Hasta La Gadget!

Potential overheating problems on Sony’s Vaio laptops prompt the company to announce a recall of 535,000 units, including some sold since January.

It’s probably not the first Foleo to ever splash down on eBay, but this one might just be the most comprehensive of them all. Palm’s companion laptop-that-never-was will almost definitely remain a tech mystery for eons to come, but today, the chance is yours to own the flop of the last decade for just $750. Better still, that Buy It Now price includes a smorgasbord of applications, so you won’t have to go hunting in order to find programs that actually take advantage of the thing. The only downside is the lack of a VGA dongle and the original packaging, but there’s only so much griping you can do about a Foleo that costs less than an Adamo.

Palm Foleo lands on eBay, can be yours for a relative song originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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British police are using poorly-locked or even unlocked “bait-bikes” to catch thieves. The bikes are loaded with hidden GPS tracking devices so the cops can simply wait for the stolen ride to end up at its final destination, letting them bust Mr. Big instead of just constantly pruning the teen-gangs and junkies that do the actual stealing.

According to test schemes, it works. After Cambridge police used bait-bikes, theft at a local railway station fell by 45%, reports the Guardian. The same article tells us that even in London, theft fell by 30%.

Bike theft is driven by the market. Recently I spoke to a bike polo player from Amsterdam, and he told me that people will buy two bikes for around €10 each if they lose their own bike, just so they have a spare. He knew that this was fueling the problem, but the alternative is to buy a brand new bike and have that stolen instead.

To me, the bait-bikes sound like a great idea. Not only do they allow the cops to catch the organized gangs behind the crimes, they sow paranoia amongst the foot-soldiers, making all bikes a less attractive target.

Inevitably, though, there is opposition. Some cite “entrapment” (not illegal in the UK, it seems), and others complain of false positives, as in the case of a drunken student who rode an unlocked bike home and then got a visit from the police (he was let off). These are technical issues, which will vary from country to country. I’m more interested in what you think. I know we have a lot of cyclists reading Gadget Lab, so let us know your opinions in the comments. Is it morally wrong to use bait-bikes? Or is anything acceptable if it stops people from stealing our rides?

Sure, we’ll never reach a lock-free utopia where we can just leave our bikes out in the street overnight, propped naked against a wall (unless we move to Canada), but it would be nice not to have to wrap the bike in twice its weight in chains and hardened-steel shackles just to stop off for a six-pack.

Bait bikes: the way to beat theft gangs or entrapment? [Guardian]

Photo: gen gibson/Flickr

What happens when capacitors go bad, spewing out their tangerine innards like the ones in the photo above? Components die. In the early to mid naughties there was a rash of failures, the so-called “capacitor plague” that affected many manufacturers thanks to millions of bogus units filled with an electrolyte mixture that was a bit off. However, nobody was quite affected like Dell. The company took a $300 million charge in 2005 to cover costs related to the faulty machines that went out with these components, and now we’re getting a better picture of just how bad it was — and continues to be.

According to recently released documents stemming from a three year-old lawsuit, Dell not only knew about the bogus components but some of its employees were actively told to play dumb, one memo sent to customer service reps telling them to “avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had issues.” Meanwhile, sales teams were still selling funky OptiPlex machines, which during that period had a 97 percent failure rate according to Dell’s own study. (And you thought the Xbox 360 had problems.) With that on the minds of shoppers, plus Throttlegate and some other recent laptop quality issues, we have to think consumer confidence for Dell must be at an all-time low at the moment.

[Image courtesy of Bushtails]

Documents show that Dell knowingly sold defective computers, misled those needing support originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is probably more storage than most folks need, but if you’re doing anything at all with HD video–filming it, recording it, etc.–you’ll find this deal hard to pass up. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13845_3-20009234-58.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Cheapskate/a/p