Books, Music and Movies

GfG Article Recap – Week of Mar 20 2009

Books, Music and Movies, Computers, Gaming & Toys, Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet, Phones, Site News, Software / By /

Here is last week’s featured gadgets and news items at Gizmos for Geeks:

To start off the week, we took a look at Legacy Locker – a rather needed innovation that allows you to pass down important account details for your online ‘assets’ in the case of your death.

We found two interesting pieces of software: Claymation’s Stop-Motion Studio Tool that allows the user to make their own stop-motion movies and Palringo – a mobile messaging service that allows you to mix up all the major IMs with and chat to groups all in one.

Dell just rolled out their Adamo Notebook which is essentially Dell’s response to the MacBook Air – thin & stylish.

Rebit’s 160GB Automatic Backup Device makes it quite easy to backup your data regularly.

Got $40k laying around? Get a Novelquest Emporer Workspace – a very high end workspace that puts you inside the spine of what can only be described as a giant dinosaur. On a more practical note, the Just One Club Card’ allows you to put all of your loyalty cards’ barcodes onto just one card.

Sony got together with Google to put 500,000 free public domain books onto their eReaders. You can save money (possibly up to 90%) on international calls by using Vopium on your mobile.

In perhaps a sign of things to come, a new magazine from Popular Science called the Genius Guide is being rolled out online only.

PopSci Genius Guide – a brand new online-only interactive magazine

Books, Music and Movies, Home Automation, Portable / By /

The PopSci Genius Guide - Subscription
Popular Science has launched a brand new online-only magazine called PopSci Genius Guide. Meant to be interactive, with embedded video and more, it simply can’t come to your doorstep in print form.

Almost every page has interactive spots that you can click on for more information, and those clicks typically result in the page re-orienting itself to display that info. There are videos of the authors /creators/interviewees of the featured tech inside the articles.

Even the ads are dynamic and have audio attached to them that are only activated when you turn to the page they’re on. Pretty much, this is the future of magazines. It may be harder to produce, but it’ll become easier and more magazines will need this to differentiate them from the pack, until it becomes a de facto standard. It’s easy to be blase about this, but only say 10 years ago, this would have been a prop in a sci fi movie; now it’s reality. It’s definitely worth taking a look at this even if you’re not necessarily a hardcore techie.

No subscription pricing model has been announced yet, but you can snag the very 1st issue from Zinio for $3. This issue focuses on home entertainment, and includes a guide to building the best movie room and a guide to home automation.

Sony eBook Store gets a 500k title boost from Google

Books, Music and Movies / By /

Sony announced today that they have, with Google’s contribution, added over half a million (500,000) free public domain books to their library for their eReaders. This collection consist of books whose copyright has expired, so most of these titles will have been published prior to 1932.

This brings the total number of titles in the Sony eBook Store to over 600,000 easily surpassing the 250,000 titles that the Kindle Store has.

While many see this as Google teaming up with Sony to compete with Amazon in the eReader field, I think Google probably saw this as an easy decision, choosing to go with the vendor that supported the e-book standard, EPUB. Kindle does not natively support EPUB, although it has a conversion tool that ships with the reader.

Kindle 2 e-reader announced by Amazon

1 Comment / Books, Music and Movies, Gizmo of the Day, Portable / By /

Amazon announced version 2 of the Kindle today, which will ship on February 24, 2009. Kindle 2 has a slew of improvements over the first Kindle such as:

  • Just over 1/3″ thick
  • Light: 10.2 oz (less than a paperback)
  • 3G wireless (and Amazon pays for the wireless bill!)
  • Improved e-ink display: 16 shades of gray & easier to read in sunlight without glare
  • Greater storage: hold over 1500 books
  • Text-to-speech – books to audio
  • 25% longer battery life
  • Built-in Dictionary

You can pre-order your Kindle 2 right now. You may remember that the 1st Kindle was in such high demand that many people simply did not get theirs. Their orders will be automatically converted to Kindle 2s without any action or additional costs on their part.

