Sony officially announced the player today, but it won't be shipping until July? Looks to me like Sony is taking a page from the Apple MacBook Pro and its infamous roller-coaster ride of ship dates.
The BD player looks pretty enormous for a set top player, but that wasn't a surprise given what I saw at CES. All the HD players were pretty enormous. The player outputs 1920x1080p(no surprise there). The good news is that standard DVDs are compatible with the added feature of 1080p upscaling through HDMI, which gives new life to existing DVD libraries.
This BD-ROM/R/RE player supports DVD playback from DVD/DVD+/-R / +/-RW encoded discs, as well as MP3 audio files and JPEG images stored on DVD+/-R / +/-RW discs, according to Sony. The player will retail for a $1000.
If that wasn't enough, Sony also announced that it'll be shipping a Sony VAIO RC Desktop equipped with a Blu Ray drive. The PC will come with, hold your breath, one piece of 25GB rewritable Blu Ray media. Given the price of these blanks, I think I'll keep that in my empty trophy case.
Nope, this isn't about thatEntourage. Mac users in mega (and not so mega) corporations have had to use either Entourage 2004 or other third party scripts to get their email and scheduling on their Macs. While Microsoft has stopped support for Windows Media Player on the Mac, they have released and update that finally supports Spotlight searching. Prior to this patch, you had to disable Spotlight for your Microsoft Data folder, otherwise your Mac would burn out its hard drive searching that folder. Needless to say, this is a good thing.
I've downloaded and loaded this patch on to my PowerBook G4, and not only is Spotlight now available, but Entourage's internal searches are faster too. Spotlight searching is sweet, since it allows me to quickly search the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of saved emails i've collected over the years. Surf to www.microsoft.com/mac to get the update. Now.
Who knew a Treo 650 could protect our nation from terrorists? (It is terrorists, right?) A 24-watcher in our office just showed me BauerCount.com, a Web site with videos of every person Jack Bauer has killed on the TV show 24, along with the weapon he used. One of the kills is ascribed to a Palm Treo 650, and if you watch the video, you'll see that Jack did in fact turn his handheld into a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
I'm no biker babe, but Out of the Box Computers is certainly into motorcycles--so much that the company is offering customized, chopper-inspired, hand-painted PC cases made here in the U.S.
American Chopper is the name of the company's custom Think Tank. Pictured here is the MSI MEGA 865 System with a Pentium 4 processor. PC Magazine's Sebastian Rupley says that all you have to do is give them the specifications on what you want your system to look like, and they'll do the rest.
Case mods don't come cheap though. The American Chopper starts at $1,420, depending on what you want. Contact Out of the Box Computers for more details.
As mentioned yesterday on Technoride, the fuel-efficient Smart Car is heading stateside. It's been available in Europe since 1998 and has been quite popular with eco- and money-conscious Europeans, and now auto company ZAP is bringing them here. Why the delay? Making sure it meets U.S. safety and emissions standards, of course. The better to protect you with if you get run over by a Hummer.
Early adopters have apparently been "stopping traffic" with the car—presumably based on its looks.
As the success of the Mini Cooper has shown, small just may be the new big. And with gas prices higher than ever, the Smart Car is bound to gain fans quickly.
The Americanized version of the Smart Car will get up to 60 miles to the gallon (or roughly twenty times that massive SUV you've been driving around) and reach speeds of up to 85mph.
The "Smart For Two Coupe / Convertible" will fit two standard adults (or 2.3 Canadians at the current exchange rate*) quite comfortably.
Keep a look out for the Smart Car (available "soon," with no specific date mentioned) at ZAP-authorized dealers. It'll run you about $15,000-$25,000, depending on options. Just don't expect to fit the soccer team in it, unless they're very small.
I grew up watching Growing Pains, Perfect Strangers, and Lois and Clark. Those were the days when TV was actually worth watching. It seems sitcoms can't outlive reality TV shows anymore, which is really sad. But when I found that a Web-only TV channel is streaming my old favorite shows for free, I was all about it.
AOL and Warner Brothers have teamed up to offer PC users, In2TV. The service offers 30 full-length classic TV shows in full screen, and all you need is Windows XP, Windows Media Player 10, Macromedia's Flash Player 8, and Internet Explorer 6 to watch them. Among the many features of the service are interactive trivia games and theme-song karaoke (Welcome Back, Kotter's theme song would be cool to sing-a-long to).
