Hasta La Gadget!

Attention all humans and empathetic robots: The Engadget Show is back in a big way today, October 23rd at 6:30pm! To get things started, Josh and the gang will be taking a first-hand look at a plethora of Windows Phone 7 devices with Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman, then we’ll be demoing Google TV, and Engadget’s own Darren Murph will be joining Josh, Nilay, and Paul on stage, Guinness World Record in hand. What’s more, we’re hosting our first ever Halloween costume contest! There will be giveaways at the show for the best costumes (as voted on by you, the audience), so get to work on your winning masterpiece now! We’ll also have the usual random giveaways, but why leave it to chance when you could win stuff with a little creativity and a black turtleneck? There will also be music from Kris Keyser and visuals from noteNdo and plenty of other giveaways at the live show only, so make the trek and join us at The Times Center in person. We have a new ticketing policy, so if you’re coming to the live show, be sure to read about it below. If you’re geographically incapable of joining us in New York City laster this evening just tune into the stream right here on Engadget.

Update: Due to a technical issue, we won’t be livestreaming the show tonight.

Update 2: Or maybe we will! We appear to have worked out some of the issues, so head on down!

The Engadget Show is sponsored by Sprint, and will take place at the Times Center, part of The New York Times Building in the heart of New York City at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues (see map after the break). Tickets are — as always — free to anyone who would like to attend, but seating is limited, and tickets will be first come, first served… so get there early! Here’s the updated info on our new ticketing policy that you need to know:

• There is no admission fee — tickets are completely free
• The event is all ages
• Ticketing will begin at the Times Center at 2:00PM today, Saturday October 23rd, doors will open for seating at 5:45PM, and the show begins at 6:30PM
• We now have assigned seating, so the first people to get their tickets — and the Sprint text-to-win winners (see below) — will get priority seating. This also means that once you get a ticket, your seat is guaranteed — you won’t have to get back in line to get a good seat.
• We still had plenty of tickets left over at the last taping, so just because it’s 5:00pm and you finally finished Halo: Reach doesn’t mean you won’t get a seat at the show — so get your butt up to the Times Center this evening!
• Ticketing will continue until all tickets are given away
• You cannot collect tickets for friends or family — anyone who would like to come must be present to get a ticket
• Seating capacity in the Times Center is about 340, and once we’re full, we’re full
• The venue is located at 41st St. between 7th and 8th Avenues in New York City (map after the break)
• The show length is around an hour

If you’re a member of the media who wishes to attend, please contact us at: engadgetshowmedia [at] engadget [dot] com, and we’ll try to accommodate you. All other non-media questions can be sent to: engadgetshow [at] engadget [dot] com.

Subscribe to the Show:

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The Engadget Show returns today! With Windows Phone 7, Aaron Woodman, Google TV devices, and our first Halloween costume contest! (update: no livestream) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The definition of a good friend is someone who, if you say to them “Gee, I’d really like a foot pedal to advance my overflowing Google Reader feeds,” turns around and builds you one. From scratch. In this way we know that modder Matt Richardson is a good friend, as that’s what he crafted out of a little electric pedal and a disused keyboard (of the Dell variety). It’s not the most complex hack we’ve ever seen, but it is a good one, and he’s happy to show you exactly how to do it in the video below. Oh, and the friend’s response? You can see it for yourself at the end of the embed.

Continue reading Matt Richardson MacGuyvers a Google Reader pedal out of just these items, zero duct tape (video)

Matt Richardson MacGuyvers a Google Reader pedal out of just these items, zero duct tape (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 Oct 2010 10:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Greg Gilmour wanted to keep his gun safely locked up, and he wanted to do it the way James Bond would, so he went the homemade biometric-safe route.

For web designers, tools that give instant color codes from anywhere on their display are invaluable. How much, then, would a tool that can do that in the real world be worth? Hopefully you said $649, because that’s what Pantone is charging for its new CAPSURE. It’s the latest in a long line of tools and utilities designed to help graphics-minded people get accurate color information, a sort of handheld scanner — just place it on anything and it’ll ID your hue in CMYK and good ‘ol RGB. Think of it as a physical eye dropper that won’t get your subjects wet, a device that just about anyone who’s ever created a webpage would love to have. Sadly, at that price, it’s bound for only the most well appointed of utility belts.

Continue reading Pantone’s CAPSURE tells you what color anything is, easily separates salmon from rose

Pantone’s CAPSURE tells you what color anything is, easily separates salmon from rose originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 23 Oct 2010 07:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on September 16, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the new features that Opera 9.2 introduced is called Speed Dial. It’s essentially like a customizable homepage except that this takes screenshots of websites, and then places a thumbnail of them aligned to a grid for easy access.

You can currently add up to nine sites, and each Speed Dial entry is mapped to the corresponding Ctrl+[1-9] hotkeys. The Speed Dial page is also displayed each time you open a new tab, and for that reason I agree with the Opera community when they say there should be more than 9 Speed Dial entries.

One of the cool things in Speed Dial is the ability to set an automatic reload interval (pictured above). This makes it easy to see when changes have occurred to any of your Speed Dial entries.

Naturally you will want to add the sites you visit the most to your Speed Dial, and when you have such a frugal amount of entries available it can be tough to decide what makes the cut. Well, today I’m here to make it even tougher by showing you some of the useful things you can add to your Speed Dial!

1. Traffic graphs – Who ever said that the pages in your Speed Dial had to be websites? You can also add images to it which are pleasantly scaled down, and website owners may find it beneficial to keep a traffic chart as one of the entries (like this one for Alexa).
   
2. Weather radar – Most weather sites offer radar images for regions around the world, and all you need to do is grab the address of the image associated with a radar image. I’ve got the AccuWeather Iowa radar image refreshing every 5-minutes, and it’s nice being able to take a quick glance each time I open a new tab to see if any big storms are coming our way!
   
3. Cron job – I’ve got a task that I want to run on a remote server only when my laptop is turned on, which happens to be the entire day expect when I sleep. So I setup the script to get executed through some PHP on a website, and if the script is successful in its task it outputs a solid green page. If it fails the page is red and provides the reason it failed. By using Speed Dial I can quickly change the interval at which the script runs, and it’s always easy to make sure things went smoothly:
   
   This can also be used for doing things like pinging FeedBurner on a regular schedule by using this URL: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http://DOMAIN.COM where DOMAIN.COM is your site’s address.
4. Email monitor – Speed Dial is obviously great for watching for changes to sites, and I use it all the time to see if there are any new emails before I actually pull up my email account.
   
5. Stock watcher – With a site such as StockCharts.com you can create a highly customized graph to monitor some of your investments! Just copy the image address into your Speed Dial, set the refresh interval, and you’re all set.
   

As you can tell I really love Speed Dial, but there are also some things that Opera can do to improve it:

• Customize how many entries could be added. It would especially be cool if you could create multiple "pages" of Speed Dial entries and organize them into tabs!
• Add multiple search engines to the Speed Dial page
• Get notified when a page has changed
• The thumbnails should be scaled to fit the width or height of the Speed Dial box. If you try inserting an image that is about 100px wide it still gets scaled down to about 25px, despite it being able to fit in the Speed Dial box without resizing it.

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