Engadget Podcast 161 – 08.29.2009

Missed the live show? Hate things happening in real time? We understand exactly how you may or may not feel, and have thrown together this intense, packaged, downloadable version of the show for you to consume. It’s kind of like a podcast, except with way more excitement and knowledge. The boys touched on a wide range of news week, pouring out their Snow Leopard early adopter woes and conjecturing on the future of book reading in the highly informative Sony Reader section. There’s something here for the whole family!

Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel, Paul Miller
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Song: Rock You Like A Hurricane

Hear the podcast

00:02:27 – Snow Leopard review
00:23:40 – Editorial: Apple, the FCC, and the sideloading solution
00:37:20 – Sony announces Reader Daily Edition, free library ebook checkouts
00:53:40 – Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 officially €500 in October (update: Video!)
00:59:51 – Nokia introduces Booklet 3G ‘mini laptop’
01:07:48 – PlayStation 3 Slim review
00:12:10 – Xbox 360 price drops go global on Friday, it’s official

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Contact the podcast

1-888-ENGADGET or podcast (at) engadget (dot) com.

Twitter: @joshuatopolsky @futurepaul @reckless @engadget

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Engadget Podcast 161 – 08.29.2009 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI’s AMD-powered U210 up for pre-order, still not ‘official’

Who needs press releases? You can snap up an MSI U210 pre-order right this second on Amazon, so why bother waiting MSI to actually confirm the thing for a Stateside release? Morality. That’s why. Kids these days think they can just drop $430 on any old Athlon Neo MV-40-powered (the same chips at the heart of HP’s dv2) 12-inch XGA ultraportable with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD and 802.11n and not have to pay the consequences. Well, we’re not standing for it. That read link right below? Not an implied approval of these illicit activities.

[Via Mark’s Technology News]

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MSI’s AMD-powered U210 up for pre-order, still not ‘official’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 13:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Read Your Time

qlocktwo.jpg

Popgadget: The most precious commodity in a human being’s life has always been one that is fathomed by an inconsiderate glance at the timepiece on the wall or one’s own body – all in pursuit of the selfish need to spend that commodity called “time” wisely and to our own advantage. Which brings us to the question rarely asked – how much time have you spent in trying to read out “time” itself ? Not more than a few minutes in an entire day, we suppose.

Well, not unless you own this German handmade marvel called QLOCKTWO which demands more than that occasional glance to make sense of time. In this clock there are no numbers, or the industrious pair of “hands”. Instead, QLOCKTWO spells out time only via text – typographic time format in 5 minute intervals combined with four-minute dots. The text that spells the current hour is highlighted using light sensors that can automatically adjust the display to ambient light. The clock itself is made of wood with an acrylic face and glass polished edges. And the changing display doesn’t necessarily mean that the clock is a power guzzler – apparently its LED technology assures a power consumption of less than 2 Watts.

QLOCKTWO from Biegert & Funk spells time in smart typography [Popgadget]

Sirius’ nifty new home satellite radio tuner

That blurry thing under the display is the SR-H2000.

(Credit: Sirius XM)

I went to Sirius XM’s New York City headquarters on Wednesday to see what’s new. They showed a bunch of docking units and the like, but the only new product that got my juices flowing was …

Originally posted at The Audiophiliac

LG’s 15-inch OLED screen is still drop dead gorgeous, likely priced to kill

Whooo. (Not Wooo.) Amazing how a few well framed PR shots can reignite gadget lust, just when it seems extinguished. Sure, LG’s 15-inch OLED HDTV will probably follow the path of Sony’s $2,500 11-inch XEL-1 to the land of ridiculously overpriced trinkets that few can or will purchase and eventually falls by the wayside when larger, cheaper options become available. Still, checking out that ultra bright screen in these photos has us checking our bank account for an extra few grand, refreshing the feeling last experienced when we checked it out in person at CES. The appearance of these on LG’s Flickr stream would appear to support the summer mass production-December launch we’ve been promised, who else is wishing the 30-inch version wasn’t delayed until 2012?

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LG’s 15-inch OLED screen is still drop dead gorgeous, likely priced to kill originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s upcoming WB5000 24x zoomer shoots RAW photos and HD video

Samsung has a new one in the works, the WB5000, presumably offering the price advantages of an 24x zoomin’ all-in-one with some of the features and image quality of a DSLR — that’s the dream, anyway. The camera shoots 12.5 megapixel stills, with full manual controls, face detection and support for RAW formatted images, while also offering HD recording and a relatively compact form factor. True details are scarce, but it sounds promising on the surface. The WB5000 should be out in the fourth quarter, no word on price just yet.

