Best Gadgets World

We’ve all been mesmerized by the local news coverage of some bad guy fleeing police in a high speed chase. And like watching car racing and hockey, we just wait for the inevitable crash that will end the pursuit. And soon enough, it comes and the foolish perp is taken away in cuffs while his car is a smoldering mass of twisted metal. But lately, police are catching all kinds of flack for pursuing these car chases at the endangerment of the local populace. Some have even taken to letting the guy go, rather than risk a crash and human lives which result in the inevitable bevy of lawsuits. But now, they can track the bad guy, rather than chase him, with a new projectile GPS transceiver which will allow the helicopter and units monitoring to simply hang back and wait for the perp to get where he’s going.

STARCHASE is the name of the device and it fits on the bumper of any current police cruiser. Like a small air powered canon, the Starchase will launch a small dart that has a GPS receiver built in which broadcasts the car’s location in real time. This enables police to either hang back and follow the perp at a safe distance or, triangulate his route and location and send units to head him off at the pass. Either way, this is the promise of new technology. Creating gadgets which, in their James Bond fashion, protect the good guys and catch the bad guys.
Now that’s a cool gadget.

Hat Tip – D’Vice

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All the karaoke nuts out there, rejoice! You no longer have to go to karaoke bars, or belt out your singing frustrations in public places which could shatter the eardrums of innocent bypassers.

Beloved Japanese company Tomy is releasing the Hi-Kara–a karaoke cube measuring just 70×70×70mm. It’s so small, it can fit in the palm of your hand; plus you can bring it anywhere with you. To be released in October, Hi-Kara is equipped with a 2.4-inch LCD screen. The minute screen actually displays the lyrics to the song, just like larger karaoke systems do! If you’re wondering where’d you get songs for your diminutive karaoke box, you’d simply need to go to the Tomy web site and have a prepair cartridge to download songs of your choice. As icing on top of the karaoke cake, you can choose between the colors white and pink; I’ll take the latter.

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Filed in archive Opinion by jim on June 18, 2008

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With terrorist related news being broadcast almost non-stop on TV it's easy to understand why there's an increased alertness towards suspicious activity of any kind.

But what is "suspicious activity", and who decides what should, and shouldn't be allowed.

There have always been locations where photography is prohibited, such as art museums, because electronic flashes can, over a long period of time, harm the paintings, or so I'm told.

Other reasons include copyright infringement, privacy and religious reasons, but now we have situations where threats to security are the reason given.

Since 9/11 I've been hassled twice, once while taking pictures of a particularly attractive courtyard outside a small bank building, and again while on the roof of the New York New York Casino parking garage here in Las Vegas.

The first incident brought out the bank manager, who was extremely nervous and not very eager to get close to me. He showed visible signs of relief when I explained why I was taking the pictures and gave him my business card.

After a few minutes he looked around and agreed that the courtyard was nice and that he had no eye for art. I assured him that when I hit the Lottery I would make a large deposit in his institution.

As for the Casino incident, which yielded the above photo, I was told, by a bicycle riding security guard, that taking pictures of the "towers" was forbidden, due to security reasons. I was then figuratively thrown off the roof.

I'm not a lawyer but my rule of thumb is that if I'm on private property, such as the bank or casino, the owners make the rules. If they say go, I go, because they have the rights to allow or disallow any type of activity on their property, I don't.

Here's a rundown of what's going on in America, England, and a few other places with regards to photography and suspicious activity.

This link takes you to a website that has a listing of photographer's rights in America.

A simple search on Google will bring up photographer's rights in other countries.

Source:www.jimippolito.com

Stop the swapping insanity! (And no, this isn’t a reference to the CBS show “Swingtown.”)

Kensington felt your pain and designed an easy solution for sharing USB devices between two computers without all that messy plugging and unplugging. Simply push a button and the Share Central automatically makes the swap.

LED lights indicate which computer has access; it’s easy to set up; both computers have direct access to the printer (without networking) thanks to Automatic Printer Sharing; it eliminates cable clutter, and if it doesn’t fit on your desk, it can be wall mounted. Share up to five different USB peripherals, such as printers, scanners, external disk drives . . . any USB device, basically. They also make a 1 USB and a 2 USB version($46.99 last time we checked.)

