Hasta La Gadget!

Try as it might, the HomePlug Alliance just can’t seem to get its foot in the proverbial door of consumers’ homes. Now the organization is eying a different target market — utilities. Its new Netricity Powerline Communications program aims to get utility companies and makers of smart meters to adopt the 1901.2 standard for sending data through existing electrical wiring and march us into the smart grid future. The low-frequency, narrow-band PLC won’t do anything to help you stream HD video around your home, but it should be more than enough for monitoring your energy consumption. Check out the PR after the break for a few more details.

HomePlug Alliance keeps plugging away at powerline communications originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 06:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tweet your radiation levels with Scosche’s RDTX iPhone dongle

In Japan, it’s probably safe to say there’s a gadget for everything. And given a somewhat disastrous year, safety gadgets are likely getting more popular. Nope, there’s still nothing that can reliably predict an earthquake, but at least careful (and paranoid) Japanese can watch out for errant radiation — using their iPhones.

Two new detectors have just been launched by Scosche, the RDTX and the HRDTX. The RDTX requires no calibration, and measures background radiation. The detectors plugs into an iPhone and feeds its findings to a free companion app, from where you can share your radiation levels on Facebook and Twitter. More useful is Google Maps integration, letting you upload data.

Less flashy, but more useful, is the HRDTX, a standalone monitor which plugs into a wall outlet like an air-”freshener” or smoke detector. Instead of having to hook it up to a phone to take a reading, it works away in the background, using LEDs and beeps to warn you. Green means safe, yellow (with beeps) means watch out and red (with a screaming 105dB alarm) means PANIC. NOW!

Both units are available in Japan right now. The iOS-friendly RDTX costs ¥21,000 ($270) and the standalone HRDTX will be an as-yet-unannounced amount more.

RDTX product page [Scosche. Thanks, Mark!]

HRDTX product page [Scosche]

See Also:

• Tsunami Warning System Counts First Coup
• Tech Companies Respond to Japan Quake With Resources …
• Study Reveals How Much Cellphone Radiation You're Getting …

Japanese mobile users have long had all manner of health apps and functions on their phones. From pedometers to services tracking their sleeping patterns, diet, calories and more, the keitai has been a trusted and personal device for analyzing and counseling on wellness anxieties. It is natural to build up a personal relationship with your phone, and you end up inputting hygiene and personal care data and information that you would be too embarrassed to tell anyone else outside the medical profession.

It’s big business too; even in 2007 the health market generated 80 billion yen through mobile phone services, and it can only go up and up as the population ages and devices proliferate. With smartphones we’re also seeing a logical shift from services provided by the network (iMode et al), to lots of single, individual apps that the user picks and chooses.

It is often said they’ve got an app for that but surely some things just aren’t possible? Take constipation. Hardly seems there could be much scope digitally. We all know there is medication available but perhaps only in Japan would someone come up with such an inventive way to promote pharmaceuticals through an interactive app.

Targeting young working women in their twenties and thirties, Yoru Suru (Do it at night!) is part virtual dating app, part personal care assistant. The free app is meant to help you remember to take anti-constipation drug Surulacs-S, made by SSP.

Three so-called “ikemen” (hot guys) talk to you and make sure you are taking a dose at the right time. You can choose which man you want — each has his own profile and personality — and then record when you, ahem, manage to relieve yourself. The app then acts as a health management tool, with your virtual boyfriend reminding you to take Surulacs-S at the set time. You can use Yoru Suru as an alarm clock too, and touching and stroking the ikemen character will elicit playful audio responses. Flirting with a constipation medicine marketing app? Yes, they’ve got an app for that.

This is a very Japanese attitude towards wellness and it is reflected in the tongue-in-cheek tone of the health products, even — or perhaps more so — in digital versions. In the recent past we’ve seen similarly colorful and lighthearted apps, assisting consumers with their health problems, but in a way that is very approachable and helping to take away the potential shame.

For example, there was a whole online campaign getting men to talk about their baldness and directing them to clinics, fronted by a popular comedy duo. And there are also funny apps for if you’re a young, stressed student desperate to find a toilet. (As way of a simple contrast, here’s a rather dour and unappealing American app for people with digestive issues.)

