Thursday, March 29, 2007

WiPeer: local wireless for laptops

Read the following hypothetical situations:

  • You are visiting your friends and would like to transfer photos of a shared trip from your laptop to theirs. Wouldn't it be great if you could share your files with them directly from one computer to the other?
  • You are sitting in a boring lecture. You and your friends all have laptops, but your university has not installed an access point in the lecture room. Wouldn't it be great if you could play a game of Chess or Reversi against them, or even gossip with them about yesterday's football match?
  • You have a home network, or even a small office network. Wouldn't it be great if you could share files among your computers without having to set up a dedicated server?
If you answered YES to any of the questions, then WiPeer is for you.

WiPeer sets up wireless peer-to-peer networks between PCs, no router, access point or internet required. The software enables sharing files directly among computers, playing multi-player games, chatting, and collaboration over both Wi-Fi and home/office networks.

Source: Lifehacker

Learn how to create special effects with Photoshop

PhotoshopCAFE has a couple dozen tutorials on creating various kinds of special effects in Photoshop. The effects include drop shadows and photographic edges to realistic reflections and built-from-scratch rope coils.

Each tutorial is broken down into small, novice-friendly steps to help beginners (and even intermediate users) learn some Photoshop fundamentals. Some also include a PSD file which you can download to see the effect firsthand.

Once you've mastered them, check here for even more.

From: Lifehacker

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The weakest link in technology

People still are the weakest link in the world of technology. No matter how much advance we see in technology, there's always a point where it depends on people to make decisions. And this is where the problems start...

A U.K. woman sent her 141000€ Mercedes SL500 flying into a river because she blindly trusted the car's optimistic GPS guidance system instead of the road signs. In her head, if the GPS was telling her to turn left, then she really needed to turn. Is it possible that she didn't stop to think that, if there was a river on the left, maybe she shouldn't have turned?

Source: Engadget
Image: This is London

Friday, March 23, 2007

Nokia's new "Multimedia Computer": N95

Nokia is pushing the limits of cellphones when it comes to multimedia integration. Not only the new N95 is a full-feature 5 megapixels camera with Carl Zeiss optics lens, it also includes integrated GPS mapping where you can easily view maps of your location (and the entire world) at a street-level zoom.

The basics of the NSeries are also there: access music, emails and advanced web browsing; integration with lifeblog which allows you to instantly upload photos to Flickr and download movies from several sources.

Some more complete (juicy) specifications:

  • Up to 160 MB* internal dynamic memory
  • Large 2.6" QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) TFT display with ambient light detector and up to 16 million colors
  • Play video, music and photos on home media network - compatible TV, stereo and PC over WLAN/UPnP
  • Integrated wireless LAN (802.11 b/g)
  • Zoom: Digital up to 20x (5 megapixel up to 6x)

What's more to come in the world of USB?

Nowadays, you can find all kinds of USB gadgets: for workaholics (for example, the combination coffee mug/mouse), for perfuming your environment (to avoid the stinky office), for fashionable ladies (who want to charge their devices in a portable way) and even for Hello Kitty fans.

So, it's not strange that you can also find this kind of product in the market: USB heated knee pads.

With all this stuff around, I guess we can ask ourselves: where will this USBmania take us? USB-powered ovens? USB-powered coffee machines?

You never know :-)

Source: Engadget
Image: Vavolo

Monday, March 12, 2007

The new video game arcade

Here's the new era of video gaming! A hybrid movie theater with all the digital fire and fury of a video game: fog, black light, flashing green lasers, high-definition digital projectors, vibrating seats, game pads and dozens of 17-inch screens attached to individual chairs.

Called Cinegames, this small theater in a huge Spanish suburban multiplex stands at the front lines where video games are invading movie territory, transforming isolated computer play into community entertainment.

Imagine a little play of Call of Duty on this baby :-)

Source: Emerging Media News

An item for the ladies: a gadget recharging purse

The PowerPurse, a rather stylish purse with an exterior of solar panels, packs an interior USB cable which connects with cellphones and other sundry gadget style devices to turn wonderful liberating sunshine into electrical juice for powering tunes and talk time.

This neat item is not out on production yet, but as soon as a production partnership is created, the PowerPurse will be released with target price point of $300.

Source: Popgadget

What Google discovers on the Web...

Google crawls the entire web to get...well, the entire web. However, sometimes it crawls just a little bit more than it should and acquires some very sensitive information.

Check out this site to get an idea of what Google was able to "capture" on the Web.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Guess what this is...

Don't know? That's okay...neither did I. This is the volume and size of 5MB memory storage in 1956.

In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

Makes you appreciate your 4 GB jump drive, doesn't it?

Paparazzi's competitors: people with cellphones!

The rise of camera phone users as on-scene photographers and replacement paparazzi is happening. That's right, people with last generation camera phones have now the technology to potentially capture "juicy" moments anytime, anywhere such as the latest Britney Spears haircut madness.

While people were only using these technologies to take innocent fan pictures, the paparazzi's business model was safe. But now, times are changing and the ubiquity of camera phones and the way they simplify distribution of such images, is creating the new wave of citizen paparazzi, that are only after their "cut" on this industry.

One could argue that this isn't a bad thing (to end the paparazzi era and give the celebs some rest), but the rise in citizen paparazzi just leads to a decline in the privacy of celebrities and everybody else. In fact, as long as "news" agencies are paying quite huge sums for some of these photos, there will always be people interested in providing this kind of "journalism".

Source: Techdirt
Image: Engadget