[Via Engadget Spanish]

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Samsung’s upcoming WB5000 24x zoomer shoots RAW photos and HD video originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 10:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Digital City No. 47: Installing Snow Leopard and the fallout from falling PS3 and Xbox 360 prices

Episode 47 of the Digital City, where we install Apple’s new Snow Leopard OS update; discuss the current round of game console price cuts; check out some Netbooks with HD displays; and

Originally posted at Digital City Podcast

HTML Signatures for Gmail 2

This article was written on November 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

Gmail 2 Logo We just wrote about how Gmail 2 breaks a lot of the Greasemonkey scripts that are available, and Gina from Lifehacker turned right around and released Better Gmail 2. As expected this version only has a fraction of scripts that the original extension had, and it still lacks some of my favorites: Google Calendar integration, Google Reader integration, and Folders4Gmail. None of those scripts have been made compatible with Gmail 2 yet.

One script that I have to have is one for automatically inserting HTML signatures into my emails. The script I used previously wasn’t all that complicated, and I decided to go ahead and fix it myself. I took it one step further, however, and made it work with both the new version and the old version of Gmail.

Note: This script is designed to insert your signature at the beginning of replies/forwards, instead of at the end.

Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Download and install Greasemonkey if you don’t already have it.
  2. Install the script
  3. You’ll need to have the HTML code for the signature that you want to insert. Once you have that just go to the Greasemonkey script manager and edit the script’s HTML signature. The code looks something like this (insert the signature where you see the green text):

    var htmlSignature = ‘<br>–<br>Ryan Wagner, Founder/Editor<br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”>CyberNet Technology News</a><br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/CyberNet.gif” style=”border:0″ alt=”CyberNet Technology News”/></a>‘;

    top.window.setTimeout(”top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML = ‘” + htmlSignature + “‘ + top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML;”,500);

    var allBody = document.evaluate(”//body[@class=’editable tr-field’]“, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
    allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML = htmlSignature + allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML;

This script does work with Opera, but only with the older version of Gmail. I used a special Firefox-only searching property to insert the signature for the new version of Gmail, and the reason being that Gmail 2 has some issues in Opera. In fact Opera users won’t even see a link to the newer version of Gmail unless they are masking the browser as Firefox or IE.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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Fuseproject commissioned by the City of New York to make bike helmets look less bad

In cities like New York, where bikers ride right alongside heavy traffic, bike helmets are a must. Trouble is, apparently plenty of riders don’t like wearing them because of vanity — most bike helmets aren’t exactly attractive, if you haven’t noticed. Well, the City of New York’s commissioned Projectfuse helmets — that combine safety with an attempt at decent stylings. The helmets feature a two-fold design, with an inner protective polystyrene, which is then covered with a customizable soft fabric that attaches with straps. No, you cannot buy them yet, and we don’t know anything about pricing or availability yet, but we do know that you can score one for free — yes, free — at various events around the city. Let us know if you snag one!

[Via Wired]

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Fuseproject commissioned by the City of New York to make bike helmets look less bad originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 29 Aug 2009 08:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Review: Toshiba U505 Is a Butt Ugly Notebook With Performance Chops

u505For a computer that’s supposed to be “thin and light” the Toshiba U505 really isn’t. It’s thick 2.8 inches because of an enormous battery that juts out on the bottom. And it’s heavy, at 5.6 pounds. But does it perform? It does! From Christopher Null:

Fortunately all is not lost with the Satellite U505: The laptop turns
in solid benchmark scores for a 13.3-inch machine, besting most of its
similarly-sized compatriots by a (ahem) thin margin. It’s also awfully
cheap for a notebook with a 13-inch screen (resolution is 1280 x 800
pixels): $950 gets you a 400-GB hard drive, 4 GB of RAM, and a
respectable 2-GHz Core 2 Duo processor. That battery also does more
than give you a pain in the back while lugging the U505 around. It
gives over four hours of battery life with the optical drive
continuously engaged, and lasts more than half a day in ordinary heavy
use.

You want more, don’t you? Read the rest of the riveting review right here.