I’m now eagerly waiting on an app for itchy groins?

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Know how sometimes you’ll be walking down the street when you encounter a seemingly crazy person talking to themselves? And you think, “But you’re too well-dressed to be insane.” That’s when you see it — the Bluetooth headset tucked neatly around their ear. Well, Bose is adding a newer, high-end option for this well-heeled crowd of faux lunatics with its Bluetooth Headset Series 2. The luxe, over-ear attachment doesn’t discriminate as to your best side, coming in both right and left versions. There’s a whole load of hyperbolically-named proprietary tech bundled into it to reduce background noise and adjust listening levels accordingly — exactly the performance you’d expect at this $150 price point. Bose is offering this BT 2.1 headset now, so you can snag it if you’re nearby one of its boutiques. Or, make like the rest of us and order it online. Official PR with all its audio jargon after the break.

Continue reading Bose Bluetooth Headset Series 2 enters the marketplace, still makes you look like a crazy

Bose Bluetooth Headset Series 2 enters the marketplace, still makes you look like a crazy originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 03:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on July 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

Hard drives are absolutely enormous these days with capacities reaching the terabyte mark, but with all of this storage we often forget to go cleanup unused files. Why’s that a big deal if you have virtually “unlimited” storage? The more files you have on your computer, the longer it will take to do a lot of things. It means more items that your antivirus software will have to scan, and it can even slow down your entire computer.

Here’s a good analogy as to why you should keep your computer clean. You inevitably have a path to get from your couch to the bathroom, and hopefully that path is free from obstacles. What if you started to buy all kinds of stuff and out of disparity for space you place it in that path. By placing the items there you managed to keep the patch from the couch to the kitchen squeaky clean. That’s great, but now it takes you longer to get to the bathroom since you have to go around a bunch of stuff. Even if you try to move things around to optimize all the paths, which is equivalent to defragmenting your computer, you would still have to find a place for all of that junk.

That’s how I explain the point behind defragmenting a hard drive, and I think it serves as a good learning tool here as well. The moral of the story is that you can try and optimize your hard drive all you want, but if you have a lot of unnecessary junk on it, there will be side affects.

So how can you remove the junk? First you have to find it, and MetaMan over in our forum found a great tool for doing just that. It’s called WinDirStat and it is open source (free) software that will point out where all of your space-hogging files are at. It works on almost every version of Windows (even Vista although it’s not stated) and takes just a second to install.

After you get it up and running you should see a screen similar to the one above. It shows horizontal “progress” bars that represent how much storage each area on your hard drive is taking up. The little Pacman characters will continue to go back and forth until WinDirStat is completely finished scanning your drive for information. When it’s all done this is what you should see:

Now the real fun begins. There are a bunch of color-coded blocks at the bottom of the screen, and I want to explain how those work. That is referred to as a treemap which is a common tool used for graphing data. It almost looks like some freaky piece of art, but in reality it is a graphical map of your hard drive where each block represents a single file. The key in the upper-right corner of the screen details what filetype each block represents.

There is a reason behind the ordering of the blocks on the treemap even though it may seem random. They are actually grouped by folders, and if I click on the Program Files folder WinDirStat will outline the block of files on the treemap with a white border:

As you can see, the Program Files area on my computer only takes up a small portion of the room. Now I’ll go ahead and click on a sub-folder in the Program Files…let’s do Microsoft Games:

As you can see WinDirStat continues to maintain my drive’s folder structure even on the treemap. I can go all the way down and select a file which will still be highlighted accordingly:

This process also works in reverse, which makes the treemap even more useful. If you see a big block on the map, such as the big red ones on the right side of my drive, you can actually hover you mouse over the block and in the Status Bar it will tell you the corresponding file:

As you can see, one of the big red blocks is my computer’s hibernation file, which is always equal to the amount of RAM that is installed. Therefore it makes sense that it is one of the largest things on my drive. If I wanted to see more information I could just click on the block, and it would immediately navigate to that file in the folder list located above the treemap.

MetaMan mentioned in his post that he was able to cut 25GB of temporary and log files from his computer using this tool. I’m sure that combining this with CCleaner (our review) you can trim a lot of fat from your hard drive, and you may even see a boost in performance as a direct result.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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