musings about tech & miscellanea
Archive for March, 2010
New Dell in the house
Mar 26th
Just picked up a Dell Studio XPS 8100 desktop at Bestbuy for $1,080, which is $278 cheaper than Dell’s site with the exact same configuration. So with the money saved, now looking for a 24″ LCD monitor, which is really the sweet spot for 1920 x 1080 resolution; crisp high res without having the fonts too small as with 22″ monitors and smaller in this resolution.
This one’s replacing 1 of the 2 desktops I use across 3 LCD monitors for my daily use; one for Outlook and various widgets across 2 screens, and the new Dell for my main
BTW, the ATI Radeon HD5770 graphics card has 1GB of dedicated memory and is an excellent performer, especially with today’s multimedia needs (and yes, great for gaming whenever I get back into WoW).
Product Features
- Intel® Core™ i7-860 processor
Features an 8MB cache and 2.8GHz processor speed. - The all new 2010 Intel® Core™ i7 processor
Features 8-way processing for ultimate smart performance. Intel® Turbo Boost Technology automatically speeds up your processor when your PC needs extra performance. - 8GB DDR3 memory
For multitasking power, expandable to 16GB.
Navigating a 13.3 gigapixel image on a 22 megapixel display wall
Mar 24th
This is so impressive! “What we’re looking at here is a 22 megapixel display, stitched together from the output of no less than 28 projectors (7,168 x 3,072 total resolution), which just happens to respond to touch-like input in a fashion even Tom Cruise would find fascinating. You don’t have to actually touch the wall, floor-mounted cameras pick up your gestures in 2D space and a 30-node computer setup crunches all the computational and visual data to deliver some buttery smooth user interaction.”
ezeStand – Universal smartphone stand
Mar 20th
Came across this great universal smartphone stand that’s raised and even has an embedded magnet to activate the docking mode for a Motorola Droid.
From ezeStand.com:
“ezeStand is a versatile desktop holder for your Smart Phone or Personal Media Player device. It holds all of the latest Touch Screen devices including Motorola Droid & Milestone, iPhone 3G/3GS, Google Nexus One, Blackberry Storm, Palm Pre, iPod Touch, and many more.
ezeStand holds your Touch Screen device at a comfortable viewing angle in either horizontal/landscape or vertical/portrait oreintation and it will hold your phone even if you have an aftermarket cover or jacket.
ezeStand will also activate the Multimedia Station mode on your Motorola Droid & Milestone and has room to plug in the micro USB charging cable.”
Synaptics driver enables multi-touch gestures on older trackpads
Mar 19th
This is fantastic, updating your laptop’s Synaptic touchpad with multi-touch gestures!
From Engadget.com:
“As a user on the Hardware Zone forums discovered, the latest Synaptics driver seems to enable multitouch gestures on older laptops that didn’t previously support them, including two-finger scrolling, and three-finger click. What’s more, while the drivers themselves come from HP, they should work just fine on other laptops with a Synaptics trackpad.”
Hardware Zone has the drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista/7.
The Making Of Heineken’s Amazing Soccer Swindle
Mar 16th
This is the best successful viral marketing effort I’ve come across. From Mashable.com:
“So when Heineken staged a fake classical music concert at the same time as a crucial Real Madrid vs. AC Milan game on October 21, there was no chance that any real soccer fan would be there…except if their girlfriends, professors and bosses convinced them (by any means necessary) to attend.
What happens next is sheer hilarity, and a nice example of a high-budget guerrilla marketing campaign from Heineken. Suffice to say that more than 1,100 soccer fans got swindled, 1.5 million people saw their reactions on live TV, and Heineken received five million visitors to the site devoted to the event — and a great deal of news coverage for their troubles.”
Leo Laporte livestreaming his crowd surfing @ SXSW
Mar 13th
Crazy stuff! Leo Laporte has a customized livestreaming rig at SXSW and crowd surfing!
