Hasta La Gadget!

With the PPC paper laptop bag, you can carry your computer, help the environment and learn how to mix cement, all at the same time.

PPC stands for “Pretoria Portland Cement”, and the bags are made from the South African company’s cement bags (hence the instructions). We have a feeling that the material was chosen for the excellent logo, though, featuring an elephant and the words “Strength Guaranteed”.

The messenger-style bags, made by Wren Design and sold through Etsy, aren’t just paper. The sacks have been backed with calico for strength and have been made more water-resistant using Scotchguard (good enough to stand up to cycling in Swedish snow, according to the site). The only problem is the price. At $82, you could buy a small Timbuk2 bag which would last you forever. On the other hand, this is hand-made, and undoubtedly cooler than anything off-the-peg.

‘THE’ PPC Cement Laptop Bag [Wren Design]

PPC Cement Laptop Bags [Etsy]

Sometimes companies spar out their differences behind closed doors, and sometimes they have guys like Jen-Hsun Huang at their helms and the whole world gets to know how they feel and what they intend to do about it. The Tegrasaurus Rex has taken a recent interview with Fortune magazine as an opportunity to eloquently lay out his side’s case in the epic cross-licensing dispute between NVIDIA and Intel, and to let us all know that he sees “no reason” to settle with the Atom-making giant. Describing Intel’s argumentation as “completely nonsense,” NVIDIA’s fearless leader tell us that he’s eagerly anticipating the court clash scheduled for later this year. We can’t yet confirm whether or not he finished it off with a “bring your popcorn” instruction, but all his recorded words await in video form just after the break.

Continue reading Jen-Hsun Huang is ‘looking forward’ to court date with Intel, sees no reason to settle (video)

Jen-Hsun Huang is ‘looking forward’ to court date with Intel, sees no reason to settle (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The super-high-end 17-inch M6500 is all well and good for giant people, but we’re glad Dell’s finally giving us regular-sizers a shot with the new Precision M4500. Naturally, compromises have been made, but only just barely. The new 15.6-inch laptop rocks a 16:9, 1920 x 1080 display, backed up by NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M or 880M graphics (the 6500 supports the 3800M, 2800M and ATI M7740) and your choice of Core i5 or Core i7 processors, on up to the Core i7-920XM Quad Core Extreme Edition. This being Dell, there are plenty of tweaks and perks on offer, like a HD+ sRGB LED screen with 100 percent color gamut, a 64GB SSD mini card for dual drive configs without losing the optical drive, a 3 megapixel camera, backlit keyboard, multitouch trackpad, Precision ON, and a multi-carrier-friendly Gobi 2.0 wireless chip. Perhaps most excitingly for us on-the-go regular-sizers, you can supposedly squeeze out 7 hours and 40 minutes of battery with the 9 cell option, and there’s a 12 cell battery slice option less than half an inch thick that should send it over the moon. On its own the laptop is 1.1-inches thick and weighs 6 pounds, and while exact pricing hasn’t been ironed out yet, it should start at less than $1,700. Start counting out those regular-sized green dollars of yours, the laptop should be out in the “coming weeks.”

That not enough for you? Dell’s also upgrading its Precision T7500, T5500 and T5300 workstations to Intel Xeon 5600 Westmere EP processors for you desk slaves within a similar timeframe. PR and another M4500 press shot are after the break.

Continue reading Dell brings next-gen Precision performance to M4500 15.6-incher

Dell brings next-gen Precision performance to M4500 15.6-incher originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen “real” guitars made to “work” with existing music-band titles, and we’ve even seen MIDI guitars play nice with Rock Band, but we’ve yet to see a company design a game from the ground-up to work with a legitimate six string. Until now. Here at GDC, Seven45 Studios is making a name for itself by introducing Power Gig: Rise of the SixString (for PS3 and Xbox 360) along with a bona fide axe. The newfangled company is a sister firm to First Act — the same guys who made that guitar sold with your ’07 Jetta — and the instrument debuting here at the show uses proprietary technology “that can distinguish and recognize gamers’ input all along the guitar.” Better still, the instrument includes all of the innards necessary to make noise through an amp, so you could theoretically use this to rock out in real life as well. If you’re skeptical about the game’s ability to actually recognize complicated inputs, get a load of this: “Power Gig also introduces the option to switch on chording, or chord play; chording presents the added challenge of playing the game using chords that require specific finger placement on the strings.” The tandem is slated to go on sale this fall for an undisclosed amount, and we’ll be snagging some hands-on time with the game and guitar here in just a few hours — stay tuned!

Continue reading Seven45 Studios ups the ante for music games, intros fully functional six string controller

Seven45 Studios ups the ante for music games, intros fully functional six string controller originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MSI’s new Wind netbook uses the low-power Intel Atom N450 “Pine Trail” CPU and manages to get an almost ridiculous 15-hours of battery life. Even if we viciously slash that time in half, to simulate real-life use, seven hours is impressive on a mere six-cell battery, and we’d expect something close to ten.

The specs are otherwise similar to all other netbooks: 10-inch display, 160GB hard drive, a gig of RAM and Windows 7. But the case itself features some rather neat additions. First, it comes in gold (or black), has a glowing MSI logo on the back, and the power button sits in the hinge – hardly useful, but certainly cool-looking. Best is the big trackpad, which has no edges and just disappears into the main body of the computer. The keyboard is more stylish, too, featuring MacBook-alike chiclets. MSI has even made the comma and period keys the right size instead of the tiny vestigial buttons on the original Wind.

The U160 is $430. That’s not bad, but we have a feeling that a certain $500 “tablet” computer might cause the netbook market to be even less attractive than it is already.

Wind U160 [MSI. Thanks, Mark!]