News

Pansonic Shows Off Its “Eco Ideas” House

Home Automation, News / By /

We may not have reached a real substantive climate agreement in Copenhagen this past week, but thankfully this is not stopping companies around the world from making steps towards improving our dire environmental state. Take Panasonic for example, which is testing out ideas for an eco-friendly house that may actually produce more energy than it uses. Now that would be novel!

Aptly dubbed the Eco Ideas House, it includes things like vacuum insulation, LED lighting, hydrogen fuel cells, and of course, smart monitoring & control systems [pictured]. The folks at DVICE took a tour and wrote about it.

Offline Gmail has become a Regular Feature of Gmail

Networking & Internet, News, Software / By /

Offline Gmail has been a Gmail Lab for quite some time now, and is now being sanctioned by the Gmail team as ready for general consumption and will become a regular feature of Gmail.

There will now be an Offline tab when you visit your Gmail Settings. From there, you can initiate and control how a copy of your Gmail account will be downloaded and synchronized to your computer.

Some Book Publishers to Delay Release Dates of E-Books

Books, Music and Movies / By /

Two book publishers have decided to delay the release of e-book versions of new releases coming out next year. Simon & Schuster will delay the e-book release of 35 titles by 4 months.

This is akin to the delay before the paperback version is published. This is obviously a backlash to the growing popularity of e-books, most likely in large part due to the lower price points they command. It probably won’t last long if other publishers have any success selling as many (or more) total # of books without delaying the electronic version.

via The Wall Street Journal

Google Rolls Out Realtime Search Results

Networking & Internet, News / By /

Google has thrown their hat into the realtime search arena, joining other services such as Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. Although those Web2.0 websites have had real-time search for some time, Google has been surprisingly absent until now. Google announced this today at their Search Event conference.

However, at this point in time, not every single Google account has the realtime feature turned on. To check whether you have this feature, visit Google’s main search page, and enter a search term. Once the results appear, click the Show Options link at the top, at which point you will (or won’t) have the “Latest” option in the time parameters section. The search results will now start updating automatically in a very similar fashion to those on Facebook or Twitter.

If your Google account does not have the realtime feature, you can see a video captured by TechCrunch:

Article Recap for the Week Ending Apr 24, 2009

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Gaming & Toys, Gizmo of the Day, Networking & Internet, Portable, Software / By /

Here are some of our notable articles for the past week. First we pondered whether Twitter’s popularity would last. Google News now has a Timeline of Events – nice feature.

We noticed that YouTube were looking to accept full length and legal content, while Fuijitsu have developed some secure new memory sticks. Adobe announced their plans to integrate Flash technology with TVs.

Oracle is picking up where IBM left off, buying out Sun for around $7 billion. That’s a lot of Rubik’s Cube Clocks!

See Timeline of Events on Google News

Networking & Internet, Software / By /

news-timeline-of-eventsI usually have no reason to visit websites to read news as I take it all in via RSS feeds using Netvibes (fantastic reader by the way), but now I have a really cool reason to visit Google News. They’ve launched a new feature called “Timeline of articles” which shows you events and other related news items related to a story chronologically.

Just click on the green link to see all related stories at the bottom of the story.

Article Recap for the Week ending Apr 3, 2009

Computers, Gaming & Toys, Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation, Networking & Internet, Site News, Tools, DIY, Home, Office / By /

Here’s our usual weekly summary of featured items from Gizmos For Geeks:

Starting off the week were a set of novelty Stone Ice Cubes – just the ticket if you worry about harming the planet when making ice cubes. We also featured a set of kitchen scales that has a neat pull out display.

We wondered out loud about whether or not you should jump on the Twitter bandwagon.

For those of you worried about security or just like the added conveniences and coolness factor, this doorlock might just be for you, or maybe you could just travel to the future to see if you’re going to need one with this Flux Capacitor!

Jobs have been in the news recently, so it seemed fair to post an interesting video about the Job Market and reported that workers who are allowed to surf the web at work have increased productivity!

Finally,  poor ol’ Silicon Graphics Inc. has filed for bankruptcy once again and has been bought out by Rackable Sytems.

The Read it Later Firefox extension

Networking & Internet, Software / By /

Sometimes I just want to turn Gizmos for Geeks into a cool productivity tools blog. Fear not readers, we won’t be doing that, but there really are so many cool software & Web tools being introduced or improved all the time.

Take for example, the Read it Later Firefox extension which helps out you news and info junkies. Ok, I’m definitely one of you! Right. So the RiT extension lets you quickly mark articles/URLs for later reading, even letting you simultaneously mark a bunch of open tabs. It also lets you mark articles in your favorite news reader and even sites like Digg. Perhaps the best feature may be the ability to sync your reading list across multiple browsers/computer.

The video sums up the features nicely in 2 mins:
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