Best computer news

Thanko has dropped another oddity on us. A completely different way to be cool via butts. The e-cigarette. Basically its a goofy quit smoking device. The USB charger charges a battery power aerosol container of nicotine spray. When it senses you taking a tug on one of the included filter butts it releases a small does of nicotine. The spray is a sweeter smelling version of normal cigarette smoke which is less noxious for those around you. The spray also contains no tar which is much better for those who like you.

This opens the door for caffeinated cigarettes and multiple flavors. The one image that continually flashes through my head while reading about this is the thought of teachers having to take them away from children. At $33 a pack it might seem cheaper to just quit smoking cold turkey but where’s the fun in that. At the risk of sounding cliché, Please keep out of reach of children.
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While there are a few pulse-meter watches out there most of the require an annoying chest strap to actually function. A lot of people buy them to help them with workouts, to achieve maximum cardio-efficiency, we however just want the cool display. Enter Rakuten’s ECG LED Watch. The over sized watch features an LED blip display reminiscent of a hospital’s ECG monitor. The peaks and valley actually graphically display the current time. The peaks map the hours and and the valleys mark the minutes.

Making for a dramatic and alarming first impression as it pulses the time it looks as if you have to have your health constantly monitored. This may not be something that you want to come across to whomever you are meeting. Barring immediate distress about your current physical condition the watch is quite the eye catching timepiece available in two colors, black and silver. The black model features red LEDs and the silver model sports green ones. To top it all off it seems that you can recharge the display battery via a USB connector just to make sure your lights keep on shining. Lest it fade during a meeting and the wrong person see it and start in with unwanted mouth-to-mouth. This mixed signal timepiece can be bought from Rakuten for approximately $257 dollars, no details on whether they will ship abroad are available.
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Thanko has dropped another oddity on us. A completely different way to be cool via butts. The e-cigarette. Basically its a goofy quit smoking device. The USB charger charges a battery power aerosol container of nicotine spray. When it senses you taking a tug on one of the included filter butts it releases a small does of nicotine. The spray is a sweeter smelling version of normal cigarette smoke which is less noxious for those around you. The spray also contains no tar which is much better for those who like you.

This opens the door for caffeinated cigarettes and multiple flavors. The one image that continually flashes through my head while reading about this is the thought of teachers having to take them away from children. At $33 a pack it might seem cheaper to just quit smoking cold turkey but where’s the fun in that. At the risk of sounding cliché, Please keep out of reach of children.
Permanent Link

While there are a few pulse-meter watches out there most of the require an annoying chest strap to actually function. A lot of people buy them to help them with workouts, to achieve maximum cardio-efficiency, we however just want the cool display. Enter Rakuten’s ECG LED Watch. The over sized watch features an LED blip display reminiscent of a hospital’s ECG monitor. The peaks and valley actually graphically display the current time. The peaks map the hours and and the valleys mark the minutes.

Making for a dramatic and alarming first impression as it pulses the time it looks as if you have to have your health constantly monitored. This may not be something that you want to come across to whomever you are meeting. Barring immediate distress about your current physical condition the watch is quite the eye catching timepiece available in two colors, black and silver. The black model features red LEDs and the silver model sports green ones. To top it all off it seems that you can recharge the display battery via a USB connector just to make sure your lights keep on shining. Lest it fade during a meeting and the wrong person see it and start in with unwanted mouth-to-mouth. This mixed signal timepiece can be bought from Rakuten for approximately $257 dollars, no details on whether they will ship abroad are available.
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Swekey, the Safe Web Enabler KEY is a new security USB device that wants to help you move quicker and more securely on the web. The Swekey uses U3 type autolaunch execution to bypass all that annoying user interaction that can slow things down. Once things are setup behind the scenes you are required to create an OpenID account. The Swekey saves your OpenID information and automatically logs you into the OpenID system as soon as the Swekey is plugged in. Swekey also has a plan for Corporate branded moiety. The Corporate OpenID/Swekey servers can be bought or commissioned, probably very cheaply considering that all the software is free/open source.

OpenID already has a fair amount of constituent members that should continue to grow. Implementation is fairly simple for system administrators and canned code for integrated logins is popping up more and more often. Joomla, WordPress, Putty and Drupal are just a few of the major Open-Source players that are already compatible. You can purchase yours for $15 from their online store and get a jump on what will likely continue to grow and the needs of online authentication continue to grow.
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Panasonic has released the second in its line of hybrid cameras this week. The DMC-GH1 is the second camera that Panasonic has released that is Still camera capable of HD video recording. Sporting the standard Lumix high quality still features like Live View viewfinder and facial recognition and memorization. Panasonic’s image stabilization technology is still touted as one of the best in the industry. Bearing a 12MP CMOS sensor the DMC-GH1 can deliver up to 4000 x 3000 resolution images, and stores them on SD media. This is the second camera from Panasonic sporting its new micro four-thirds lens mount. The kit comes with a 45-200mm zoom lens and should retail around $1500.

