by Joshua Fruhlinger, posted May 29th 2008 at 5:23PM
With the price of gas these days, it’s no wonder people are skittish when it comes to mowing lawns. What’s more, gas-powered mowers have been shown to pollute up to 7 times as much as vehicles. Sure, you could go get a manual mower and get some exercise, but why do that when you can convert your gas-powered mower into an electric one? This modification takes you through three steps to do just that, including: removing the engine and installing an electric replacement, converting the engine to one powered by solar panels, and installing the solar panel. Expect conversion costs to run around $1,500. Of course, you could always just buy a Huskvarna and skip all this tomfoolery.

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Filed under: Household

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The BenQ T850 is the world’s slimmest 8-mega-pixel digital camera.

The T850 digital camera from BenQ comes with 1600 ISO, 3x optical zoom, stainless steel casing, 3″ TFT LCD Screen and smc PENTAX lens.

A comprehensive selection of options including Smile Catch, Auto Face Tracking, Z Lighting, advanced photo art, scribble & scrawl and Quick Bar make the T850 a fabulously fun companion for bringing enjoyment and quality to today’s digital life.
 
Controls and menus on the T850 are very simple - no pressing button after button to navigate through multiple menus.  The T850 has pared down complex camera operations to a minimalist, logical approach.  Circular touch buttons, which can be pulled up instantly on the extra-large screen, get users to the right setting fast so the moment isn’t just a memory.

The BenQ T850 features a Quick Bar that gives you even faster access to 80% of all photo taking needs.  For customized convenience, users can add three of their favorite functions to the Quick Bar. 

To reset the focal point, simply tap the preferred spot on the screen, and the T850 will re-center and automatically refocus the image.  To enlarge a specific portion of the image, simply draw a circle around the location with your fingertip.  The T850 will instantly perform a 12x zoom to the circled area.  Plus, by using the picture cropping mode you can save the enlarged image as a new image. 

Touch screen capability lets you free-hand scribble and scrawl fun captions and drawings to photos.  In addition, you can select from a numerous callout balloons and photo backgrounds/frames.

The T850’s 30 preset modes range from standard auto and video to more exact settings such as “Museum,” “Party,” “Beach” and “Fireworks.”

The BenQ T850 will be available worldwide.

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FROM GAMERTELL - We finally know what we’ll be playing Street Fighter IV on, as the game has been confirmed for the PC, PS3, and 360. MORE »

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by Paul Miller, posted May 29th 2008 at 9:50AM
It wouldn’t be a decent pointless chip marketing program if you didn’t get minor computer builders supporting the “spec” in an effort to make a name for themselves. AMD GAME! just got its first product announcement from Vigor Gaming, and it’s quite the yawner. Vigor is sticking the required AMD components into its Force Recon SP desktops, with a “mainstream” version running an Athlon X2 5600+ processor, ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics and 2GB of RAM for around $1,845, while an AMD Game! Ultra configuration bumps up to a Phenom X4 9650 chip and Radeon HD 3870 graphics for $2,733. Both systems are naturally based on AMD’s 770 chipset and run Vista. Vigor offers free overclocking for the brave and custom painting for the aesthetically challenged.

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Filed under: Desktops, Gaming

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by Donald Melanson, posted May 29th 2008 at 4:48PM It’s far from the first supercomputer created with the help of some gaming hardware, but this rig built by a group of researchers from the University of Antwerp is certainly impressive enough in its own right, with it employing four of NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics cards (which combined pack eight GPUs) to help develop new computational methods for tomography. Dubbed the FASTRA, the system also packs an AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 750GB hard drive, all of which is powered by a 1,500W power supply (and tastefully lit up with some blue LEDs). That apparently lets ‘em do calculations that previously took an hour in just a few seconds, not to mention finally get a decent frame rate in Crysis. Be sure to check out the video after the break for a thorough (and more entertaining than it should be) overview of the system.

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For the last several years, the still pretty crappy cameras on my cell phones have been my main camera. Knowing that I have the cam on the phone in case of impromptu photo opps (generally involving my dogs) makes me less likely to want to drag around yet another device. So now I have hundreds of great pictures, or pictures that would be great if they weren’t so low-res and crappy. They’re not suitable for framing or generally even for printing because they’d look like blurs.