Reading For Your Inner Geek

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Happy New Year everyone, have you downloaded the Beta of Windows 7 yet? If not, you better get your skates on as the Beta download is for a short time only.

I have been busy reading over the holiday break and have some good recommendations of reading for you. The first is the thought provoker “The End Of Mr. Y” and the other is the techno-thriller “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez which I heard this morning is heading for moviedom. If you have an interest in Web Development you could also check out Understanding RESTful Web Services which has some fine examples of accessing web service API.

Analog to Digital Converters – Round Up

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, Cameras and Photo, Computers, Gizmo of the Day, Recommended, Software / By /

Slide and Negative to Digital Converter

Here we have a furious round up of some of the many analog to digital converters we’ve featured over the years to persuade you to digitize your precious analog collections of audio cassettes, vinyl records, photographs, slides/negatives and VHS tapes. Let’s go!

Audio Cassettes

With CDs looking like they’re being overtaken by new performance discs and music simply being downloaded and stored on computers, it’s amazing that some people still have audio cassettes – we’ve said our goodbyes, now it’s your turn. The Ion Tape2PC USB Cassette Deck lets you do that by sticking your tape into the slot and transferring it to your computer in MP3 format. Audacity and EZ Tape software suites are included to make make everything run smoothly and is compatible with PC and Mac.

Buy now! – $125

Slides, negatives, photographs, vinyl records and VHS tape still to come. Read on.

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Analog to Digital Converters – Round UpRead More »

#CES09: Powermat says wireless charging mats are close

Books, Music and Movies, Cameras and Photo, CES, GPS, Home Automation, Phones, Portable / By /

Powermat has a wireless charging solution that uses, you guessed it, a mat that you just place your gadgets on, and voila!, they’re charged up. It uses magnetic induction just like many of the other (promised) solutions. They have a wide range of products ranging from the small, folding to the large desktop variety. Apart from the added price, the only 2 drawbacks that I can see is the limited number of devices that they support, and that you need some kind of device adapter and/or support pre-built-in.

Devices: iPod, iPhone, Blackberry, Razr, GPS unit, handheld game, laptop computer. Not yet available, but expect $100 mats and $30 chargers.

#CES09: Dish 922 HD DVR with SlingBox embedded

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, CES, Gizmo of the Day, Networking & Internet / By /

Excellent – this is what we want to see – more convergence of media devices. Following the purchase of Sling Media by EchoStar, the 2 have worked together to come up with a Dish Networks receiver that essentially embeds a Slingbox. They’re calling it a SlingLoaded player, but the bottom line is that you now get place-shifting built into your DVR and Satellite TV receiver. Nice.

The 922 is a sleek looking box with a 1 TB drive for up to 1000 hours of storage (in SD), can support 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480i, and 480p formats, and has a new touchpad remote control that has half as many buttons as a standard remote control, and that can function as a universal remote. Of course, it includes all of the SlingBox features and be controlled via the Web using SlingGuide.

Macworld 2009: Apple iTunes store going DRM-free

Books, Music and Movies, CES, Software / By /

You can now get about 8 million tracks free of DRM (copy-protection software) from iTunes with another 2M by the end of April. You can upgrade your existing set of iTunes tracks, but it’ll cost you – 30 cents per track.

The downside is that the record labels will now get to set pricing as opposed to the fixed per track/per album pricing in the past. I’ll take it; it’s a good thing overall.

#CES09: Tonium rolling out Pacemaker 60GB Portable DJ System

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, CES, Miscellaneous / By /

While this is probably not for the masses, it is for the DJ on the go. The Pacemaker DJ system from Tonium is a portable DJ mixer and player that works in effects such as pitch changes, looping, roll, echo and more things that the DJ-newb such as myself know nothing of!

We saw a 60GB Pacemaker that is truly handheld. It has jacks for headphone monitors as well as a crossfader, multiple channels and a USB connection. The cool part of the interface is the touchpad that lets you control many of the functions with your fingertips.

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