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[Biography of Sir Arthur C Clarke]
I can’t stand the U.S. Postal Service with their obsolete stamps and long lines, but they have actually come up with a useful service called “Mail Back” that allows you to ditch your old gadgets in the mail for free. Currently, postage-paid envelopes can be picked up in around 1500 post offices in 10 cites…
Engineers at Thorrn Micro Technologies have created a solid state fan for portable gadgets that is one-fourth the size and two to three times more powerful than a comparable mechanical fan. The RSD5 fan, which is roughly the size of a microchip, is said to be extremely thin, silent, and powerful and current prototypes can…
Before you start freaking out, hold on. They just wanna know who’s in your living room. That’s all. It’s for a really cool features, really! When you turn on your TV, the box will recognize you and make recommendations or pull up shows in your profile. Still not sold? Well, if it detects kiddies in…
The Talking Elvis robot is on sale at the WowWee store for just $99. Depending on how you look at it, that’s either $200 less than it should be, or $99 too much. Either way, if you can’t make room for a creepy hunk o’ burning love in your living room, then… you’re probably smarter…
Luxim’s new bulb may only be the size of a Tic-Tac, but this little bugger can crank out way more light at 250 watts than a traditional 400 watt LED. It can achieve this feat thanks to gas that is heated inside the bulb via electrical energy delivered to it by a “puck.” As the…
I’ve seen interesting bookmarks before, but none as practical as the pneumatic Abracadabra design concept. It works like this: the two-chambered bookmark—one filled with air—is placed on a page, and when the book is closed the air is pushed to the outside chamber. To open the book, you simply squeeze the exposed chamber, propping it…
Well, it may not actually compare with KITT, but get a load of this go-kart-inspired concept from Florian Dobe. It sports tiny 10-inch rims and seats that can fold into the body to create a sculptural look when not in use. Given the fact that no performance specs exist, it appears that the main focus…
The whole reason to pay the obscene premium for a SSD is because it’s supposed to be way more reliable than your average spinny hard drive. According to an analyst at Avian Securities, however, an unnamed “large computer manufacturer” is having 10 to 20 percent of its flash-based notebooks sent back because of technical failure—and…
If anyone knows people go apeshit for new color combos, it’s Nintendo. Slowing hardware sales? Some fresh hues perk ’em right up. Well, Colorware isn’t content to let Nintendo keep all the fanboy action to itself, so they’re bringing their paint-y crafts to the DS. Just do us a favor and don’t hit brainstorm before…
We just heard that Iomega was icing its plan to release HomeCenter, a Windows Home Server product like the ones currently available from HP. The company stresses that this decision has “nothing to do with the bug” that’s been corrupting data saved directly to WHS systems from certain applications. Instead, Iomega felt that the high…
It may not be first touchscreen digital camera on the market, but Panasonic’s new LUMIX FX500 is better late than never with a 3-inch touchscreen LCD and the same 25mm ultra-wide-angle Leica DC lens 10.1MP resolution, intelligent ISO and face detection as the FX35. It also features a 5x optical zoom, auto focus tracking and…
If you’re the “fun” guy in your office (and I’m guessing you are), you’ll love the Phantom Keystroker. This little USB device is sure to drive anyone who has it hooked up to their machine insane: it randomly moves the mouse around and types out garbage text at random intervals, making the victim think their…
Windows’ much demanded Vista Service Pack 1 is finally free for you to download from Windows Update or Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft says SP1 will bring “improvements that address many key pieces of customer feedback, especially in the areas of performance and reliability.” Gaming and networking are two particular areas of improvement, though experienced opinionators…
The Lichtinfusion lamp from Christian Maas makes me think of the best insults you can lob at someone who spends too long in front of the mirror (it’s too rude for the first para, I’m afraid). With the power cables disguised as the rubber tubes that would normally feed sick little puppies like me their…
Great news for democracy! It looks like some voter fraud went down in Ohio, with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation seizing voting machines for forensic analysis and a criminal investigation underway. Apparently, a candidate’s name was marked as withdrawn on a number of voting machines and the internal audit capability on the…
The iPhone 8GB is available now $249 refurbished from AT&T; that’s $150 closer to touching the JesusPhone. Better than the Apple Store’s refurbished section, and with free shipping too, limited to one per person. Not too shabby indeed. [AT&T]
We’re not entirely sure why you’d wanna go about pulling apart the Eye-Fi wireless SD card—it’s pretty obvious you’re gonna find a flash chip, and hey, a Wi-Fi chip, too. But someone did anyway! The NAND flash is from Sammy, while Atheros supplied the Wi-Fi module, its 802.11b/g AR6001GL radio on a chip. For more…
Nvidia’s headlining GeForce 9 series card, the monstrous 9800 GX2, officially launched today. It pulls an old trick out of Nvidia’s hat—melding two GPUs onto a single board—so you can actually go quad-SLI for a mere $1200. It completely crushes ATI’s top-of-the-line dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2. But is two times the GPU necessarily two…
Panasonic’s latest D-Snap audio player, the SV-SD870N, is debuting (in Japan at least) with a trio of cool features, though no Bluetooth: • It can run for “approximately” 100 hours without needing a recharge. • It can record directly from music source to SD card when docked. • It has built-in “noise killer” active noise…