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No matter the fuss about RFID hacking, France’s national train operator SNCF is trialing a single-user RFID payment system for journeys on its network. The Weneo card is no flimsy card with a simple embedded chip however: it’s a thick gizmo with 4GB aboard and a USB plug. Shoving it into a PC takes the…
Most of us will be happy with consumer-priced stock DVRs or TiVos. But for those who are looking for something better for the ego, Niveus has just revealed their updated media centers, the Rainier, Pro Series and Denali Limited Edition. All three lines support 8 CableCards and 10 Media Center Extenders. The Rainier is modest,…
Bikes with chains may be becoming an endangered species. Belt-driven bikes, which were introduced by boutique bike makers a couple of years ago, are just starting to hit the mainstream. Trek has introduced two new urban bikes for 2009 with belt drives rather than chains, and they look pretty sweet. The benefit to a belt…
Last year, Epson brought the price of 1080p projectors down to $2,700 and today it’s dropping it again, to $2,000 (officially $1,999) for the all-new Powerlite Home Cinema 6100. We’re not saying it’s going to be as high-performance as Sony’s or Panasonic’s new $3,500 projectors, but damn if that’s not the right price to build…
No surprise that JVC is showing off their own ultra high-def 10MP wonder projector, since JVC’s D-ILA tech also powers the one we saw from Meridian a few weeks ago. That means it should deliver the same stunning 4,096×2400 resolution image—it’s like IMAX in your house. Or you can watch up to four full HD…
We’ve all been wowed by the remarkable photos of the apocalypse-bringing Large Hadron Collider (set to run next Wednesday!), but it’s not the only piece of insanely-large scientific equipment that’s easy on the eyes. Japan’s Large Helical Device was designed to “conduct fusion-plasma confinement research in a steady-state.” Also, it looks amazing. Sure, it doesn’t…
A new entrant to the Blu-ray player field, Cambridge Audio’s first BD machine is pretty high-end. Apparently the white-painted gizmo is all about matching “the original studio masters” in audio quality with Dolby TrueHD and DTS HR surround, and in video quality with 24 fps progressive scan True Cinema, which “allows films to be watched…
AMD’s immediate processor plans have been leaked in the form of a PowerPoint slide to Spanish site CHW.net. Dual-core “Brisbane” Athlons at 2.6GHz are due in October, alongside “Toliman” triple-core Phenoms. November sees the single-core “Lima” Athlon chip, obviously destined for low-power devices, since it runs at 1.6GHz and draws just 15W. Most interesting to…
At CES, JVC showed off its super slim LCDs, but at the time there wasn’t a lot of detail on them. Today, the 42″ LT-42SL89 and 46″ LT-46L89 are shipping, priced at $1,900 and $2,400. Though the 1.5-inch thick TVs actually measure 2.9 inches in the middle, they come with an integrated HDTV tuner, which…
After artist Jeremy Mayer created this series of typewriter masks, he said, “I’m not going for whimsy. So I will probably never do a set again.” That’s a shame. Wired has a full profile of the artist along with a complete gallery of his intricate human-sized typewriter cyborg sculptures. There are worse ways to spend…
At last, someone managed the most needed, most anxiously-awaited PC retrofit job there is: putting a PC inside a Nintendo Wii box. Looking into its guts and its back, the Wii PC not very powerful, but it is fully functional and comes with everything you need in a Windows XP box. The computer runs Windows…
At the Beijing Olympics, there were thousands of photographers all looking to get iconic shots of the games. For some events, that meant arriving many, many hours early and setting up elaborate remote camera setups. For the men’s 100m dash, there were close to 100 remote cameras set up, all focused on the same thing:…
Click to viewSometimes I notice that I take technology for granted. All these machines doing things around us, cars running, planes flying, phones ringing, computers—ahm, humm—computing, and guns firing, but how do they really work? What’s the deal with their mechanics? Do you think they work with magic? Did Steve tell you that, per chance?…
Hey you Europeans! You may have all your hot Swedish and Italian and Spanish and British girls, and all those old stones, and all the awesome cuisine, and all the delicious wine, and all that great coffee, and all the cool clubs, but guess what we have? We have the number one position in 3G…
Here’s the first print ad for the Sony A900, spotted in a Danish photography magazine, enjoying bubbles like an 8-year-old girl. But if that’s still not enough to convince you that this 25 megapixel SLR is just days from release, Sony has confirmed an SLR announcement during a Tokyo event next Wednesday. Short of bribing…
Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM’s future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta’d all over. It’ll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It’ll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around $208 million, which…
We’ve seem our share of good packaging ideas and bad packaging ideas, but this new method from HP is a great packaging idea. Their Pavilion dv692 systems available at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club will sit on the shelf in their own recycled material messenger bags, stabilized and protected with internal air bubbles. This alternative to…
We’ve been keeping you up to date on the CDMA version of HTC’s Touch Diamond, coming soon to Sprint, but the lucky buggers over at the Wall St Journal got their mitts on one ahead of its launch. It’s fatness turns out to be 0.6-inches in size, partly due to that 1,350 mAh battery good…
This is what you get when you combine Lego and massive mechas done at the minifig scale: the biggest robotic overlord I’ve laid my eyes on. Then, when you go through the massive gallery, you get what I call a robner followed by a brickgasm. Updated: actually, reader/brother Oscar sends me pictures of a huge…
Folding screens (that occasionally useful piece of furniture, and classic movie prop) get a dab of 21st Century tech with the DID-FS from Daewoo. The old-fashioned wooden frame is there, but supplemented by four LCD widescreens, mounted vertically. That leaves you free to choose what pictures you’re using to break up your living space into…
