Asus Bamboo, The Jungle Boy
Boris | 2:30 am | January 31, 2008 | Concept Laptops, Green Laptops
Laptop life expectancy. How long is it? With the speed things are changing, CD for DVD, HDD for SSD, ABC for XYZ, how often do you want your laptop to be replaced? Our conservative guess is 1.5 years, at most. 18 months before you throw your laptop away, replacing it by a newer, faster, better one.
Portable devices and, in particular, laptops are not easy on the environment — they produce toxins when they end up in landfills. But the industry, while encouraging to spend more, is at the same time trying to show that it cares. Not just about terabytes, megapixels and inches – but about laptop ac adapters that don’t waste as much electricity, batteries that are easier to recycle, and components made from plants.
Asus brings us the latest in eco-friendly notebook design. The Asus Eco Book, as it’s dubbed, is encased in natural bamboo. Building computers out of wood is not new. Apple’s first computer was nothing more than a homemade motherboard inside a wooden box. But Asus had a much harder task, since the components of a laptop are so close together and heat insulation is an issue when something as flammable as wood is used. Apart from a bunch of homeless, anorexic pandas that rely on bamboo as their habitat and food, Asus will please everybody if the concept works.
Crystals Are Laptop’s Best Friends
Christine | 6:53 pm | January 29, 2008 | Uncategorized
If one is to name a purely girlish laptop, they probably think of Apple iBook Tangerine or Sony Vaio VGN-C290 Pink. A red, green or yellow Dell Inspiron 1720 will do as well. Strange though it may seem, the colour may be more important for a girl than technical features, and laptop manufacturers have been making use of it, offering more nicely-coloured laptops each year.
NEC said no to this colourful tactic by launching a new Hello Kitty laptop, which, however, exploits another soft spot voiced by Marilyn Monroe: “Diamonds are a girl’s best friends”. Well, NEC’s “diamonds” are not actually diamonds, these are Swarovski Crystals, but they have their magnetic force, too. Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but blondes will certainly prefer shiny laptops. So it seems that at the moment only NEC knows how to entice girls from Apple and Sony, just like Daniel Swarovski is the only one who knows how to turn a strass into a sparkling crystal.
Source: FarEastGizmos
HandWriting 2.0
maksim | 6:05 am | | Laptop Accessories
On the scale of things that define us as civilized, writing comes first. You can eat with your feet, use bathtub as a toilet, and walk around in crocodile skin skirt- all these are mere eccentricities compared to social death of somebody who can’t use a pen.
Today, of course, most of us hardly ever write. But similarly, some of us hardly ever unclip other people’s bras. Skills like these are like sniper shots – rare to use, but are the ones that need to be executed with effortless perfection when the time comes.
What keeps the skill of writing alive in a battle against qwerty is its simplicity- nothing can beat a clear white sheet and a pen. What kills it is the inability to edit and store text in digital format, something that only a keyboard can offer.
Pulse Smartpen by Lightscribe is an attempt to stop the war, and teach the pen how to type. Written text can be converted into digital format, and what is even more striking, the pen can record sound and synchronize it to the writing. Sounds weird and overdone? Here is what it can do.
The pen has a tiny infrared camera on its tip, and everything is recorded on 1gb of inbuilt memory. It needs special paper to write on, but the cost is similar to the cost of regular paper. Notes can later be transferred to a PC and also uploaded online, there is a dedicated account with 250mb of free storage for every registered user. Files can be shared between users, which can be very useful for students exchanging lecture notes.
Smartpen has a built in voice recorder that times audio with writing. Later, the sheet can be tapped at any part of written text and the pen will start audio playback at the point when this particular text was written. Students revising a course before an exam can quickly clarify the meaning of some hastily scribbled term- by tapping a term the pen will start playback of the lecture at the time the term was discussed. Journalists can conduct interviews as it was done before, with pen and paper, and later playback specific extracts of the conversation by touching shorthand notes.
Higher quality audio recording can be done with a 3D recording headset that both records and plays sound. Each earbud contains a microphone that records audio separately, perfect for far-field recording and noisy environments.
