Best computer news

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that creative is “where it’s at” when it comes to all things computer audio. Just announced Creative HS-1100 Tournament Gaming Headset‏, a new headset in their line of competitively priced high quality cans seems to be the best of the best of all they have to offer. This gamer specific headset is really tuned for all the aspects of high performance action, featuring in-house ‘Silencer’ noise canceling, audio enhancing Crystalizer effects, and the tried and true X-Fi machinery found in all of their higher fidelity offerings giving accurate 3D positional surround sound.

Not just a normal USB headset for in game voice chat and team play, the HS-1100 also drops the Fatal1ty brand, and adds a few new exciting features over the current top model, the HS-1000. The adjustable microphone is now detachable, earcups are foldable, and bundled VoiceFX software will allow you to alter your voice to sound older, younger or more Shatner depending on which is appropriate for your particular game. You have to pay to play though, these bad boys will set you back $129.99 once they are released. Full headset image after the jump.
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Well, the challenge to keep people away from your desk just got easier. The network manatees have been hard at work coming up with the USB powered, glowing, motion sensing alarm skull. A random convergence of features if there ever was one. Set this spooky brainbox on your desk and plug it in and watch it glow. But look out the skull watches you back, if anything moves in front of its gaze it lets out a blood curdling shriek. It only comes with a 3 foot cord, so an extension might be in order if you want to use this while you’re within earshot or the joke will be on you. This should make everyone think twice before bothering you while you are busy.

While there’s probably very few practical applications for this outside of pranks and annoying people this side of Halloween, pranks ought to be enough to warrant the spend. A measly $14 and you can get your Cinco de Mayo and Halloween shopping done a few months early. Once they’re in stock at thumbsup we can see if it might finally be the thing that keeps the cats off our keyboard.
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Kanguru Solutions has come out of nowhere with an innovative flash drive to give modern day computer users the added option of using a large capacity flash drive over both eSATA and USB connections to truly get their need for speed satisfied. With their first attempt can they succeed in manifesting a formidable foe to other USB flash drives by offering both the convenience and wide availability of USB and the pure performance offered by the relatively new eSATA interface without affecting the general experience? Read on to find out.
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Well, you’ve just run out of people to blame for those extra charges on your credit card or your competitor edging your company out of the market. Studies keep pointing the finger at you, well us, the end user as a major source of identity theft and fraud due to misplacing our digital goodies. Most recently, laundromats seem to be a flash black hole eating up a total of around 9,000 USB flash drives each year.

Another study estimated that nearly 200,000 phones, PDAs and laptops were lost in a single cab company’s cabs each year. Countless business secrets and personal info is flying into questionable hands due to sheer forgetfulness. IT departments are racing to come up with strict new policies and solutions to protect their intellectual property but technology is outpacing security. They are approaching microscopic are nearly indestructable and camoflaged. This is ignoring the fact that some of them are big enough to smuggle out your entire email system on a single drive. So hang onto those drives the job you save may be your own.
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Nascar fans, start your engines. Centon is gearing up to release race car shaped (1:88 scale replica) USB drives tricked out in the glorious colors of race icons Dale Earnhart Jr., Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon. If that’s not enough to get your engines revving, instead of the usually sub-par capacities offered by stylized flash drives, these standouts are in rare company packing 4GB of space. There’s more race fans, the drives are preloaded with images, sounds and videos of each driver doing their thing. This is the perfect gift for that sports fan boss that’s not tech-savvy enough to own their own drive. This one they might even be able to find instead of borrowing yours. But of course, if you’re looking for a real fast thumbdrive, look no further than this.
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Kensington, renowned makers of power and peripheral products, have silently added a USB powered AAA battery charger to their lineup. Joining the ranks of Energizer, Duracell and more recently IOGear this dual function charger can also use the charger’s juice (with the included adapter cables) to power up your cell phone for some extra talk time. While only packing 800mAh of charge in the 2 included NIMH AAA’s should eek out a few emergency minutes or an extra text message or 2 to your BFF. Don’t expect too them to help terribly much on the more power hungry phones like the iPhone and other smart-phones. What they are a great tool for is wireless mice and keyboards, having a charger and 2 sets of batteries in rotation can really save your work day as batteries tend to be a valuable commodity in the workplace.
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This is the second toy put out by Eyeclops that is marketed for kids but if you try it you may not let your kids have it. This advanced toy is the 2nd eye opener (pun intended) from this new firm that will have kids and adults entertained for hours. Looking similar in build to the Eyeclops Night Vision Goggles, the Bionicam is a handheld portable microscope with a builtin display. It sports 3 levels of magnification, 100x, 200x and 400x which can be changed by rotating the front bezel of the lens. The image is displayed on its approximately 3″ LCD screen in full color. It runs on 5 AA batteries via a corded battery pack.

That would be cool enough but there’s more. Images and videos can be recorded onto a custom USB drive. Specifics on the image and quality have been hard to come by but best guess is 1024×768 jpeg images and 320×240 AVI video. Eyeclops may not include batteries but they do throw in a 32MB flash drive so that you can start emailing super macro photos and videos right after you send the kids to bed.
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Snacks stop getting refilled in the break room? Your boss has coincidentally asked everyone to list all of their current responsibilities? Your 401k looks more like an 001k and the execs are spending a lot of time in locked door meetings? Now the big client’s website has just gone down. Don’t freak out, let it out. Everyone needs a way to let off stress from time to time. Unfortunately, those little gel balls don’t squeal when you squeeze them and those little whack-a-moles don’t cry or do anything truly wrath-satisfying when you need it.

Dreamcheeky has something to help try and get your blood pressure just a little bit lower. The USB Stress Ball offers 2 more dimensions to vent your fury. This stress toy offers more than just a punching game you can strangle, smash, squeeze and twist it and see your power with some onscreen feedback of your strength and rage. It has a 4 ft. cord so you should be able to get it a safe distance from your innocent bystander peripherals. So if an hour of Halo isn’t enough to calm your nerves plug one of these in before that big vein in your head pops.
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Perched near the top of the ultra-slim T series line of digital still cameras, the Cyber-shot DSC-T500 is the camera of choice for the fashion conscious – stunning exterior design, competitive feature set, 720p HD video capture, a brilliant widescreen and touch interface, and the often-copied Sony folding lens. Has performance and ease-of-use been sacrificed unnecessarily in the interests of fashion? Or has Sony finally created the ultimate slim high resolution digicam? Read on to find out.
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We love this Nano craze, seriously, and will be be the second one in line for one of these. Buffalo’s preparing to slip a Draft N wireless USB adapter under your door, the WLI-UC-GN. Like other nano dongles for Bluetooth and mice this nubbin of a device barely sticks out of your computer as far as it goes in. Currently only being released in Japan at the roughly translated price of about $23 USD. Expected availability there is sometime in February. We can only expect(hope) that this will have a wider release shortly thereafter.

While speed is the most widely touted attribute of the 802.11n standard which tops out at a theoretical 600Mb/s, most of the current consumer releases of N devices top out at 300Mb/s. The WLI-UC-GN has hopped on the Draft2 standard which only clocks in at 150Mb/s. The one vital statistic that’s missing from the release notes is the effective range. In a nutshell, 802.11n relies on multiple antennas and with the adapter being so small one has to wonder if range will suffer. The adapter is really inexpensive and hard to pass up but with questionable range and only 3x faster than widely adopted 802.11g it may not give us enough of an upgrade to invest in a network upgrade over g.
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