And here’s the video link of him starting out on his crowd surfing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone/4430516153/
Check out Leo’s livestream from South by Southwest at: http://live.twit.tv/
Forget Avatar: Hubble 3D Is a Religious Experience
Mar 12th
This 45-minute 3D documentary is coming March 19th to IMAX and IMAX 3D theaters! Much longer and cheaper than a $200K brief flight into space via Virgin Galactic…if you can get on.
From Motherboard.tv:
“But, in IMAX 3-D, Hubble 3-D is a religious experience. It is hard to find fault with the 45-minute documentary that details the history of Hubble, its near abandonment, and its resurrection on more than one occasion. The IMAX format in conjunction with 3-D virtually places the viewer in the shuttle, thanks to the camera work of the astronauts and the guidance, from Earth, of director Toni Myers. Yet it’s not just the photographic technique. It’s the entire experience. It’s about being there.”
HTC Incredible very soon on Verizon?
Mar 11th
Verizon may be replacing the HTC Droid Eris with their new HTC Incredible on April 1…we hope. The Incredible appears to an improved Nexus One with its optical trackpad, underclocked Snapdragon processor (improved battery life!) and HTC’s much heralded Sense UI.
I’m so glad I waited and not get a Nexus One … the Sense UI is … well, incredible 
With the power of today’s mobile processors and Android 2.1 OS, these are no longer just smartphones, rather ultra-mobile personal computers.
From Engadget.com:
“Android Forums is alight today with fresh HTC Incredible chatter — a phone every Android fan on Verizon is desperately waiting for — and we’ve managed to glean a few more pictures and possible specs out of the mess. It looks like we can expect a half gig of RAM with about 320MB available (roughly the same as what you find on the Nexus One) and an 8 megapixel cam, but interestingly, the phone’s Snapdragon core is apparently underclocked to 768MHz, almost certainly a battery-saving measure on HTC’s part; fortunately, the Sense-powered Android 2.1 firmware is still said to be “blazing fast.” It measures 117.5 x 58.5 x 11.9mm — just a hair narrower, shorter, and thicker than its Nexus One doppelganger, small enough of a difference so that we think it’ll be virtually indistinguishable in person.”
Read on at Engadget or check out the 100+ posts in the AndroidForums.com thread ….
@LisaTickledPink gets Leo’d
Mar 10th
The power of social media is phenomenal! Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose of Digg.com while on Leo’s This Week in Tech pod/video-cast (Episode 238), randomly picked LisaTickledPink on Twitter to see how many followers they can get her. She started out with only 3 followers at around Sunday, March 7th, and at the time of this post less than 3 days later, she now has 16,766 followers and it continues to grow by the hundreds per few minutes.
You can imagine what Lisa was thinking when she got 4,000+ email notifications of followers, especially when Kevin Rose found her via a search for “I hate technology.” All is good; Lisa now has a very influential position in having so many “eyes,” Leo will reimburse any charges incurred, giving Lisa an iPad when they come out, along with another iPad to a randomly chosen follower.
Check out Leo’s This Week in Tech Episode 238 to see this all come about (starts around 24.:13 in the videocast), and the interview below with Lisa on New Zealand’s Radio Whammo Show, Kiwi FM. Simply amazing, Lisa got Leo’d with a virtual flash mob on her Twitter account. BTW, Leo’s This Week in Tech and This Week in Google are 2 of my favorite podcasts that I regularly listen to while on the road, and highly recommend them.
Microsoft’s Courier tablet – video
Mar 8th
Now this is a tablet I’d be highly interested in, Microsoft’s Courier that is “slated” to come out Q3/Q4 this year. Much more functional for productivity than the oversized iPad coming out next month.
From Engadget.com:
“As we’ve heard, the interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments. We’re also hearing that there will be a built-in camera, and there’s a headphone jack for media playback. Most interestingly, it looks like the Courier will also serve as Microsoft’s e-book device, with a dedicated ecosystem centered around reading.”
Read on at Engadget.com and check out their other video…
