Hasta La Gadget!

File this one directly in the “why didn’t I think of that?” folder. As the bathroom gets more and more eco-friendly, the EcoDrain is stepping in to take advantage of all the hot water that goes to waste each time you shower. Put simply, this user-installed heat exchanger transfers heat from hot shower waste water to cold incoming water, essentially cutting water heater usage by as much as 40 percent. Of course, we’ve never seen a plumbing job that was anything close to simple, but for savings like this, it may just be worth the trouble.

[Via Inhabitat]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

EcoDrain heat exchanger makes good use of warm waste water originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of our pet peeves with Sony gear has long been the software. Beautiful hardware matched with average to awful software can kill the user experience. Oh sure, there are exceptions in Sony’s broad product portfolio, but interfaces like XMB are bubbles on Sony’s otherwise festering UI sores. Sony knows this, they’ve admitted it with a promise of good things to come — and here’s a good example: Sony’s new X-series Walkman with 3-inch OLED. In the (controlled) promotional video (finally!) found after the break, the X-series Walkman seems to offer a sweet mix of hybrid touchscreen and physical controls conveniently positioned for use. The 3D animations also look fluid without being superfluous. Even Sony’s drag-and-drop Content Transfer Tool (updated to 1.1 last week) for quickly moving audio, video, and pictures onto the player looks dead simple to use. We’ll reserve final judgement until we get a unit in-house for a review. Until then, feel free to jump to your own conclusions in the comments.

[Via SonyInsider]

Continue reading Video: Sony NWZ-X1000 OLED touchscreen Walkman rightly promoted

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Video: Sony NWZ-X1000 OLED touchscreen Walkman rightly promoted originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A new firmware update from Apple is designed to fix the “possibility" of vertical lines and distorted graphics on the new, 17" unibody MacBook Pro. This will come as good news to the hundreds or thousands of owners who thought that Apple had simply shipped machines with defective graphics cards.

The problem can be seen in the photograph above, taken from an Apple Support Forum posting by Forcefedmedia. The lines appear when switching to the more powerful GeForce 9600 graphics card — sticking with the integrated graphics fixes the issue.

Hopefully, given that Apple has now released this firmware update, things will be fixed. The prevailing thought said that this was actually caused by fried graphics processors, and it’s easy to see why, especially if you lived through the iBook G4 (and some G3) issue of some years back, which actually was a hardware problem.

Still, the unibody MacBooks have generally been the best Mac launch in years, with much fewer teething troubles than usual. Any giant, 17" MacBook toting readers should let us know how things go.

About the MacBook Pro Graphics Firmware Update 1.0
[Apple]

Screenshot: Forcefedmedia

If you can set aside the emotional ire evoked by its unfortunate DoReMi subtitle, French site Le Journal du Geek has procured a Samsung U5 pocket audio player and posted a plethora of pics of it dans la nature. No impressions here, but it does appear to come with a handful of colored face plates. They certainly won’t cover the player the ones we saw in the official photos, but if you need a change of scenery, we guess every little bit helps. Still no word on pricing, availability, or that certain je ne sais quoi that’ll help the player rise above the fates of its U3 and U4 predecessors.

Filed under: Portable Audio

Samsung U5 DoReMi, out of pocket and in the wild originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s a meme that never gets old, wouldn’t you agree? As the world gathers ’round again to chuckle at an all-too-faithful GPS user in the UK, we’re looking this time at a man who literally drove his BMW to the brink of disaster while following his sat nav down a skinny, steep lane on the way to imminent death Todmorden. As the story goes, his navigation system apparently told him to drive directly into a fence just before the road fell off of a cliff, and considering that the 43 year old bloke uses the GPS for his job, you’d think he would have the whole “follow the leader” thing down pat. At any rate, the poor fellow did manage to survive, though he won’t soon shake the “driving without due care and attention” charge. Nor the embarrassment.

[Via Switched, thanks Alan]

Filed under: GPS

Another UK driver nearly dies from following GPS instructions originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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