Hasta La Gadget!

Our Dell Adamo unit arrived this morning, and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it. As you can see, the packaging is pretty unique–and getting it out of the box and into our hands took less than 30 seconds. Nice job, Dell!

Watch in High-Defintion

UPDATE: The links to the Russian site aren’t working; sorry! Hopefully the site will come back up.

This, hands down, is one of the most involved–and amazing–case mods I’ve ever seen. Originally posted on casemods.ru, few details about the project are available to those who don’t read Russian. (Google Translator to the rescue!)

Completely hand-built in just 18 days, this amazing mod began when a man named Valeri watched Wall-E, Disney and Pixar’s 2008 animated hit:

I was impressed by the
image of a small, very lonely robot who is struggling alone with a
whole army of fellow that I decided to make a computer corpus of my
favorite hero.

So he headed to the machine shop and got to work. There, he cut, milled, drilled, and filed every piece of the lovable little robot out of metal, paying remarkable attention to even the tiniest of details. The resulting 19 pages of in-process photographs show the truly astounding craftsmanship that went into creating the final piece.

Perhaps for his next project, an external-drive Eva is in order?

Is your sofa a Mac or a PC? If you consider your couch a Mac, this post isn’t for you (I suggest you try this one instead). But if you prefer to have Windows in your living room, read on. 

Ladies and geeks, feast your eyes on the latest addition to the tech-themed home accessories market: ALT+CTRL+DEL throw pillows. Completely handmade out of eco-friendly felt, the set of three 12-inch-square pillows costs $60 (or $52.50 for the cases only) in Diffraction Fiber’s Etsy shop.

[via SwissMiss]

Hey, what do you know? All those meetings over the proposed National Broadband Plan has amounted to something: a “yeah, we should probably hit this up.” Today, the FCC has kicked off an immensely ambitious project to bring “high-speed internet access to every corner of the United States.” $7.2 billion of the economic stimulus package has already been allocated for the task, but it’ll be ages before anything becomes of this. For starters, the FCC is asking for input from consumers, businesses, etc, yet it doesn’t require a response until February of 2010. Meanwhile, nations like South Korea, Japan and Australia are all looking to implement similar rollouts, albeit with much higher speeds. You see, the FCC currently defines “broadband” as 786Kpbs, which obviously isn’t anywhere near median rates in some of the aforementioned countries. Pardon our skepticism in this becoming a reality, but at least we’ll be extra elated if our rock-bottom expectations are met.

Filed under: Wireless, Networking

National Broadband Plan to bring high-speed access to all Americans… ideally originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Gadget: Elgato’s turbo.264HD video encoder, a USB dongle meant to be a fast and easy way to potentially speed up video conversions to H.264 file format for your iPhone/iPod/AppleTV.

The Price: $129.95

The Verdict: Elgato’s turbo.264HD is a great encoder for those who need to basically do a lot of video encoding and want it done quickly. It’s extremely intuitive, making it quick and simple to use, and is also the fastest one we’ve tried to date.

Using an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (which was 20.5 minutes long and a 175MB AVI file) as our guinea pig, we tested the turbo.264HD converter against older encoding programs including iSquint and the previous version of turbo.264.

Encoding times for an h.264 file

From these results, iSquint’s conversion times seem to jump drastically depending on what platform it is converting for. But with turbo.264HD and it’s previous version, they were both consistent in their conversions—a couple of them only differing by 3 seconds, with Elgato’s upgrade being consistently faster—up to 5 times as fast as iSquint in some cases— than the others. However, one thing you have to remember with the turbo.264HD though is that you cannot use the program unless you have the USB plugged in, forcing you to use something else (iSquint) if you don’t have it on you. Also, the dongle only works with its designated turbo.264HD software, rendering it useless when used with any other program and with any other application that has Quicktime export as well.

As for quality, I honestly can say that all the encoders produced pretty much the same type of video when converted for the iPod: slightly grainy and blury like a crappy, pirated video rip, but nothing to truly nitpick considering the medium it’s for.

Before purchasing turbo.264HD, it would be smart to think about whether you have $130 worth of video you need encoded, or if you’d rather spend more time encoding to save some money. Basically, what is worth more to you: time or money?