Mar 09

Zivix’s Headliner guitar lets you rock the real and virtual stage

Posted in: controller, guitar, Today's Chili

Zivix's Headliner guitar lets you rock the real and virtual stageSurvey says: kids who pretend rock out in music videogames are more likely to want to learn to play those instruments for reals. For would-be strummers, that means a rather abrupt transition from cheapo plastic toy with buttons to hand-crafted wooden instrument with strings. That could change with the Zivix Headliner, a prototype guitar that also works in both the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series, featuring sensors on the neck to act like buttons and real strings that replace the plastic strum bar. It’s not the first game-friendly guitar with strings we’ve seen, nor indeed is it the company’s first stab at creating a hybrid instrument like this (they demo’ed something similar called the Hero Maker last year), but with a little more venture capital infusion Zivix hopes to have this model on sale by year’s end for under $250 — expensive for a game controller and not exactly cheap for an electric guitar. Any takers?

[Via OhGizmo!]

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Zivix’s Headliner guitar lets you rock the real and virtual stage originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 09

MobME

Posted in: mobile, Today's Chili

The Economist: One drunk driver, 32 traffic violations and 15 miscellaneous offences. A daily tally of crimes in Cochin, a city in the Indian state of Kerala, appears on the mobile phone of Sanjay Vijayakumar, the young co-founder of MobME. His firm, which provides “value-added services” for mobile phones, has outfitted the Cochin police with camera-phones.

Instead of describing crime-scenes to their control room over a walkie-talkie, the police can now snap a picture (stamped with date, time, and place) and send it over the airwaves. It takes just a few seconds to send a photograph over India’s mobile networks. Users can also send live video via 3G networks.

The hesitant auctioneer [The Economist]

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Mar 08

Cisco said to be buying Pure Digital for around $500 million

Posted in: business, camcorder, cisco, industry, merger, Today's Chili

Believe us people, popularity pays off. Just ask Pure Digital CEO Jonathan Kaplan, who is reportedly scrambling for ways to spend $80 million of the $500 million Cisco Systems is about to hand over in order to acquire the company. Granted, none of this has been confirmed just yet, but TechCrunch has it that the deal is all but done. Reportedly, Cisco’s interested in bringing the firm into its portfolio in order to further push high-bandwidth using services. Obviously, user generated HD video fits pretty perfectly into that agenda. We suspect we’ll be hearing more on the subject as the work week begins in earnest, but it sure sounds like Linksys is about to get a new cousin.

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Cisco said to be buying Pure Digital for around $500 million originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 08

From The Creators Of StumbleUpon Comes StumbleVideo

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on December 14, 2006 by CyberNet.

StumbleVideo

Okay, this is one of the coolest sites that I have been to in a long time. StumbleVideo is a simple concept that is based off of the popular StumbleUpon for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It will basically shuffle you through videos from MySpace, Google, and YouTube based upon the category that you want to watch. Much like StumbleUpon, you can give each video a “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” as a rating and the more positive ratings a video receives the more people it will show it to.

My favorite part about StumbleVideo is that you don’t have to download and install a thing, nor do you have to register. Just visit the StumbleVideo website and start watching videos. I have been playing with this all morning and some of the Science/Technology videos are ones that I would not have seen otherwise. Underneath the video you’ll also see a counter for how many videos you have viewed and how many you have given a positive/negative rating to.

I was also looking for a good laugh so I switched over to the Humor category. After 10-15 minutes by side was starting to hurt because the videos were so funny. The video that really put me over the edge was this one…did you know that eBay had a song? Talk about creative! Or maybe you want to find out why animals are better than humans?

I would have been better off without the site because way too much of my time is going to be spent here. Checkout StumbleVideo for yourself to see how quickly you can get addicted!

News Source: TechCrunch

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Mar 08

Aliens PS3 case mod is staggeringly ugly to non-fans

Posted in: case, diy, hack, mod, playstation 3, Playstation3, ps3, sony, Today's Chili

Adding even more credibility to the whole “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” mantra is this… masterpiece / abomination. Inspired by the iconic Aliens films, this completely over the top PlayStation 3 case mod is about as ridiculous as it gets. We’re not really told how the modder went about crafting this lovely interpretation, but we are given a few more snapshots to gawk at in the read link — which you won’t visit unless you too are an Aliens freak, but hey, that’s cool.

