We have all heard about the Wii, and some even of project Natal for the Xbox 360. But news to me was that Sony is rattling their sable in this scene also and preparing a motion controlled controller to theirPS3 (much like the Wii controller just light controlled instead). My friend René showed me this cool video clip where you can see what is installed for PS3 owners, it does look really cool indeed.
Cool gadgets, we must all buy one…
Ever been on a long air flight and had to endure the person in front of you putting his seat down from start to end? Annoying like hell.. Well here’s the trick to combat that “Knee Defender”, you lower the table/tray in front of you and attach this Knee Defender and viola the seat in front of you is locked in it’s upright position – but yes the tray/table has to be down for this to work, nothing is free so that is the drawback to this little trick. At a price of US$ 15,- it’s a bargain for those transatlantic trips.
Get it here; http://www.kneedefender.com/
So I stumbled across a Kingston Data Traveller 128gb USB flash drive for US$ 27,- on Ebay.co.uk – now with a retail price of US$ 527,- this is beyond totally cheap.. Sadly it is likely a fake drive, but hey with the PayPal buyers protection program (and a price as low as this) I’m not that concerned about possibly loosing a penny or two… Also it would be interesting to get a fake pen to the lab and see how it works under the hood.
And who knows, I may just be lucky and get a bargain 😉
A few interesting links when it comes to fake USB pens;
http://sosfakeflash.wordpress.com/article-list/
http://fixfakeflash.wordpress.com/
http://reviews.ebay.co.uk/BEWARE-of-FAKE-128GB-256GB-USB-Flash-Drives-on-eBay_W0QQugidZ10000000001236067
I just spend a few hours browsing around Ebay for interesting gadgets, and actually found a few;
First up, I actually ordered one of these – a SATA HDD docking station;
Now this is clever, now I got both a card reader AND a HDD cradle, what need do you have for a HDD cradle you say? Well now you can buy cheap SATA HDD’s and easily copy data to them for storage (no need for bulky cases and power supplies).. Quite easy and simple.. and cheap as well I got this for about £ 17,-
WiFi;
Having problems with reception or just going war-driving? Well this gadget/wifi reciever claim up to 1000 feet coverage. Not something I need, but interesting never the less.
Hand size wireless keyboard for Media Centers, PS3, XBox 360 etc.
A cool small keyboard for your PS3 or mediacenter.. If I ever get around to either I would consider one of these for sure 🙂
I somewhere read about this software a while ago called “Boxee”, it’s a new mediacenter software which can be downloaded for free from http://www.boxee.tv But with so much mediacenter software out there it got lost in the masses. Anyway, recently I was reminded as D-Link is rattling their sable with the forthcoming release of the Boxee Box (well that is hardly going to be the name but still).. It looks VERY interesting especially with a full qwerty keyboard being merged into the very neat remote that come with it, and it does seem somewhat more interesting than the WD Live TV (A LOT more apps/widgets) and a more finished design overall.
It does indeed look interesting. Boxee seem to be based upon XBMC (X-Box Media Center) http://xbmc.org/download (which I btw still use on my old trusty X-Box 1 Classic)
Should you want to preview the experience you can download the free software for your pc/mac here http://www.boxee.tv/box
A few notes though;
- You need version 10.1 of Adobe Flash (currently only available as beta software), you will find it here; http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
- The box is generally good at recognizing your video and music files (even series etc), BUT if it does not recognize the media file (it does so from the naming of the file) it wont show it :-/ thus you will need to rename it to a naming convention it understands which seem silly and acquad. From what I can tell it will be getting the data (including photos) from IMDB.
- I had some issues getting it to accept a share on a Windows 2003 server, I could ‘bypass’ this by mapping the share as a drive letter on my Win 7 machine where I ran Boxee but I am still puzzled as to why it did not seem to accept a simple Windows Share.
- A further cause of concern is, what data is reported back to the producers of this software!? Do they get the complete list of my music, video etc. archives? Sadly I don’t know which concerns me as you have to register to run the software 😐
A quick look at what formats it recognizes;
Video:
- Adobe Flash 10.1
- H.264 (MKV, MOV)
- VC-1
- WMV
- MPEG-1
- MPEG-2
- MPEG-4
- AVI
- Xvid
- Divx
- PCM/LPCM
- VOB
Lyd:
- MP3
- WMA
- WAV
- AIFF
- FLAC
- AAC
- DTS
- Dolby Digital
- Ogg Vorbis
Billeder:
- JPEG
- TIFF
- BMP
- PNG
It would appear that RCA has developed some kind of gadget that can ‘harvest’ energy from WiFi signals, you could use this to eg. charge your cell phone totally wireless..
It sounds cool, but I am a bit sceptic – more in the line “I want to see it to believeit” 🙂 from what I have read elsewhere the energy available in the WiFi signal is so insignificant that it would take weeks or months to charge a cell phone battery.
But even if thisjust a vague first step, it is an important step in the right direction. Wireless power is bound to catch on..
Read more here
During Christmas I visited a friend of mine, he had just invested in a “Western Digital WD TV Live HD Media Player” and ran a quick demo for me.. It actually looks quite nice with a lot of useful features, it streamed perfectly from his NAS even HD ran perfectly and it had YouTube support and whatnot 🙂 The remote seemed a bit toy-ish but was very responsive and worked much better than how it looked..
I have the XBOX 1 (Classic) with a boot chip and use XBMC on it, so to me there is little need to invest in this new box, that is until I get a HD tv then things might change 😉
Like to know more about this box? Here’s a YouTube review for you;
Microsoft has revealed a new Tablet-PC (HP produced), this could be a competitor for the soon to come Apple Tablet that the world is waiting for.
You may have heard about E-books, you may even have heard about the Amazon Kindel (E-book reader), but did you know that there is a ton of other E-book readers on the marked? I personally had expected perhaps 5-6 different models, but acording to this link there are up to 39 different models (some not released yet though). If you are interested in E-books then it may be worth your while to visit http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix
Just stumbled across something interesting, Beagleboard.org..
It’s a VERY small motherboard that could be utilized for numerous things like building a small linux firewall (smoothwall or the like) or a media center (XBMC is working on something for this board). It’s all very interesting and definitely SMALL form factor, and at a price of $149 it is within a fair budget.
More info here;
http://beagleboard.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-JUb6bb69E