Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Western Digital's 250GB perpendicular Scorpio heads for laptops

from Engadget by Darren Murphy

Late last year, Western Digital decided to make the leap to the land of perpendicular magnetic recording with its 160GB Scorpio, and now the firm is stepping it up to a full quarter terabyte with its latest rendition. The 2.5-inch SATA drive fits nicely within the confines of most lappies, sports 8MB of cache, a 12-millisecond access time, spins at 5400RPM, and touts the company's WhisperDrive technology so you'll barely know its there. Additionally, the ShockGuard and SecurePark systems tag team to keep your data safe during turmoil, and the IntelliSeek system reportedly "calculates the optimum seek speed of the read / write head actuator to help reduce noise and power consumption." So if you're looking to up the storage capacity of your mobile machine, you can snag WD's latest right now for a penny under $200.

DViCO's TViX M-5100SH offers 1080p, HDMI, and H.264 decoding

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Seems like only yesterday -- ok, 4 days ago -- we were telling you about the DViCO M-4000SA HD media player. Now they're back with the M-5100SH which bests the former with 1080p support, HDMI output, and H.264 decoding. It still packs Ethernet for plenty of in-home media streaming and of course DViCO will be more than happy to throw in a 3.5-inch, 512GB SATA disk for a fee. But why not save some bills-per-byte and double your capacity with a 1TB Hitachi disk purchased elsewhere. You can also add WiFi and an optional ATSC tuner to create a full-featured 1080i video recorder. Decent but standard stuff so far; what's odd is the pricing. The cylindrical M-5100SH is only available for pre-order and will cost $439 when it ships next month in Japan and presumably parts beyond. Meanwhile, the boxy M-4100SH offers all the same features as the M-5100SH yet costs only $359. Oh, and it's available domestically now. Of course, black MacBook owners already know the premium paid for aesthetics. Peep the M-4100SH slab after the break. [Via Impress] Read -- M-5100SH Read -- M-4100SH

Continue reading DViCO's TViX M-5100SH offers 1080p, HDMI, and H.264 decoding

Plinkme.com - Free Exposure, Free Photos for Your Site

from KillerStartups.com - published startups by Siri

Bloggers like to spruce up their blog with pictures-- after all who really reads posts longer than two paragraphs in these Twitter influenced days? You can take your own photos with your handy camphone, or digital Leica , however, sometimes your photos don't make the cut, and you need something else. Now Plinkme has come up with a service to hook up bloggers with photos, while giving photographers plenty of exposure. You can browse through the site's growing gallery of photographs and pick something that suits your fancy; to use it in your blog just copy a snippet of code, et voila you've got a nice photo to enliven your post. All photos from Plinkme will include links back to the original source; one link goes directly to the photographer's Plinkme gallery, the other will go to his/her personal website. All photos are displayed via Flash, meaning photographers needn't worry about proper credits. So you photogs out there can get some exposure just by uploading your photos. Plinkme also encourages comments so you can get feedback on all your work. It's a great way to share content. In their own words: "Plinkme was developed to provide bloggers, article writers and content republishers with a means to easily and very quickly add a photo to their content to make it more visually appealing - simply by copying and pasting some JavaScript into their page. Plinkme is also a service for photographers to showcase their work, get them exposure and generate links to their site. We believe this service will give serious amateurs and professional photographers a means to get their pictures into the public eye; Plinkme automatically provides a link back to the photographer's own home page as well as their plinkme gallery whenever and wherever the photo is published." Why it might be a killer: Plinkme is a perfect marriage between publishers and photographers; bloggers get readily available photos, that are quite good, without having to go through the hassle of uploading etc; photographers meanwhile, get their work displayed all over the web, and they receive proper credits too. Plus the site is beautifully designed with tags and categories. Some questions: Will photographers be wary about submitting their work for others to use? Plinkme doesn't work with MySpace, Hi5, and a host of other networks because they use javascript, despite displaying as Flash- so what good is it really if you can't use it with your social networks?