The 1080p full HD movies are captured at only 24 frames per second. This is a bit slower than standard television signals which around 30 frames per second. You may be able to tell the difference in fast action captures but for most any other subject matter you probably won’t care. The video is encoded in the AVCHD standard which is still rising in popularity. This should be available in Japan on April 24th no word on how long it will take to reach the rest of the world.
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French magnate Thomson is positing a new type of a mp3 file the mp3HD is basically a standard MP3 with higher quality version of the same track along for the ride. Thomson hopes that this new format’s scalable quality will endear itself to audiophiles who don’t want to ditch their old (or new) MP3 players. This would allow for portability amongst systems with differing capabilities. Most MP3 players will see them as nothing more than regular MP3s but if you’ve equipped your PC with the appropriate codecs you’ll be able to access the Higher quality audio stream. The new codec is compressed slightly more aggressively than FLAC but is still capturing 800kbps of sound data. The wrapper MP3 data can be scaled at any quality level but since the HD data is going to be piggybacked on regardless there’s not much since trying to economize for size.

While definitely having some niche utility there’s not too much to get excited about since this tries to cater to 2 groups that very seldom overlap, audiophiles and music pack-rats. The songs will take 6 times longer to download and take up 6 times the storage on your already cramped flash players. Similar add-ons have been attaching themselves to mp3s like leeches almost since their first release. ID3, ID3v2, Album Art, Lyrics, etc… There’s no reason that sticking a higher fidelity version of the song into that melange wouldn’t be a win, eventually. Now while it also would be nice to only manage one library of music this format is a little ahead of its time. After another few cycles of Moore’s Law elapses this will have great use but it will truly rely on bandwidth and flash storage no longer being a factor.
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Evergreen’s new USB trackball is a dead ringer for the Blackberry Pearl trackball, which was was so popular that it has persisted in almost every model of blackberry produced for the past 3 years. The tiny trackball has also just shown up on the HTC-G1. Now while most people know that trackballs are really intended for exterminating centipedes and destroying missiles threatening to annihilate your space colonies, the trackball has remained a cult favorite in the desktop IO game for years. Trackballs are good at reducing RSI problems and require much less desktop space than the old school mouse. Their smaller real estate requirements have brought them back into the mainstream of late as controls for portable devices like phones, PDAs and UMPCs.

The Evergreen Trackball comes attached to a retracting USB cable and is paired with 3 button controls ostensibly left click, right click and a scroll toggle. Unfortunately the shape doesn’t suggest that it would be comfortable in any orientation. Although, even without the buttons this could find its way into use in plenty of unique custom setups like car-PCs. Sadly there’s a better version of this already alive in the Raon Everun UMPC. If the trackball is an upside down ball mouse, Raon’s version is in upside down optical mouse. Either way more innovation is always welcome as wearable devices come into fashion and traditional peripherals really don’t work well on the go.
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Wacom has released a new series of their much sought after tablets. The Intuos4 series of tablets incorporates many new features that greatly enhance their ability to digitize an artist’s output from wrist to virtual canvas. The tablet can distinctly recognize 2048 different levels of pressure from the variety of input methods available. Capturing the most subtle nuances of pressure, tilt, rotate and turn capturing amazing levels of intended detail. There are 6 different input styli to choose from but only the original is included. 4 types of pen forms, Art, Classic, Inking and Grip should suit provide a fit for any hand or simulate any analog writing utensil. Each pen also comes with an assortment of nibs (pen tips) to provide the friction and tactile feedback you desire. There’s also a mouse for run of the mill computer work and a very handy looking Airbrush Pen with a scroll wheel to take the place of the flow control.

The tablets themselves are also elegantly multifunction. Easily resting under your free hand you can operate four application specific or programmable OLED mode buttons as well as a Touch Ring akin to the 2nd gen iPod’s ring. The only thing you might find uncomfortable about the whole setup is the price. Wacom is still on the luxury fringe catering to the hardcore artists with their asking price of $229 to $789 according to your desired tablet size.
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Hard drives and external drive enclosures can be sourced cheaply through a wide variety of retailers. The FreeAgent Go portable hard drive is a new-comer to Seagate’s drive family of portable storage solutions and in an age where gigabytes of storage are needed in common households for data, photo and movie archival. Can a new case design, hard drive management software and a brand name renowned for great warranty service and reliability grab your attention? Read on.
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