Not available until the end of the month, all versions, including the 5 share (priced at $79.99) can be pre-ordered from Kensington here and from Amazon.

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Go to the Popgadget Shop for more peripherals and other products.

First, The Beatles took on America, launching a British Invasion of music. Then Led Zeppelin took the hard rock world by storm. Should we be expecting another kind of invasion anytime soon? Perhaps a Robotic Invasion? Could robots eventually take the place of modern musicians, and do a better job of writing hit tracks? What could this mean for the future of the music industry?

Allow us to introduce to you, The Trons! A fully autonomous robotic band. Watch out U2! The Trons are a New Zealand based robot band which does a pretty good job rocking the house all on their own. The video above shows The Trons performing their rocker “Sister Robot”. The robot musicians are even designed to resemble humanoid figures.

The robotic members of The Trons go by the names Ham (vox and rhythm guitar), Wiggy (single string lead guitar), Swamp (drums), Fifi (one-handed keyboards), and claim to be influenced by a wide variety of musicians including The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo. To be honest, they sound pretty darn good for a band whose members are simple robotic machines.

The Trons will be performing at the upcoming Ignition Fringe Festival, a 9 day performance show which features 26 Poetry, Street Theater, Dance, Music, Comedy, Theater, Film, and Visual Art acts. The festival started on June 13th in New Zealand and will be continuing until the 21st.

MySpace Page via Communist Robot

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The other day we reported on a possible mini-projector for the iPhone. I just found out that a company called Optoma has just introduced the first Pico projector based on the DLP (Digital Light Processing) Pico chipset. This projector isn’t just for the iPhone or that snazzy iphone 3G, but it is designed for any mobile device including iPods, PDAs, smart phones, and digital cameras.

According to the company, this is a “world’s first”, and will allow users to share photos and videos with a projected image that is 100 times bigger than that of their normal screen. Best of all, this projector is small enough to fit in a user’s shirt pocket.

Optoma likes to think that they have reached a “new benchmark for sharing content on the go”, and I can’t help but agree with them. I always knew that the perfection of this technology would change just about everything. I guess it won’t be long before I pass a group of teenagers projecting their photos on a wall instead of passing their mobile devices around.

This Pico Handheld Projector is on display at Texas Instrument’s InfoComm in the Las Vegas Convention Center this week. Optoma’s product is prepared for a limited distribution in Europe and Asia in late 2008, with a worldwide launch in 2009.

Source

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A TV with its own robot?  While the concept might be a bit Blade Runner-esque, Bang & Olufsen says the technology will ensure rich and natural colors throughout the lifespan of their plasma screens.

The audio and video equipment manufacturer recently launched the sleek, 50-inch BeoVision 9 plasma TV.  The device boasts of an Automatic Colour Management technology that adjusts the color temperature of the plasma screen to compensate for the tendency of TVs to feature a yellowish tinge in the picture after hundreds of hours of use.

Here is where the robot comes in.  When a user activates the Automatic Color Management technology, a short robotic arm with a camera swings down from the upper portion of the screen.  The camera films a test picture on the screen, analyzes the light and dark areas, then adjusts the color balance to correct coloring errors caused by aging.  The feature automatically activates every 120 hours of use but can also be manually activated.

Aside from that, the device also automatically adjusts the brightness of its image according to the ambient light of its location.  The product ships with a built-in center channel speaker with acoustic lens and digital surround sound capabilities.  The price, at $19,900, is a bit steep –- if only it restocks its own beer, perhaps couch potatoes won’t mind.

Read [Twice]

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JVC may have beaten Panasonic with its three AVCHD camcorders announced yesterday, but two new Panasonic camcorders have something that the JVCs don’t have - 3MOS system which according to Panasonic provides superb video image quality. These two new Panasonic camcorders are the HDC-SD100 and HDC-HS100. Both camcorders include manual control features for zoom, focus, iris, shutter speed and white balance. They also boast of Panasonic’s new Intelligent Auto (iA) mode which automatically activates and makes video capturing easy and seamless.