In the future, the companies hope to add more TV shows. (I'm hoping to see Alf and Saved By The Bell.)
PC Magazine took a hard look at In2TV. Find out how they rated the service.
Most concept and prototype cars will never see the light of day. But they give automakers a chance to gauge public perception while providing a bit of entertainment and flash.
At the recent Geneva Auto Show, Nissan was especially out front with blue-sky concepts, such as its interpretation of a lunar rover for earthbound scientists. Others, such as Honda and Opel (a division of GM), showed prototypes that are months away from production; all that's required is removal of some of the flashier pieces of trim that would be impractical on a street car.
The show also had plenty of real cars for real people. GM, for instance, showed Europe its new full-size SUVs, the Tahoe and Escalade. Why would Europeans want something so big? Exclusivity, for one thing. And GM's upcoming hybrid engine, developed with BMW and DaimlerChrysler, makes possible a 3-ton SUV that might return 25 mpg on the highway.
Yesterday I went to a press preview of the newest space show at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York; "Cosmic Collisions" opens to the public on March 18. (I do love my job.) If you haven't been to the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and the new Hayden Planetarium there, make sure to put it on your list next time you visit the city; it's a wonder, both inside and out. Admission's a bit pricy, but it's one of those "you've gotta do it at least once" things.
The show is breathtaking, and even thrilling at times; the visualizations of colliding heavenly bodies are accompanied by both audible and subsonic rumbling. And the topic is not only pop-culture cool but also fairly educational (in an interesting way), focusing on how collisions of asteroids with planets and so on help evolve our universe. Of particular interest to geeks (and not just astrogeeks) is the story behind the show. Huge quantities of scientific data was parsed and processed by supercomputers in order to create highly accurate renditions of how these collisions occur.
Before I had a baby, I never considered nipples to be so full of peril.
But now I have a one-month-old and a very tired wife, and sometimes I like to give my wife a break and feed our little girl. Most bottle nipples seem designed to thwart breastfeeding, because it's a lot easier to get milk out of a bottle than out of the breast. That creates the dreaded 'nipple confusion,' which isn't confusion at all - babies start thinking, why do I have to strain with this boob in my mouth when I could just wait for somebody to pour milk down my gullet?
Then I discovered Second Nature nipples. Designed just two years ago by a former NASA scientist looking for a way to make spillproof cups and drink bottles, Second Nature nipples have a grid of tiny valves at the end, rather than just a hole. The valves only open if you both squeeze down on the nipple and suck, which is not coincidentally what a baby must do with a human breast. Apparently, scientists in California and Wisconsin are working on studies to see if these nipples really do solve the breast/bottle dilemma. The nipples are also spillproof, so liquid doesn't spray everywhere when you're shaking the bottle. And they're made and sold by a pretty small (15-person) American business, not by some baby-products giant. The only downside is that they're a little fragile, so I'm already hunting around for more.
The result: at our house, no nipple confusion. Happy baby with breast and bottle, and daddy who's kind of psyched to be feeding baby with cool space-age gadget. The nipples are kind of difficult to find, though, so find stores selling them at RegalLager.com.
Update: Apparently, our software has auto-censored the most inoffensive possible word for a lady's upper frontal superstructure. Yet oddly, it does not censor boob, ta-ta, hooter, honker or gazoonga. How the heck are we supposed to talk about breastfeeding if we can't talk about breasts? Score one for the Janet Jackson police.
Now that my breakfast of choice is a Dunkin Donuts #1 Special, I spend most mornings feeling like I've just been pummeled about the head with a bag of sugar. You can duplicate this feeling yourself with the new "Marshmallow Blaster," an air-powered shotgun that (according to the press release) "is engineered to propel large marshmallows up to 40 feet. . . packing the extra punch you just can't get with mini marshmallows." Really, I'm not making this stuff up.
Apparently, the Blaster is the next step in an artifically sweetened arms race that started with the Marshmallow Shooter, which pumps wimpy little mini-marshmallows at your foes. In this time when America is besieged by enemies, I think it behooves all citizens to be able to defend themselves adequately from the Stay-Puft threat. The Blaster is around $24 from drugstore.com.
Mixx It
Digg It
Stumble
More...
