Hasta La Gadget!

Boeing was pretty bullish about its aircraft-mounted laser system only a few short months ago, but it looks the program’s future is now considerably more uncertain, even as the sole aircraft to be equipped with the rig begins its first flight tests. Apparently, everything with the tests themselves has been going according to plan, with both the high-energy laser itself and the “beam control / fire control apparatus” along for the ride, and Boeing is even reportedly still on track for a missile-intercept demonstration later this year. The recent funding shakeup at the Pentagon, however, has thrown Boeing and its partners in the project for a bit of a loop, with the department now apparently intending to keep only one of the planes in service (instead of the proposed seven) as it transitions the rest of the program towards a purely R&D effort.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Transportation

Boeing’s Airborne Laser begins flight tests, future uncertain originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Apr 2009 23:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While most carriers are having quite a tift about Skype intruding on their territory, UK-based 3 is letting customers use unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls and messages without any extra fees. The new rules start May 1st for any compatible 3 headset, and later this summer it’ll expand to every 3G phone on the network. The company says it sees the initiative as a win to everyone, not just the customers, as the hope is it’ll lessen calls to people on other networks, which carries a hefty Mobile Termination Rate fee. Whatever the reasons, we’re just happy to see at least one company embracing the VoIP service. We (and Nokia) can only hope this move is somehow contagious.

[Via GigaOM]

Filed under: Cellphones

3 UK promises free mobile Skype calls until the end of time originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While RED has been pretty tight-lipped about its planned RED RAY product, some footage shown off at RED’s NAB party gave a sizable hint that RED RAY could be much more than meets the eye — specifically a $1,000 device that can play cinema-quality 4k video off of standard DVDs. At the party they played an uncompressed showreel of 4k footage on a Sony 4k projector, which clocked in at 1.3GB per second, and then showed that exact same footage under the “RED RAY” codec at a mere 10Mb/s (megabits, not bytes; about half the bitrate of SD DV), at a compression rate of 700:1. Attendees claimed they could see zero visible compression, though a projector in a ballroom isn’t exactly the best case scenario to test that sort of thing. Unfortunately, there’s little other info about how they’re achieving this (we hear “wavelets” come into the equation at some point), or to what nefarious aims, but with compression like this the implications for content distribution are pretty stunning: 1080p+ streaming for all. Naturally, the down side of all of this is probably some pretty hefty processing power on the consumer end, but we’ll cross that I/O bridge when we come to it.

[Thanks, Ben H]

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment, Storage

RED blows away small room of videophiles with 4k RED RAY footage at half the bitrate of MiniDV originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A notebook from MSI portends the crush of lower-cost, Intel-based MacBook-Air-like laptop designs to come.

The MSI X-Slim series herald Apple MacBook Air-like laptops without the luxury laptop tax

(Credit: MSI)

As I’ve written before, consumer ultra-low-voltage (CULV) chips will arrive in earnest this summer. The X-Slim X340 from MSI (…

Originally posted at Nanotech – The Circuits Blog

Some of today’s DVD and Blu-ray soundtracks are so densely mixed that dialog can be hard to understand.

When actors’ lines are obscured by onscreen mayhem, you may miss important plot details. The dialog intelligibility problem is even worse for people who are hard of hearing.

Here’s a simple fix to improve intelligibility that also works like a charm for quiet, late-night movie watching.

Onkyo's TX-SR805's remote offers direct access to center channel volume.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

Turn up the center channel volume level. Please understand, that’s not the same thing as cranking up your receiver’s volume control. Raising the center channel volume relative to the left/right and surround channels makes dialog louder than the music and sound effects, so it’s easier to understand what the actors are saying.

The easiest way to make the adjustment is with your receiver or home theater-in-a-box system’s remote control. Check and see if your remote has a button marked “Channel Select.” My Onkyo TX-SR805 receiver’s remote has such a control, marked “CH SEL”. It toggles through left, right, center, etc., and once I got to the center I used the “Level -” and “Level +” buttons to adjust the center channel volume.

Experiment to figure out how much louder you want the center channel speaker to be, but start with turning it up by three decibels. That might be enough, but don’t hesitate to turn it up higher if that’s what you need.

Of course, you can also use the CH SEL feature to boost subwoofer volume to taste whenever you switch movies or CDs. Or adjust the surround channels volume.

…

Originally posted at The Audiophiliac