the ‘All-Tentacle Massage’ parlor.”
Futurama premiered to strong ratings, but as the show was shuffled around the schedule, viewership slipped. Every season, the renewal notice came late — so late that there wasn’t always time to deliver a full slate of episodes. After the fourth season, the people working on the show waited and waited for a renewal notice until they eventually assumed — correctly — that it wasn’t going to come. “We didn’t get to finish the way we would’ve liked,” Cohen says.
Futurama was never a mass market success — it never generated universally known catchphrases like “Don’t have a cow, man” or a movie that grossed half a billion dollars. It just attracted a niche of enthusiastic devotees. But in the modern media landscape, a hardcore niche of fans can be all you need.
Futurama was killed, but like some B-movie cyborg it refused to stay dead. The fans watched the 72 episodes religiously in syndication and shelled out $170 to get the entire run on DVD. So, in 2005, Fox green-lighted 16 new episodes. Cohen and Groening have reassembled many of the hundreds of writers, animators, and voice artists who’d gone on to other projects to create four DVDs of new material, including sexy robot stage shows. The first DVD hits stores on November 27, and the features will then be divided into half-hour episodes when the entire run of the series begins airing on Comedy Central next year.
At last, Futurama is getting a fifth season.
Star Trek had a token alien crew member. Futurama’s crew includes an alien, a mutant, and a robot.
Image: Matt Groening; Futurama TM and 2007 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Matt Groening’s studio in Santa Monica, California, is where Futurama is written and where Groening draws his comic strip, Life in Hell, which has been a newspaper fixture for nearly three decades. It’s also where Groening keeps his music collection. There’s an entire room stacked floor to ceiling with LPs, CDs, and tapes, everything from Swiss yodels to Balinese gamelan. It’s a sunny afternoon in late September, and Groening’s a day late delivering the latest installment of Life in Hell. “When I’m procrastinating, I come in here and file a few dozen records,” he says.
Groening, 53, is an omnivorous mediaphile, and it shows in his work. The Simpsons began as a straightforward parody of the conventions of domestic sitcoms but quickly turned into a nonstop barrage of pop culture references and allusions. For Futurama, Groening drew upon a childhood shaped by Isaac Asimov stories and the colorful covers of pulp magazines. (There’s a stack of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures from the 1950s on a shelf near a few of his Emmy statuettes.)
Groening shows me another media archive housed nearby in the studio: a wall full of sci-fi paperbacks. He points to some that he and Cohen studied while working on their show. Arthur C. Clarke! Alfred Bester! Stanislaw Lem! Rudy Rucker! Kurt Vonnegut!
Taken from Wired
Stick it on the Walkman
Sony is planning on releasing this very feminine Walkman for Christmas. The lipstick-shaped compact MP3 player, the Walkman NW-E013 is available in various girly colours and has a lightweight, glossy body that houses 1GB of storage - still not as much as most hand-bags!
It’s a Rocker!
Have you got £150 burning a hole in your pocket or looking for an answer to the annual “what would you like for Christmas?” questioning?