Development of third-party software is encouraged, which means that there will be more possible applications of the Smartpen as soon as it is officially rolled out in March. One that is likely to be on the list is text recognition software customised to specific handwriting and language. Which should make converting your handwriting to typed text easy.
Combining simplicity of a pen, recyclability of digital text and accuracy of recorded voice is an exciting idea. And if it works as well as it sounds the skill of handwriting will not be forgotten any time soon.
Source: Ubergizmo via Lightscribe
Mouse Bad
maksim | 2:31 am | January 25, 2008 | Mouse Pads
From the point of view of marketing, a mouse pad is a very difficult thing to sell. They are so easy to make, everybody does it. Competition is very tight. The only feature of a mousepad is its complete lack of features. It is as simple as a spoon. It is design nirvana, it is form meeting function to become one, 100% perfection.
So how then do you sell a mousepad, if everyone is so good at it? How do you perfect the perfect? Easy. You need to change the function. Change the reason why the mousepad exists. You need to make people want to do more with it. And that will create new form. That will create the mousepad that no competitor has, and everybody wants.
A small company from
Source: GadgetShop
8 Ways To Make a Recyclable Laptop Bag
Christine | 3:42 am | January 24, 2008 | Green Laptops, Uncategorized
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Hippies may be accused of libertinism, drug-abuse and sexual perversion, but what they try to teach the world is that the nature is our treasure. Wearing synthetic clothes, eating artificially made food, driving cars with high levels of toxic gases emission we can hardly call ourselves flower children.
However, while hippies’ methods of struggling for nature protection were mostly expressed by boycotting ecology-unfriendly products and promoting biodegradable products, some consumer goods manufacturers take action nowadays and introduce a range of eco-friendly products.
Let’s take laptop bags, for instance. It’s hard to believe how different recyclable materials for making laptop bags can be:
Though the bag may be a bit inconvenient to use as there’s not much space left when a laptop is inside, the bag looks very stylish.
Quite a clumsy one, but seems to be soft and have enough space.
The bag looks as if it was made from durable fabric, besides, it is stain-resistant.
It’s impossible to tell a common laptop bag from one of these recycled ones. And if there’s no difference, why not go for an eco-friendly one.
Teenagers will like it. As well as hippies.
These bags are handmade and thanks to the handmade nature, they are unique since they all vary a bit in size and shape.
This one even allows to access ports without removing the laptop from the bag.
Sails of decommissioned yachts
Sails is probably the last thing that would come to one’s mind when thinking of recyclable materials. Which, however, doesn’t make the bag look less trendy.
Make Money While Others Sleep
maksim | 2:17 am | January 23, 2008 | Laptop Accessories
Finally, a way not to ever loose things. Loc8tor Lite, a tiny teardrop of electronics, could be attached to anything you like, from keys to girlfriends.
It can be tracked anytime with the help of a special credit-card-shaped device. The tiny trackable bit starts to flash and beep when the special button is pressed. Hunt for a lost cat becomes a fun police chase, the cat being the police car and you being the high-tech Godzilla, running after, shouting threats to give the bloody cat a spin in a washing machine. A shot of adrenaline and workout for the cat, a lot of fun for you.
What does the thing have to do with laptops? How can it be used? We are not entirely sure. The best we could come up with is this:
- Hide the tag inside the laptop.
- Sell the laptop on eBay, to somebody who lives locally.
- At night, after 4 in the morning, drive to the house of the buyer and activate the alarm in the tracker, waking up everybody inside the house.
- Repeat until the laptop is auctioned on eBay again as faulty.
- Buy the laptop, for fraction of the price.
- Back to step number 2.
Source: Loc8tor.co.uk via Geekalerts
Tape Your Memories
Christine | 5:47 pm | January 21, 2008 | Uncategorized
Sound recording has gone a long way, from first phonographs invented in the 17th century to digital recording, with such pit-stops on the way as gramophone, magnetic tape and optical recording. While first gramophone records were 7″ wide and could reproduce sound for 2 minutes at most, the capabilities of modern media storage devices are astonishing. Although technological progress has positive connotations, it seems to wipe out what we cherish – the soul of our favourite records. Does The White Album on CD or in mp3 sound the same as the vinyl White Album bought in 1968? Hardly.