Unless… you’re printing with a Polaroid Pogo pocket printer, which prints small, 2″ x 3″ prints with sticker backs that are small enough to look good even with the resolution provided by most phone cameras. Not only that, the Pogo is wireless and inkless, and weighs only 8 oz. Using Bluetooth, you can print directly from your cell phone. The Pogo prints in full color in about 60 seconds. The printer is inkless because it uses Zink photo paper which is covered in heat-activated crystals. Unlike the Polaroid photos of old, which were prone to smearing, Zink photos are waterproof, tear-proof, and smear-proof. The printer works both with a battery or with the charging cable.

The Pogo will retail for $149, and will be available in July at Target and Best Buy.

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I’m certain some of you are probably stumbling over the title of this article. What the heck is an Unshredder? The opposite of the Shredder, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles greatest enemy?

Actually, the Unshredder is something that helps a user “unshred” shredded documents, something spy agencies have been doing for years. All a user has to do is just use the scanning technology with the device’s artificial intelligence, and that which was shredded will be made whole once again.

Granted, the work of restoring a shredded document is only made less tedious as a user must paste the torn strips of the document onto a transparent tray, and then scan both sides.

This definitely would have come in handy during the cold war. I once heard this story of some American ship that would shred its documents, then it would just throw them out into the sea. This was before environmentalists told us it was a big no-no. Anyway, a Russian submarine would pick up these shredded documents, dry them off, then painstakingly put them together to recover top secret information.

Imagine how easy it would have been if the Soviets had the Unshredder. Well, now you can have it for a rather expensive price of $950 per year for its licensing fee.

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Google’s been teasing the supposedly-called HTC “Dream” and its interface, Android, at the company’s I/O Conference in San Francisco. In case you didn’t know, it’s highly anticipated. It is the Google Phone (UI), after all. The Dream appears to be the real deal, though. Featuring a touchscreen, the model really is the one that Android is built for. In a demo of Android at Google Headquarters, the developers showed off the phone’s accelerometer by using it in “compass mode.” How else this will be used is not really yet known, but using Google Maps’ Street View feature, the phone can be a window into what you’re already looking at and give you directions as you move. Also demoed were the phone’s browser, instantly available traffic information, YouTube, a customizable home screen, the stock ticker, and Pac-Man. I must admit I’m curious as to whether this was made possible by a deal with Namco, or if the Google guys put an emulator on it that all of us can use, too.

The Dream is set to hit by the end of 2008 and according to Engadget, includes 3.6Mbps HSDPA, a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor good for 528MHz, 128MB of RAM, 256MB of ROM, a capacitive touchscreen, and the key to our hearts.

Read More at Engadget

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It looks like the age of the cable box is nearly behind us. A new system being supported by all of the major cable companies, and hardware manufacturers including Samsung, LG, and Panasonic got another big boost today. Sony is on board as well. Essentially, the system is a cable box in your TV. It can do everything the cable box does (guides, DVR, VOD) without that extra peripheral. This’ll be great, and it seems like it truly is the way of the future. Now, if only they can start putting PS3s and amplifiers in our TVs too, so that we don’t have to have shelves and shelves of equipment underneath them.

The agreement also assures the consumer that competition will thrive with this new product. Each TV manufacturer and cable company will be able to tweak the service as they see fit in order to compete for your hard earned dollars. The platform even calls for “write once, run anywhere” applications, and to security for both you and your data and the copyright holders and their data. By getting other technologies behind the new ‘tru2way’ standard, the companies that are currently involved hope to bring on a true digital age. If cell phones, MP3 players, and UPMCs were to support tru2way, legal content could be controlled and still transferred all over the place as the consumer sees fit.

Read More: Gizmodo

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MacRumors discovered a patent application that shows that Apple is looking into integrating solar power into their handhelds and laptops. The most interesting part of this, apart from the green benefits, is that the solar panel could be potentially integrated into the LCD screen themselves, laying right under the glass and LCD layers of the screens.

If Apple pulls this off, this could be the move that gets me to switch my laptop to a Mac. I’m hardly a Windows zealot, but application support has had me sticking to Win32 for a long time, and now that XP has proven its relative stability, I hardly care to switch (the pretty graphics don’t tempt me). However, I’m keenly aware of my carbon footprint, and if there’s a way for me to reduce that without a real decrease in utility, then I’ll gladly use the Windows emulation environment if I have to.

via MacRumors

Posted in Computers, Portable

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