Saturday, December 13, 2008

ViBook USB Adapter Runs Many Screens Via USB [Adapters]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/_a2zN9Ps1mg/vibook-usb-adapter-runs-many-screens-via-usb

The maker of the ViDock Gfx ExpressCard adapter solution has just come out with another adapter to connect up to six displays via USB.

The dongle comes at $130 and can support 1680x1050 or 1600x1200 on both Macs and PCs. It's compatible with the latest MacBook and MacBook Pros, for those of you who need more displays than the one Mini DisplayPort can hold.

Each adapter supports one display, and you can hook up to six of these to your PC or four up to your Mac for a super crazy panoramic view at your spreadsheets. Compatibility is DVI and VGA, and should be fine with hot plugging in and out. [VillageTronic]



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10 Gadgets For Winter Fun: From Snowball Guns to Ice Saunas [Tgif]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/2Yj6tebBL4k/10-gadgets-for-winter-fun-from-snowball-guns-to-ice-saunas

Man, I really miss all the fun you can have in the snow. Snowball fights and forts, snowboarding, school cancellations...those were good times. If only I had gadgets like this back then.

Snow-Baller: Nothing beats a good old-fashioned snowball fight when the conditions are right. You know—when the snow is wet enough to be densely packed. The only problem is that forming the snowballs yourself reduces your efficiency and therefore compromises your chances of success in battle. The Snow-Baller should help to eliminate that problem by speeding up the production process (although you may have to make a trade-off between quantity and quality). [Sno-Baller via Link]

Snowball Blaster: If you are really serious about having an advantage in battle, you could step up to this full-fledged snowball gun. It sculpts the balls for you (three at a time) and can sling em' up to 50 feet. [Hammacher Schlemmer via Link]

IceBox Igloo Maker: If you are going to engage in an all-out snowball war, a pr! otective fort is going to be essential. Using this tool you can build a quality igloo, brick by brick in one to three hours. [Icebox via Link]

Snowman Maker: What's a war without an army? Using this mold, you can crank out a battalion of frosty, button-nosed warriors. Kind of like a wintery version of Emperor Qin Shi Huang's terracotta army.

Slegoon: There are sleds...and then there is the Slegoon. Imagine, if you will, blazing down an ice coated hill in one of these things. The g-forces pressing you against the seat, the snow set ablaze behind you, kids on normal sleds getting devoured by your wake. What was that sound? A sonic boom? You just might survive this if you can stay focused and you don't run out of track. [Link]

Gas Powered Snowboard: Part snowboard, part snowmobile, this contraption has a 6.5-hp 4-cycle gas engine that can get you traveling at speeds up to 18 mph. It can also run for up to 2 hours on a 3/4 tank of gasoline. [Hammacher Schlemmer]

The Grinch: If you prefer riding a traditional ! snowboar d, you can still enjoy some assistance from technology in the form of this Grinch slingshot. The device is hammered into the ground and can rocket snowboarders and surfers into ramps and waves with a towrope attached to a 7HP engine. [Grinch via Link]

Ice Sauna: Of course, there is more to do during the winter than snowball fights and snowboarding. Apparently, sitting in a room where it is 10 degrees below zero can be quite relaxing (for northern European countries at least). I'll take their word for it—although if this woman is included I'm all about it. [Link]

Snow at Home: No Snow? No problem! The SG7 snowmaking system can turn your lawn into a winter wonderland on demand. Unfortunately, it requires freezing temperatures to operate (and it doesn't come cheap at $3300). Might as well just wait for mother nature to do her thing. [Snow at Home]

Instant Snow: Okay, so you don't live in an area where the temperatures dip below freezing. You can still join in the fun with this Instant Snow kit. All you need to do is add water to the powder mix and you can watch it transform into a compound that looks and feels like real snow. Each container can make eight gallons of artificial snow, which should be enough for a warm weather snowball fight. [Steve Spangler Science]

[Image via Frank Juarez]



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Cheap HDTV Battlemodo: The Best Sets Under $900 [Cheap Hdtv Battlemodo]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/-o2cEOOLMeg/cheap-hdtv-battlemodo-the-best-sets-under-900

With so much financial strife, it sounds insane to splurge on an HDTV now. Good thing there are 40" or bigger sets to be had for under $900. But which ones don't suck?

To find out, we grabbed five HDTVs you can find on the street for under $900—some require a little snooping to find that price, but they're out there. We've got four LCDs and one plasma, with four of them were discount brands, while one was from a pretty top name brand. We're looking at a few things: are any sub-$900 TVs actually watchable? Are any lower-tier brands as good as big name brands? And finally, which TV delivers the most bang for the buck?