While gramophone records are still produced and bought, cassettes are slowly but steadily disappearing from stores, mainly because they are so inconvenient to use. However we all remember those times when a favourite cassette was played and then rewound, again and again, and we love these nostalgic memories. MIXA brings you 10-15 years back by presenting a flash drive that looks just like a tape cassette, so all your memories can now be kept at your fingertips. Chose from MIXA’s images or use your own design, buy it for yourself or for your parents, who are still afraid of using a laptop, enjoy it before cassettes disappear forever.
Source: Makeamixa.com
USB Tannenbaum 2.0
maksim | 8:19 pm | January 18, 2008 | USB Flash Drives
Deep in the shadows of strangely silly and wonderfully childish Great Woods of USB Crap there exist bizarre little creatures that speak German and smell of fresh pine. Thallbach, a company from the town of
Germans have a special relationship with woods and trees. For them, a forest is a sacred place, a stage of ancient myths and fairy tales. Die bűrger from
If you are German and like to spend your time in a company of IKEA genocide victims then you will probably love the idea. For the rest of us, it is just silly to pay extra 50 euro for a chance to carry a piece of German tannenbaum in a pocket. And it is not stylish. A bit like wearing leopard skin pants- you will be the man of teenage dreams in urban
Source: Thallbach.de
5 Things You Need To Know About Macbook Air
Boris | 11:58 pm | January 17, 2008 | New Laptops
Apple started year 2008 by introducing MacBook Air, the new ultra-thin notebook. Rumors ran wild the weeks before the show, and not surprisingly a lot of them came true. A trademark Apple feature, MacBook Air is recognizable more for what it doesn’t have than what it does.
All the people who don’t like the new notebook automatically assume that Apple was targeting them and missed horribly. Well, this was not intended to be a mainstream hit. The paper thin laptop is marketed to a specific market, one where weight and portability is of utmost concern.
2. World’s thinnest notebook
MacBook Air is so thin that it fits in a regular post envelope. It measures an unprecedented 0.16 inches at its thinnest point, while its maximum height of 0.76 inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks.
3. No User Replaceable
Selling devices that are not owner serviceable is now the Apple way, after people tolerated this in the iPod and reluctantly accepted it with the iPhone.
With MacBook Air you can wirelessly borrow the optical drive from any other computer or rent movies from the iTunes Store. Even Apple haters should appreciate the way Apple introduces new and bold concepts that has the competitors tiptoeing behind.
5. Limited Connectivity
Getting that thin has meant sacrificing connectivity, ports and storage. There is no Ethernet, no Firewire, no express card or PCMCIA slot either and single USB port. What you get is 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0 + ERD connectivity, micro-DVI socket, headphones jack and iSight webcam.
“Thinness” being the major selling point is a doubtful advantage, with the price of over £2000 for a solid state harddrive version, enough to buy seven Asus Eee Pcs for every day of the week. Still, you don’t loose inches overnight, there is some groundbreaking advanced technology inside that fragile body, and it comes with the price. Air might not be a revolution, but it certainly is a remarkable innovation.
DJing for Dummies
maksim | 9:07 pm | January 16, 2008 | Laptop Music
Consider the life of a sculptor. What an unusual, unexpected choice of a namebadge, not only for a man, but for an artist too. The mountain does not crumble and fall to Muhammad, Muhammad orders the mountain to be blown up, cut, and delivered to him, by UPS, on a Monday morning. And then he is locked away with the rock in a studio, possibly for years, turning it into a huge stone thing looking like a spermatozoid on one side and a teardrop on the other, symbolizing the victims of a 1937 Great Wisconsin Tornado, or anything to that effect involving angry tornado-looking forces and dead spermatozoids.
Life of a DJ is in no way that exotic. It is mostly just sex, drugs, drums till dawn- usual, everyday, mundane routine. Yet they are somewhat similar- to become one, you need a lot of investment and space.
Source: Firebox.com