[Thanks, Jeremiah]

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Aliens PS3 case mod is staggeringly ugly to non-fans originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 22:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 08

Mimi Switch remote control relies on facial expression, not phalanges

Posted in: ipod, remote control, RemoteControl, Today's Chili

For some reason, whenever gadgetry and smiling cross paths, things tend to get a little creepy. Where the smile trainer was mostly a curiosity, the Orwellian implications of the Okao Catch technology were a bit much — even for the hardened tech blogger. Sure, the Mimi Switch is quite clever: instead of relying on your fingers, this remote control uses an earbud containing infrared sensors that measure the inner ear movements resulting from various facial expressions. “An iPod can start or stop music when the wearer sticks his tongue out,” says the inventor, Kazuhiro Taniguchi of Osaka University. Sounds innocent? Not so fast. The device can also be used to monitor your facial expressions for the appropriate levels of cheerfulness. “If it judges that you aren’t smiling enough,” the inventor goes on to say, “it may play a cheerful song.” Or if you’re smiling too much, the thing can be programmed to play some latter-day Depeche Mode. That always bums us out.

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Mimi Switch remote control relies on facial expression, not phalanges originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 08

Best Buy Says Goodbye to Circuit City

Posted in: exclusive, retail, Today's Chili, top

Reader Sean sends in these photos taken outside his local Circuit City store in Amherst, as Best Buy‘s Geek Squad pay their final respects to Circuit City. And by that, I mean they bought stuff.

Sean tells us that the store was empty down to 3 carts, which meant Circuit City did the only thing they could: They sold their fixtures.

Those yellow price tags you see in the image below are how much the shelves went for, which is what the BB people were there to buy. Everything was somewhere between $75 and $250, in case you were wondering.

Goodbye Circuit City. You were a store we went to before.

All of Giz’s Circuit City coverage – Thanks Sean!

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Mar 08

17-inch MBP fan / overheating issues causing GeForce 9600M to bug out?

Posted in: Apple, GraphicsCard, issue, macbook pro, MacbookPro, NVIDIA, problem, Today's Chili

Oh, brother. We can already tell this one’s going to be a fun, enjoyable journey to follow. Shortly after Apple’s 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro began making its way out to early adopters, small legions of owners have reported all sorts of bizarre graphical glitches. While we first assumed that it was NVIDIA’s GeForce 9600M causing all the mayhem, further investigation has led us to believe that faulty fan controls could be the culprit. Granted, all of this is just speculatory at the moment, but it seems that some users have noticed that their fans aren’t kicking into high gear when they should. ‘Course, some folks have seen those RPMs spin up while the funky lines and psychedelic colors remain, so it’s still hard to pinpoint a definite root cause. We’re told that folks from NVIDIA and Apple are spending their weekends working to figure it out, but we can’t help but be reminded of an eerily similar string of events with overheating MacBook Airs just last year. Hopefully a fix will be out soon; till then, just pretend those erratic colors are some new curative feature.

Read – Fan grumbling
Read – More discussions

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17-inch MBP fan / overheating issues causing GeForce 9600M to bug out? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mar 08

Microsoft Private Folder Protects Your Documents

Posted in: Newly Released, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on July 10, 2006 by CyberNet.

Microsoft Private Folder Protects Your Documents

Microsoft Private Folder 1.0 is a big step in privacy for Microsoft. After downloading the software you will receive a locked folder in your user account that can only be opened with the proper password. If you try and access any files in the folder, even with an external application, you will have to provide the password.

After using The Private Folder for a little while you will notice that the folder can lock itself back up if your computer is idle for a length of time. Microsoft also places a shortcut on the user’s desktop that will link to the folder which prevents people from having to “wander” around their computer looking for the folder.

This is actually a nice concept and I think it should be a feature incorporated directly into Windows. Many people don’t take enough precautionary measures to make sure that their documents are free from being accessed by outside sources. This Private Folder can protect your information so that it isn’t susceptible to a virus or other malicious attacks. Microsoft has definitely done something right this time.

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Mar 08

Sony’s Vaio P benchmarked in all its magnificent and diverse forms

Posted in: benchmark, intel atom, IntelAtom, sony, Today's Chili

Thanks to the work of the gang making time over at their Vaio P forum, the folks at Pocketables have been able to compile benchmarks of all the various configurations of the ultraportable. Including the three models available domestically (which all sport a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520) and the various 1.6GHz Z530 and 1.86GHz Z540-based machines available elsewhere, this ragtag group of benchmarksters have come to the conclusion that the main factor when it comes to the machine’s performance is the disk drive type. “Yes,” writes Jenn Lee, “the faster CPUs give the ALU/FLU numbers a noticeable bump up, but it’s not as significant as the increase seen between a HDD and SSD.” Hopefully this is some small comfort to those of you who are miffed that the 1.86GHz model isn’t available in the States. Of course, now that we’ve seen the Vaino we’re so over Sony’s sassy’n’classy non-netbook, but if you’re morbidly curious the read link tells the whole sordid tale.

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Sony’s Vaio P benchmarked in all its magnificent and diverse forms originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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