The HD Guru Gary Merson and Cnet senior editor for TVs David Katzmaier—two guys who know more about HDTVs than I know about my mom—graciously came by to help us calibrate the sets, in order to coax the absolute best picture out of them and give us some insights on what we should look for.

Here's how we set up the tests: Every set was calibrated with a THX Optimizer disc, with an emphasis on getting the darkest possible blacks while maintaining detail and acceptable brightness, since blacks are LCDs' big weakness, and the most likely attribute to suffer in cheaper sets—in more expensive sets, like Sony's LED-backlit Bravia XBR8, a lot of what you're paying for are deep, detailed blacks. From there, we tested the sets playoff style—two at a time with a 2-way HDMI splitter using The Dark Knight on Blu-ray as the test disc because it's a beautifully shot film with all kinds of perfect HDTV test scenes, and its excellent master makes it solid source material. Plus, it's the one Blu-ray movie everyone will own. An! d it's a wesome. So, two may enter, only one may leave: The set that wins the showdown advances to the next round. Here are the five cheap HDTVS:

•Insiginia NS-LCD42HD-09 1080p LCD$800 (Note: We actually tested the 52-inch version because Best Buy didn't have the 42-inch model, but they assured that the guts are the same, so we assume that the results would be the same)
•Toshiba Regza 42RV535 1080p LCD $875-$930
•Vizio VO42LF 1080p LCD $830 MSRP-$880
•Vizio VP423 720p Plasma $830 MSRP
•Westinghouse VK-40F580D 1080p LCD$850-$899

Round 1: Toshiba Regza vs. Vizio LCD

It's pretty much a blow-out: The Regza wowed us against the Vizio with blacks that weren't just deeper, but more detailed with a much cleaner contrast. In night-time skyscraper shots, you could make out windows and other smaller details much more clearly. The Vizio's viewing angle was not nearly as wide as the Toshiba, and it had a more noticeable color distortion at a 45-degree angle. Color wise, the Vizio might be a bit more appealing, because even after calibration, they tend to be more saturated. The Toshiba had noticeable! instanc es of showing shiny moire pattern when panning down a building that was essentially a set of verticals lines—in other words, they got kind of warped. But dialing down the sharpness, as David suggested, reduced this quite a bit. Both sets have below-par motion resolution, one of Gary's favorite picking points. If you watch text as the camera zooms by, it gets mad blurry, but as Gary himself admits, most people don't notice this kind of thing unless it's super egregious.

Winner: Toshiba

Round 2: Westinghouse vs. Vizio LCD

This was a really tough one. We went ahead and slotted the Westinghouse against the loser of the first LCD battle because we noticed it had a really obnoxious backlight issue during calibration: It's much brighter on the right than on the left, a problem that gets worse when you view it off-angle. The picture exaggerates how bad it is, but it's definitely noticeable.
That aside, it performed favorably against the Vizio. It has a better viewing angle with less distortion as you swing to the side. But it also has some of the moire problems we noticed with the Toshiba. Motion isn't fantastic on either set. What did the Vizio in was how badly it crushed the blacks vs. the Westinghouse. In other words, at the brightest black level we considered acceptable, a lot of detail was lost. Gary pointed out the problem there—which you'll see again in the plasma: Its settings don't have fine enough gradations for picture fine-tuning. It got brighter or darker in huge leaps, preventing us from finding a happy medium with solid blacks that have detail. So, as we said, it's a tough one. If the Westinghouse didn't have the backl! ight iss ue, it would've won hands down.

Winner: Tie.

Round 3: Vizio vs. Insignia
The Insignia is the worst set we tested. It's just bad. The blacks are really crushed, the details are mushy, the colors don't pop—we even tried tweaking post-calibration to bring them up, but it just made them look unnatural—and the few aspect-ratio options all resulted in a noticeable portion of the picture being cut off, even as it displayed perfectly on the Vizio LCD next to it. If you buy the 42-inch version for $800, you're getting hosed. If you buy the $1500 52-inch version, you're just screwed. It made the Vizio, the loser in previous rounds, look almost amazing.

Winner: Vizio

Final Round: Toshiba Regza vs. Vizio Plasma
This was the hardest fought battle of the competition. We gave the plasma a bye to skip to the final, because we rightly figured plasma's inherently better picture qualities suited it for a boss battle, the Sagat to LCD's Ryu.