Convert HTML Web pages to JPG Images or PDF Documents

from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

Total HTML Converter can convert HTML webpages into virtually every file format including JPG pictures, Word Documents, Adobe PDFs or even Excel Spreadsheets. You can also use this tool to extract plain text from HTML web pages. The utility supports batch conversion allowing your to transform any number of HTML files into other formats at the click of a button. Geeks would love the command line support.

convert html to pictures

Total HTML Converter supports different charsets and encoding tables and can fit HTML Width to the chosen PDF-Page-Size. Total HTML converter costs around ~$40 but you can have this useful HTML conversion tool for free providing you start your downloading engines within the next 24 hours. Download Total HTML Converter at Give Away of the Day for free. No watermarks.

MIT's handheld FAR-NDT device sees cracks in structures

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Filed under: Transportation

We've already seen radars come in handy when dodging impending attacks and avoiding accidents, but researchers at MIT are utilizing the technology to make sure our roadways and structures aren't pushed beyond their limits. A newfangled handheld device uses FAR-NDT (far-field airborne radar nondestructive testing) in order to "see through the fiberglass-polymer wrapping often used to strengthen aging concrete columns to detect damage behind the wrapping not visible to the naked eye." Furthermore, the technique can be executed from about 30 feet away and "requires no dismantling or obstruction of the infrastructure" in order to provide instant feedback. Unsurprisingly, creators are suggesting that it will be best used on bridges and piers which are typically difficult to carefully inspect, and while there's no word on when this stuff will hit DOT offices nationwide, current prototypes are panning out quite well. [Via Physorg]

Intel's P35 "Bearlake" chipset gets benchmarked, reviewed

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Those of you that have been itching to see just how well the first batch of Intel P35 "Bearlake" motherboards perform can now rest a bit easier, as the first reviews and benchmarks are finally starting to trickle in. From the looks of it, HotHardware is among the first to do the honors, getting their hands on Asus's new P5K3 Deluxe motherboard and some Corsair XMS3 DDR3 memory to go along with it. According to their findings, that combination delivered 2 to 5% boost in performance over its 965 counterpart across a range of applications, with the mobo also delivering some modest gains when loaded up with DDR2 memory. While that may seem like a relatively small bump in performance, HotHardware sees plenty more room for the chipset to grow, most notably with the addition of 1733MHz DDR3 memory. About the only downsides they could find are the DDR3 RAM's somewhat high latency and the high cost of the hardware for early adopters, although that's hardly a surprise. Those still craving some more details can hit up the link below for the complete rundown.

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Dell XPS 720 H2C gets official

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

We already knew it was coming and knew what it'd look like, but we've now got the official word from Dell on its new high-end XPS 720 H2C Edition, which is sure to delight those with big pocketbooks and a penchant for slanted boxes. Boasting a starting price in the neighborhood of $6,000, this mammoth rig comes equipped with your choice of factory overclocked QX6700 or QX6800 Core 2 Extreme processors, dual GeForce 8800 GTX or GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards, a pair of 160GB SATA hard drives, some overclocked Corsair Dominator DDR2 memory, a Blu-ray drive, and, of course, Dell's trademark H2C thermo-electric/liquid cooling system. As of yet, there's no word on a non-H2C model. Those in the U.S. can get their orders in now, while those in Europe will have to wait a few more weeks.

Medical records of Colorado residents compromised

from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Jon Gordon from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) says,

On MPR's wavLength blog and American Public Media's Future Tense program, there's a story about how we came across personally identifiable medical records for thousands of residents of Colorado (and some from Illinois) on an FTP server that required no username/password to view the data. Data was sensitive, and some records included SSNs.

Monday, May 21, 2007

Why English is Hard

Big difference between "attendee" and "attendant" -- one attends, the other attends to. :-)

Brother's RL-700S prints out RFID cards

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless

It's just too fitting that a company dubbed Brother would unleash a printer that enables even the little guy to become a Big Brother, but the RL-700S printer can indeed pop out IC tag labels with embedded RFID by the dozen. Presumably marketed towards businesses who need to keep better track of personnel, this machine also sports an RFID reader to keep a digital eye on those passing by, and even laminates the cards so that your dutiful subordinates will never suspect that their hard-earned "Employee of the Month" card is actually an undercover tracking device. Additionally, users can even pick up an optional PS-9000 module that enables network printing, and while we're not savvy on the price, it looks like it'll only be available in the oft surveyed nation of Japan anyway.

