Hasta La Gadget!

Oh sure, the e-reader may be just fine for some, but for the traditionalists in attendance who just can’t enjoy a novel without turning those crisp, cool pages as you plow through yet another masterpiece, this invention is the one to care about — particularly when you’re fingers are frozen in place and you’re just too dilapidated to do anything but read and comprehend. The absolutely genius Book Time creation managed to nab a Robot of the Year award over in Japan, as it holds down books and periodicals and automatically flips pages and pins down edges to keep sheets from flapping about uncontrollably. We can’t quite tell if this thing’s voice activated or not (we’re hoping so), but either way, you can check out the hot paper turning action for yourself just past the break.

[Via NewLaunches]

Continue reading Book Time shrugs off e-readers, turns paper pages for you

Filed under: Robots

Book Time shrugs off e-readers, turns paper pages for you originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We had a feeling that MSI’s second Wind, the hybrid drive-toting U115, would sport a better battery life than its predecessor, but we didn’t think it would be quite so spectacular.

Because the U115 features both a traditional hard drive along with a solid state drive, it can use the low-power SSD for often accessed system operations and keep the juice-sucking HD spun down most of the time. over at the German site, Eee-PC.de, writer Johannes loaded up the Wind with a third-party nine-cell battery and fired up the  testing software “Battery Eater” and left it to run. The test began one evening and ran all night and day, finally finishing 25:04:16 later.

The Battery Eater test is one that sits there and sips power — the netbook was doing nothing that it would do in real life other than sitting on a desk. But still, that’s more than a day’s worth of use. Compare this to Laptop Mag’s more intensive test on the nine-cell, carried out in a seedy Vegas hotel room in January. That test pushes the machine far harder, running Wi-Fi and loading a selection of 60 web-pages on a cycle until the battery dies. The result? 10 hours 32 minutes. For normal use, then, you’re looking at something in between.

Is anyone else having flashbacks to the early nineties and five-hour cellphone battery life? The days where you had to carry the charger wherever you went? I don’t miss them. and I won’t miss them this time around, either.

MSI Wind U115 with 9 cell battery in Idle: 25:04 hours!
[Eee-PC via Lilliputing]

Photo: nDevilTV/Flickr

See Also:

• MSI’s Second Wind: Hybrid Drive, Low-Powered CPU
• MSI to Showcase Low-Powered All-in-One Desktop, Netbooks at CES …

If you want to impress your friends and family, try shooting some panoramas. Panos are composites from multiple photos showing a wider field of view than a normal lens would provide. Because you’re using multiple shots panos often have astounding detail. A pano shot of 100 megapixels or more is not that hard to achieve and you (Yeah, you) can do it with virtually any camera and free software!

Panoramas will be much easier if you’re not shooting in “AUTO.” Admittedly the purpose of this series is to get you to explore the other modes in your camera, but it’s a really big deal here. You want your snaps to match shot-to-shot in depth of field and exposure. “AUTO” won’t let you do that. You need to be in “MANUAL” or an aperture priority mode where your f-stop setting won’t change between clicks.

We understand, you’re not ready to let go of the BSG season finale just yet even though Tiger and Phil are charging up the back nine at Augusta, but keeping a lot of HD on the DVR can fill up space quickly — which is where these two come in. Amazon is now taking pre-orders of the long-awaited 1TB edition of Western Digital’s TiVo compatible (or other eSATA enabled box) DVR Expander, although no ship date is listed, and Apricorn took our advice on its fugly 500GB, 1TB or 1.5TB sized boxes, giving them a sleek new look. It’s dual USB 2.0 / eSATA compatible, but not TiVo, so Scientific Atlanta 8300, DirecTV and DISH ViP owners can claim this one at $219 for the 1.5TB, while the WD will set you back $183.

Read – Apricorn Unveils New Look for the DVR Expander
Read – Western Digital WDG1S10000N My DVR Expander 1TB eSATA (Black)

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

Western Digital 1TB DVR Expander pre-orders up at Amazon, Apricorn add-ons get a face lift originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Apr 2009 22:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on December 04, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’ve got a lot of news to share about Ubuntu, and instead of doing several different posts about it all I thought it would be better to aggregate the info into one convenient article. Prepare your minds for Ubuntu overload!

–Dell Ships 40,000 Ubuntu Machines–

The Register managed to get their hands on some Dell stats, and they are actually rather impressive. It was back in May that Dell started offering Ubuntu as an operating system option on both laptops and desktops, and since then they have apparently shipped 40,000 units. I’m rather impressed with that number, but over 6-months has passed since the release which equates to about 220 computers being shipped every day.

The big question that this has left everyone asking is whether that’s good enough for Dell. They are shipping about 10 million computers every 3-months, and I’m not sure if they’ll see enough value in offering a line of computers where they can only ship 20,000 in the same period. It will be interesting to see how it plays out though.

–Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 1–

One of the joys with open source technology is that you can keep on top of future releases almost as if you were a developing it yourself. With that being said Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 1 (Hardy Heron) was just released, but it only brings a few goodies to the table. It has Xorg 7.3 which improves automatic graphics configuration, a few updated apps like Firefox and Gimp, and there are some new packages that were merged in from Debian.

It’s probably not worth an upgrade quite yet because you’ll risk compromising your system’s stability since it is such an early release. Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 is scheduled for December 20th, and then looking into next year Beta 1 is planned for March 27th. When all is said and done Ubuntu 8.04 will ship on April 24th, 2008 and it will be classified as a Long Term Support (LTS) release.

–Full Circle Magazine Issue #7–

It’s that time again! The community-powered Ubuntu magazine is already on its 7th issue, and the cover story is on installing Ubuntu Studio. That version of Ubuntu is geared towards audio and video enthusiasts.

I’ve converted this issue of Full Circle Magazine into a JPEG image for those of you who don’t want to download the PDF, and here’s a quick overview of what issue #6 has in it:

• Step-by-Step Ubuntu Studio Installation
• How-To:
• Simple SSH Install
• A Terminal on your Desktop
• Easily Convert from Windows
• Learning Scribus Part 7
• Wubi Installer Review
• Top 5 Audio/Video Apps.
• Interview with the Howard County Library
• News, Letters, Q&A, MyDesktop and more

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