Surflizard » 2007

Around The World For iPhone

Posted by Joe on July 7, 2007 · Comments Off

A guy living down under re-arranged his trip stateside to correspond to the iPhone’s release: The 26-year-old New York consultant who is on secondment in Sydney has just returned from a five-day, 32,000 km round trip to the east coast of the United States, ostensibly made so that he could be among the first wave to own one of Apple’s new mobile phones. A self-confessed gadget fiend, Brown says he has fixated on the touch-sensitive phone, with an in-built iPod that can also be used to surf the web, ever since it had its first public showing in January. And he can’t even use it [...]

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Killer App — MobiPocket

Posted by Joe on July 7, 2007 · Comments Off

jkOnTheRun has posted a review of the MobiPocket ereader program for his Blackberry. I’ve used this program on the Palm OS and on various Pocket PC and Mobile Windows devices over the years, and I agree that it’s a nice reader. In fact, it’s one of two reader programs I always have installed, the other being the eReader program offered by eReader.com. I use eReader for books I’ve purchased on that site, and MobiPocket for free books available in the incompatible MobiPocket format — such as the books in the Baen Free Library. I love having a library of books with [...]

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Zonbu Thin Client — Cool But Pricey

Posted by Joe on July 7, 2007 · Comments Off

The Zonbu PC is a cool device, but overpriced at $249. It’s a thin client pc with no hard drive, and even the dvd drive is optional ($59). The Linux OS resides in flash memory, and online storage is used for files. You can get the Zonbu for a more reasonable $99, but only with a 2 year commitment to pay $12.95 a month for 25 gb of online storage and tech support. That doesn’t seem cheap. I’d love to get one of these to hack on, but not for $249. With that much money, you could buy a real Linux PC from Mad Tux, and have $110 left over for more memory and a dvd burner. [...]

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Xbox Chief Discusses Red Rings of Death

Posted by Joe on July 7, 2007 · Comments Off

Newsweek has posted and interview with Xbox chief Peter Moore about the decision to extend the 360′s warranty to cover the “Red Rings of Death”. Excerpt: Firstly, we’re making improvements to the console itself that will reduce the occurrence of these issues. But perhaps more importantly, we’re implementing an enhanced warranty program to cover the general hardware failures, the ones that are indicated by the three flashing red lights. So we’re announcing a specific warranty coverage extension to three years for any console that displays the three-red-light [...]

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Fancy Russian Space Toilet Costs $19 Million

Posted by Joe on July 6, 2007 · Comments Off

NASA will pay $19 million for a Russian-built toilet system for the international space station. On the plus side, the station’s water bill should go down a bit. According to the AP, “The new system will be able to transfer urine to a device that can produce drinking water.”

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iPod Resurrection

Posted by Joe on July 6, 2007 · Comments Off

My wife’s 1st generation iPod Shuffle quit working a few weeks ago. It showed up as a drive in My Computer, but iTunes couldn’t communicate with it, even to do a factory reset. I finally gave up, and just resigned myself to using her iPod as a rather pricey USB key. But today I came across the ‘iPod Reset Utility’. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones with a comatose Shuffle, since Apple created a specific utility for precisely this situation. I downloaded it and after 3 resets, the Shuffle is now working again. I have no idea why it took 3 resets, or why it [...]

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Straight To Download

Posted by Joe on July 6, 2007 · Comments Off

A new feature film is being distributed via iTunes and Amazon Unbox, with no theatrical release…and several months prior to the DVD release. MGM is giving a new film an online debut, making “A Dog’s Breakfast” available on iTunes and Amazon’s Unbox on Tuesday. “Breakfast” director David Hewlett is the star of another MGM property, “Stargate Atlantis,” a sci-fi series with a cult following online, MGM senior executive vp Charles Cohen said. That made the online push for “Breakfast” a natural move. This sounds like a great way for [...]

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Xbox 360′s Billion Dollar Defect

Posted by Joe on July 6, 2007 · Comments Off

Microsoft is trying to minimize the fallout of the Xbox 360′s high failure rate: Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it expects to spend more than $1 billion to repair widespread hardware problems in its Xbox 360 video game console after a large number of them broke down. Microsoft said it would extend the warranty on the Xbox 360 to three years after too many of the consoles succumbed to “general hardware failure,” but the company provided few other details about the extent of the problems. Here’s the MS press release. Note that the warranty extension only covers hardware failure [...]

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Kowal Portable Typewriter and Adding Machine

Posted by Joe on July 6, 2007 · Comments Off

Mary Robinette Kowal’s laptop mod looks awesome. The almost-steampunkish vintage typewriter look really works. It’s a shame laptop manufacturers don’t have this kind of imagination.

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Pick One, Already

Posted by Joe on July 5, 2007 · Comments Off

A new study (these people have too much free time) suggests that sexually ambiguous avatars just aren’t trusted. The study reveals that androgynous digital personas (avatars) are perceived as less trustworthy than ones that are clearly either male or female. It also seems that people typically extend this impression to the person behind the avatar too. The results hint that avatar design and behaviour may have a range of unforeseen psychological influences and that such virtual personas need to be carefully designed to make the right impression, the researchers argue. The first thing I thought [...]

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Chuck Has A Secret

Posted by Joe on July 5, 2007 · 1 Comment

Chuck is a typical slacker-geek working for the Geek Squad Nerd Herd at Best Buy Buy-More. But everything changes when he has top secret info downloaded into his brain without his knowledge. Oh, and there’s a hot CIA operative. It sounds awesome, so I’m sure Chuck will last at least four weeks before being canceled by network pin-heads. Someone should go ahead and start planning the “Save Chuck” campaign.

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China’s new nuclear sub on Google Earth

Posted by Joe on July 5, 2007 · Comments Off

A nuclear researcher spotted China’s new nuclear sub on Google Earth: A satellite image of China’s new nuclear ballistic missile submarine is available on the Google Earth Internet site. Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), spotted the images, photographed by the commercial Quickbird satellite in late 2006.

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Impressive Photo Printer Under $100

Posted by Joe on July 5, 2007 · Comments Off

A new portable photo printer costing less than $100 has an impressive list of features. The Canon SELPHY CP740 Compact Photo Printer has a 2 inch lcd screen, multi-format card reader, makes lab-quality prints in under a minute, and can even run from an optional battery pack. You can get the Canon SELPHY CP740 Compact Photo Printer for $99 with free shipping at Amazon.

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Consumerist Catches Geek Squad File Thief

Posted by Joe on July 5, 2007 · Comments Off

Consumerist has caught a Geek Squad technician copying personal images and porn files from a customer’s computer in an ingenious sting operation. The link is work safe. UPDATE: the opinion voiced by DownloadSquad matches my own: The video that The Consumerist posts is of a technician who browses the user’s files looking for saucy photos, and copies them to a USB thumbdrive. He doesn’t have to look too far, since the computer has been set up to be as provocative as possible with obviously labeled folders right on the desktop. Seriously, is anyone actually surprised by how this [...]

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