Dell's ultra-thin LCD concept with DisplayPort going retail?

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Displays

Remember that super swanky Dell monitor concept we went ga ga over back at January's CES? Yeah, we still find it hard to believe it's a Dell design. Well, it'll apparently be up for sale later in the year. What's more, it features the new VESA approved DisplayPort 1.1 interface which allows Dell to keep the panel depth to a crazy thin 0.5-inches. Although DisplayPort is said to support a resolution 4x that of today's HDTV resolutions, the panel on this pup was only pumping an estimated 1920 x 1200 when we saw it. No specs or price but we expect good things given Dell's past performance in delivering top-notch displays on the cheap.

Researchers tout better, brighter LEDs

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Displays

A pair of researchers at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science seem to think they're well on their way to building a better LED -- one that's not only brighter than existing LEDs, but more energy efficient and less expensive to boot. According to Physorg, the team's biggest success so far is red phosphorescent LED (or PLED) that delivered a record-breaking 18 lumens per watt (compared to an average of 12 lumens per watt with current red LEDs). The key to that, it seems, was to simplify the LED as much as possible, which they did by adding a polymer powder and liquid mixture to a "previously top-secret material" developed by Canon. The resulting "paint-like product" was then used to coat a layer of glass, with a charge then added to get the whole thing going. From the sound of it, these new wonder LEDs should be making their way into consumer products sooner rather than later, with Canon (naturally) reportedly already having licensed the technology and the first commercial products expected in "about three years."

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AppleTV hacked to run Xgrid

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Home Entertainment

It's no secret that the Apple TV is just a stripped-down Intel Mac running a lightly-tweaked version of OS X, so simply getting an app to run on the system isn't really a big deal -- we've seen full installs of OS X running on the device at this point. On the other hand, if you're just using the Apple TV as a media extender, that processor is just sitting there wasting spare cycles when you're not using the device, so this little hack to run Apple's Xgrid distributed-computing client on an Apple TV seems pretty slick. The hack is pretty simple if you've already poked around inside your AppleTV -- it mostly involves copying over the Xgrid Agent and configuring a few preference files. After that, your Apple TV's spare horsepower will be available to your network's Xgrid Controller, but you won't have disturbed the functionality of the device at all. Just the thing to speed up those VisualHub video transcoding sessions, eh? Now, if only someone would wedge the Folding@home client into this thing (hint, hint).

8-core NextDimension PC stretches the definition of portable

from Engadget by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

No, the laptop industry hasn't bypassed the idea of quad-core laptops in favour of octo-core machines, since NextComputing's 8-core flextops are machines you wouldn't want anywhere near your lap. Based as they are around the Intel Xeon 5300 processor, the NextDimension Pro and Evo can take advantage of the relatively low power requirements of 100W for two quad-core CPUs (down from 160 Watts for its power hungrier desktop equivalent). For a sense of just how expandable the NextDimension machines are, consider that they can hold up to twelve 160GB 2.5-inch 7200RPM hard disk drives. They also manage to pack in four PCI / PCI-e slots in the Evo model, and Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for 24GB of memory through four DMA channels on both models. These 20-pound desktop machines with a handle will be shown off at Interop Las Vegas later this month, but beyond that we're not sure when or for how much you'll be able to lug one away.

Toshiba's NC-MR technology could boost HDD capacity 'tenfold'

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Just days after Fujitsu tooted its own horn and suggested that it could increase hard drive capacity by 500-percent in a mere two years comes word that Toshiba coincidentally has a similarly grandiose claim. Aside from the obvious leapfrog game that's being played here, Tosh has apparently been working hand-in-hand with Tohoku University to develop "a phenomenon" dubbed Nanocontact Magnetic Resistance, or NC-MR, in which an "enormous difference in magnetoresistance is achieved when two magnetic materials are situated close together and connected by a contact point that narrows to around 1-nanometer." Put simply, the prototype NC-MR structure is twice as large as today's read heads, and elements based on the NC-MR structure would have a "lower resistance than existing TMR elements, enabling the read heads to be miniaturized and still operate quickly." Of course, these sensational claims have yet to make it beyond the drawing board, and while you may be anxious to get one of these in your rig, you'll be waiting about five years or so if things continue as planned. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]

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