Gadgets Control

by Darren Murph, posted Aug 16th 2008 at 6:05PMThis one isn’t quite as dodgy as they come, but the very notable limitations really keep this from being the whiz-bang hack that it appears to be on the surface. Hacker StreetskaterFU had no trouble getting confirmation from others that his method of running Blu-ray games from the playstation 3’s hard drive was indeed legitimate, but it is only confirmed to work with select “older titles” including Warhawk, MotorStorm and Call of Duty 3. To make matters worse, instructions are sketchy at best, but at least there’s a video of the process working after the break. Let us know how things go should you give this a whirl.Read PermalinkEmail this24 CommentsFiled under: GamingT (Read the full post about ‘Hacked PlayStation 3 reportedly runs Blu-ray games from HDD’…)

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Clothing which integrates solar power isn’t exactly breaking news. It has been done before and it’ll be done again. But frankly, we were yet to have seen such a cool integration of form and function such as with this Solar Powered Necktie. Designed by researchers at Iowa State University, whom have been working on inventing an effective use of photovoltaic textiles, sort of stumbled across this tie creation as they were figuring out ways to apply thier new founded solar fabrics. The really cool thing about this Solar Tie is that the pattern used for the solar shells sort of looks like a cool pattern that would be used on a tie anyway, so it’s really not too obtrusive into everyday life. (Read the full post about ‘Solar Powered Necktie charges your gadgets on the sly’…)

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by Darren Murph, posted Aug 16th 2008 at 4:08PM Oh sure, you’re pretty 1337 if you can say you’ve got an SSD within your laptop, but if you’ve a need to store more than, say, 8GB of files, a bit more room may be desired. tnkgrl’s Aspire One mods began earlier this week with the addition of Bluetooth and extra RAM, and today she’s showing the world how to swap the built-in SSD with a 1.8-inch 60GB PATA drive. As expected, this one’s remarkably easy to complete once you’ve torn the thing open, but she also explains how to best put it all back together once you’re done. (Read the full post about ‘Aspire One modding continues: swapping SSD for capacious HDD’…)

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by Chris Ziegler, posted Aug 16th 2008 at 5:10PM We can think of about fifteen plain-vanilla EDGE flips from Samsung that we’d expect T-Mobile to launch ahead of something like this, but you’re definitely not going to see us complaining. TmoNews is claiming that the guys and gals in pink magenta have an ace up their collective sleeve in the form of Samsung’s F480 Tocco — or really, an Americanized version of it dubbed T919. Naturally, the US version goes through the usual dilution, losing the front-facing cam — but on the upside, it manages to hang on to the really important stuff like a 3G radio (AWS, we’d assume), GPS, and 5 megapixel cam. (Read the full post about ‘T-Mobile USA getting a beefy Tocco from Samsung?’…)

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by Paul Miller, posted Aug 16th 2008 at 12:46PM If you hadn’t heard, TSA’s new laptop bag rule went into effect today, so we’re wondering: what sort of experience are you getting at the checkpoint? (Read the full post about ‘Flying today? Say hello to the TSA for us’…)

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Take a good look at this GPS.  That’s right, that is a GPS, not a remote control or an mp3 player.  Introducing the Kapsys Kapten, a GPS that has a display of 0 x 0 resolution.  Apparently, any and all instruction given to this Kapsys Kapten is done via vocal commands.  This means that you had better speak clearly when you’re telling the address you want directions to, and hopefully you will hear the computer clearly when it tells you where to go. The company has designed this device for the walkers and not the drivers.  I always hoped the GPS market would be targeted more for the pedestrians rather than the drivers.  The Kapsys Kapten has some nice specs with a SiRFStar III GPS chipset , 4GB of internal memory, and weights about 50 grams. (Read the full post about ‘Kapsys Kapten uses nothing but the voice’…)

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Rumor has it that Seagate is dropping the brown/orange colorway on its FreeAgent external hard drives and refining it to a more futuristic look (as pictured above).  The bigger drive is most likely the FreeAgent Desktop, the standard desktop drive.  To its right is probably the FreeAgent Go, or another iteration of Seagate’s portable drive line.  From the picture, it is evident that there is the inclusion of a new docking station, which will help show off the eye candy element of the drive.  Not only will the drives shed their brown exterior, they’ll be available in grey, black, silver and others, including red, green, gold, and pink.  For Mac users, it is especially exciting to hear that at least one of the drives will be formatted for instant use in OS X, so lowly Windows users will have to format the drive in order to use it. 

Look for a formal announcement for these external hard drives sometime next month.

(Read the full post about ‘Rumor: Seagate to revise FreeAgent drives, add Mac-friendliness?’…)

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by Darren Murph, posted Aug 16th 2008 at 9:31AM We recently learned that Intel would be (officially) calling Nehalem Core i7 and Centrino Atom, um, Atom. Now, however, we’ve got a few more related details for you to digest thanks to a stack of leaked presentation slides. The Tick Tock Development Model explains that both Westmere and Sandy Bridge (codenames, of course) will be fabricated with 32-nanometer technology in 2009 - 2010. Moving even further into the unknown, geeks can expect Ivy Bridge and Haswell (both doing the whole 22-nanometer thing) to surface between 2011 and 2012. The Sandy Bridge architecture will reportedly “double the number of cores per die to eight,” while a new instruction set coined Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) will likely get most of the attention. (Read the full post about ‘Leaked Intel slides reveal 8-core CPUs, AVX instruction set’…)

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Acer, a world-renowned notebook and laptop manufacturer, is set to woo its users with the new Acer Extensa 5220 Notebook. The new Acer Extensa 5220 Notebook sports a 15.4-inch Widescreen TFT Display and supports DVD-RW. This notebook incorporates Dynamic Video Memory Technology and provides a superb resolution of 1280 x 800 on its TFT screen.

Features

• Integrated Wireless WiFi Connectivity
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional
• 80GB Hard Drive
• 1024MB RAM
• Intel Celeron M 1.73GHz

Acer Extensa 5220 Notebook provides a battery life of over 2 hours.

(Read the full post about ‘Acer Extensa 5220 Notebook’…)

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I’m not certain who is coming up with ideas for cell phones designs at Alcatel, but they’ve clearly been looking to animals.  As you can see, the V212 takes its inspiration from one of the most graceful of animals to start with the letter Z.  Don’t expect too much out of this guy, as it cannot surf the web or other fancy bells and whistles.  Who would have thought that someone would actually make a cellular phone that just takes phone calls and does text messaging? (Read the full post about ‘Alcatel intro’s the zebra-patterned V212′…)

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