One of plasma's greatest strengths against LCDs is that, unless you're talking about super-high-end LED-backlit LCD, plasma will beat LCDs with darker, richer blacks every time, simply because of the technological differences. So it was stunning that the Vizio essentially forfeited this advantage by crushing them. Hard. They were darker than the Toshiba's, obviously, but bringing the brightness up to a level where you could make out the same dark details seen on the Toshiba without washing out the picture was impossible because of the controls. Gary says he routinely advocates that TV makers build in finer gradations in adjustments, and in this case, the ability ! of the u ser to more finely adjust the picture. Better controls would have been to the Vizio plasma's tremendous advantage.

The Vizio plasma maintained its other inherent strengths though. It had zero viewing-angle trouble, looking essentially perfect from all angles. Motion was better, with more details preserved, in signs for instance, as the camera passed by. Like the other Vizio set, the LCD, colors were verrry saturated, especially out of the box, with a lot of red in the picture. Calibration helped, but the Toshiba still seemed to provide more accurate color. A few people in our office who passed by said they preferred the extra pop of the Vizio plasma's color and saturation, so this might come down to a personal preference.

At our viewing distance of six feet, the difference in detail between the 1080p LCD and 720p plasma was noticeable, particularly when we examined facial details and hair. The 1080p Toshiba was, well, more detailed than the 720p Vizio plasma. From nine or more feet away though, most viewers would be hard pressed to discern a difference in screen resolution.

In the end, we, along with Gary, came down on the side of the Toshiba. Its picture has a clarity that the plasma didn't quite touch, both in dark scenes and its colors were truer to life. Overall, we feel it's the best buy for the money, though it will take a bit of gumshoeing to buy it for under $900.

Winner: Toshiba

Other Considerations
There are a few larger points to take one. First and foremost, any of these sets will be more amazing than your standard-def set, and none of them, except perhaps the Insignia, are a total waste of money. Another important point, one that David stresses, is that we were able to make the picture on each one worlds better than it was out of the box—if you calibrate your TV, you will get more out of it, no matter who you bu! y it fro m. Finally, Gary notes that the lower-tiered brands can have worse warranty and customer support terms, so while the Toshiba might run the highest price initially, its overall cost of ownership may possibly be lower. If you haven't bought an HDTV yet, we hope this little test-bed has served you in making this very important step.



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Addonics Adapter Turns Any USB Storage Device Into a NAS Server [Storage]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/Ml31nqRMDeA/addonics-adapter-turns-any-usb-storage-device-into-a-nas-server

For only $55, Addonics claims that this tiny gadget can easily turn any USB storage device into a full-fledged Network Attached Storage (NAS) server with support for both SMB and FTP access.

All you have to do is pop it into your USB storage drive (also works as a print server), attach an Ethernet line to your router and you are ready to start serving up media over the network. It even features Bit-Torrent compatibility, so you can send downloaded media files directly to your storage unit no matter where you are.

Features:

* Convert any USB 2.0 / 1.1 mass storage device into a Network Attached Storage device
* Great for adding Addonics Storage Tower, Storage Rack or any Addonics USB storage device onto the network
* Great for creating a custom Network Attached Storage appliance.
* USB port can be used to power most 2.5" USB hard drives or any low powered USB storage device.
* Support Fast Ethernet 10/100Mbps.
* Simple to install
* Small and light weight. Size slightly longer than a C size battery. Can be installed practically anywhere
* Can be set as DHCP server or client.
* Support Samba server for up to 64 concurrent clients.
* Support FTP server for up to 8 concurrent users.
* Can be set as a print server to attach any USB printer to the network
* Built-in Bit Torrent client for direct download to the attached USB storage device
* Can be set as a UPnP AV server to share photo/music files stored on the file server with XBOX 360 video game consoles connected to the LAN
* User management to allow read only or read/write access to folders
* Administrative management access via web browser with password security.
* Compatible with all Windows OS, Mac OS, Linux 2.6.x and above

[A ddonics via eHomeUpgrade via Crunchgear]



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BlackBerry: $20, McCain-Palin's Contacts: Priceless [BlackBerry]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/KwaMc-RBdjw/blackberry-20-mccain+palins-contacts-priceless

In order to get back some of the money spent on the McCain-Palin campaign, items from the campaign were sold today at a yard sale, including a $20 BlackBerry, fully loaded with confidential information.

When reporters from Fox 5 stopped by the McCain-Palin headquarters today, they were excited to find BlackBerry phones being sold for $20 each. Because the phones came with dead batteries and no chargers, it was only after the reporters had returned to their office and had charged the phones when they realized what $20 actually bought them.

Hundreds of e-mails from early September through early November, and more than 50 phone numbers—including private cell phone numbers belonging to politicians, campaign leaders and journalists—had been left on one of the BlackBerry phones. Whoops! Not to worry though—after the McCain-Palin campaign had been notified, they assured everyone that procedures were being carried out to fix the situation. [MyFox]



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