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HGST may have beaten them to the punch, but Maxtor today announced their 500GB hard drive. Set to be released in the third quarter of this year, the drives will supposedly be offered in all of their existing product lines (such as the OneTouch external drives, DiamondMax, and so on). They haven’t said anything about…
Sharp has come out with a line of solar panels that replace standard concrete tiles. It’s designed to work with just about any roof, providing your roof has something called “battens” (TIP: check with your doctor). Essentially, this does away with the huge, unsightly panels that we’ve all seen thus far, replacing them with Battletech-type…
“Shrunq” is a mobile phone browser from Jason Uechi, built upon how he is “some kind of neurotic prissy” because he doesn’t want to click “‘more’ 25 times in the course of reading a single 350 word article.” Here’s to hoping this project turns out to be a success, because it’s come to the point…
Lufthansa-Technik hopes to do away with the Nintendo-era airplane position displays we all know and love. By using real GPS data and satellite photos, Airtrack supplies a realtime view of the ground and surrounding airspace. The roll-out is pretty slow—just Air Berlin and an unnamed Middle Eastern line—but the system can render 2D and 3D…
Oh Peter Jackson, what won’t you do? You decide to cut some rather important scenes from Return of the King, yet you also decide to blow $100,000 on a giant MIDI-controlled cabinet of instruments? I just can’t figure you out. With drums, an accordion, piano, guitar, bass, and even 24 chord organ, I hope you’re…
Taiwan’s “Kemiz” has developed a solar-powered Bluetooth GPS receiver. This could be great when you’re stuck out in the middle of the Gobi Desert with nowhere to turn but to your phone, which you somehow forgot about until you were completely lost. It would behoove Kemiz to make this as an all-in-one; there just aren’t…
I’m going to offer an opinion on this Apple/Intel adventure that is slightly tinged with a zealot’s bias. I’m a Switcher. I bought a Mac Mini and never looked back. A perfectly good Pentium 4 3.2-GHz machine is sitting on my desk, unused for months, and my laptop is running Xandros Linux for that counter-culture-without-the-hard-work…
TheRegister is amongst the first to report that Siemens and BenQ (or “The Company Formerly Known As Acer”) plan to launch a phone spin-off. There is some official word coming in from Siemens now, but for us Americans the entire deal will remain transparent. Siemens never really had much presence in the States and, according…
Reader Larry sent in one of the most dumbfounding pieces of tech I, in all my many years, have seen. I can’t find anything on it through the Interwebs and I’m really confused and bewildered. It appears someone has attached an iPod dock to one of those paper towel rack for very small, contained spills.…
Looks like Best Buy is doing the old “two price tango.” It’s not that they’re doing actually offering two prices—they have every right—but that’s the first time I’ve seen it so egregiously in the wild. Reader Todd sends us a missive from the big box heartland after the jump. The web browsers from within the…
Oh wow! A Ferrari PDA! With a stylus with a little red tip! And it’s got WIndows Mobile 2003 SE, 128 MB storage, Bluetooth, WiFi, and SD/CF slots! And it’s just an Acer N50 with a nice paint-job! And, like the Acer Ferrari laptop, it’s aimed at people who… I don’t know? Like red? Like…
Our new Intern, Travis, the one in Kansas, offered up a bit of car-side crappery. The Bumper Dumper is a toilet seat attachment combo that allows you to connect a working toilet to your truck. I know what you’re saying—”That’s what the ashtray is for!”—but hear me out. What better way to spend a long…
In honor of the 100th anniversary of Jules Verne’s death, some cats in Nantes, France staged a jaw-dropping fantasy morning involving wooden space probes, a giant water squirting elephant, and a huge girl on a scooter who visited the mayor at his office and made pee. I think the elephant is absolutely incredible. I apparently…
The Radio YourWay LX is a time-shifting device for radio broadcasts. This is one of the first digital radio MP3 recorders to support AM radio, which makes this thing make a little more sense but it seems like the whole system is a bit of overkill. However, I will accept that Dittohead out there want…
I admit it. I like to squeeze my zits. I like to get in there with a bottle of peroxide and just drink and squeeze all weekend. I may look like that fat floaty guy in Dune but those are just appearances. However, there is hope for me. The Zeno Zit Zapper not only reduces…
We’ve all heard of these replicators that use cornstarch or plastic or whatever to create solids from a CAD image. However, Dr. Adrian Bowyer at the University of Bath—that’s a city, not a discipline—in the UK, has created an open source replicator, the RepRap that uses glue or heat to bond layers of a solid.…
It seems like only yesterday that Intel and AMD announced their dual-core offerings and they’re already getting all hot and bothered and releasing quad-core chips in Q1. Intel, not to be outdone, is attempting the same feat in the beginning/middle of 2006. With dual-core ramping up from zero to about .9999999% penetration, I wonder how…
ExtremeTech pulled together a very nice post from Computex 2005 complete with hot photos of hot Asian devices sans lots of scantily clad booth babes (What’s up with that?) Writing about the best products shown at a trade show is an exercise fraught with peril. It’s always difficult to know if a product that appeared…
BOOM – OS X on Intel. Ok. It’s official. They’re offering a developer transition kit for $999. Tool is called Rosetta to turn everything from PowerPC to Intel. Joel was just on his way to the lumber yard when he mentioned the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference and I’m all like “Wha?” and he’s all like…
Hot news for travelers—we’re getting in-flight WiFi from Verizon! Luckily, it will be their ultra-far wireless group that shoots “data” straight into outer space so we can be disconnected for weeks at a time at 30,000 feet in the air. The FAA has OKed the feature on United’s B757-200 jets and it will only be…