As we said, these two camcorders employ a 3MOS system which has been newly developed by Panasonic based on its 3CCD technology. In simple terms, this system provides good image quality even in low-light environment, reproduces superb color, captures more vibrant, true-to-life colors and offers richer gradation of video resolution.

In addition to the 3MOS system, these two camcorders also features Panasonic’s HD Advanced Pure Color Engine and a Leica Dicomar lens which allows for the production of images in full-HD 1920×1080 resolution. These lens also allows the camcorders to have both 12x zoom power in a compact body.

Other features of these two camcorders include HD Writer 2.6 software for Windows, iMovie 08 for Apple, support for Panasonic’s VIERA link for connecting the camcorders to a VIERA HDTV using HDMI cable. It also allows the camcorder to be operated by a TV remote control.

The Panasonic HDC-SD100 and HDC-HS100 will be available sometime in September for $1,299.95 and $1,099.95 respectively.

Read [Market Wire] Via [Electronista]

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Although these two basic mobile handsets were never part of the Sony Ericsson mobile phone leaks which have haunted all of us the past couple of days, their simplicity might actually pull one off the more advanced Sony Ericsson phones announced today. We’re talking here of the candy-bar phones J132 and K330.

The J132 is your basic talk and text mobile phone with added entertainment feature such as an FM radio and a stereo hands free kit. Sony Ericsson gives this handset’s keypad a solid feel as well as a dust-resistant feature to withstand heavy text usage. It has a clear and bright screen that features one-click shortcuts and easy-to-use navigation keys. With a simple phone such as this one, the most important feature that we should look for is its talk time and standby time, which the J132 answers with 9 hours and 450 hours respectively.

The other simple mobile phone that Sony Ericsson announced together with the J132 is the K330. This one delivers a bit more than what the J132 can offer. This basic VGA camera phone captures videos and photos which can be shared via Bluetooth with another Bluetooth-enabled phone. It can also store up to 250 photos or 12 minutes of video, aside from storing up to 1000 contacts and 450 text messages. Other features of the K330 include; 1.7-inch display, FM Radio, Health mate calorie counter and health plan manager, and a torch function for its luminous screen.

The K330 is slated for an early Q3 release in Gold on Black and Green on Black design, while the J132 will be available sometime in Q4 in Black or Blue design.

Product [Sony Ericsson]

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Yet again, Nvidia unveils another next-generation multi-core GPU to satisfy all the gamers and performance freaks out there. Enter the Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 series.

Holding true to their multi-GPU design (starting from the 9800 GX2), this series is a dream for Nvidia’s power-hungry enthusiasts. But the GTX 200 series is also incorporating NVIDIA CUDA technology – the world’s only C language environment that enables developers to write software to solve complex problems in a fraction of the time by tapping into multi-GPU technology – which means that this video card series is potentially a strong platform for numerous CUDA-enabled rich-media and visual-computing applications. Such applications are becoming more commonplace in the medical and scientific field because of the phenomenal boosts that CUDA gave programs when it was released. The series’ tagline “Beyond Gaming” really is not such a far-off notion because of CUDA.

Nvidia is also hyping on the boost that this series can give to everyday media tasks – video transcoding, for example. What would normally take hours could become a task that could be finished in minutes.

For gamers (who would normally be the first partakers of this new series), 448 to 512-bit processing is available, with GDDR3 already being a standard for Nvidia’s high-performance cards. Combined with PhysX (Nvidia recently acquired AEGIA) and SLI technology (Nvidia is moving now from three-way SLI to Quad-SLI), enthusiasts and gamers could be in for a whole new world of facial animation, flowing smoke and fog effects, awesome clothing flow simulation, staggering physical debris and explosions – all the standard eye-candy that we require to be norms.

Believed to be released in 2 variations, the GTX 260 and 280 (868MB and 1GB models respectively), expect a lot more hype and innovation as game developers and software designers move to catch up with the multi-GPU revolution.

Read [ZDNet]

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