Crave giveaway: Panasonic Link2Cell home handset

The Panasonic KX-TG7872S has a USB port for cell phone charging. The base unit measures approximately 4 inches by 7 inches by 4.6 inches.

(Credit: Panasonic)

Congrats to Angela C. of Allen, Mich., for winning a Soundmatters Dash 7 portable Bluetooth speaker in last week’s giveaway. This week’s prize brings more Bluetooth, in the form of the Panasonic KX-TG7872S, a home handset that uses the company’s Link2Cell technology to sync two cell phones to the base unit.

Panasonic calls its Link2Cell devices “convergence” phones. What would you do with such a thing? Let’s say you and your housemates have just gotten home and need to recharge your cell phones. While they’re wired up and powering, you can make and receive cell calls from anywhere in the house using this cordless phone. If you get a text message, the unit will audibly alert you. A Talking Caller ID speaks incoming-call information.

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Mystery Google barge will be invite-only Google X showroom, says report

Google's mystery barge in the San Francisco Bay. A new report said that the tech giant is building a VIP, invite-only showroom for Google X projects and products.

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

After a week of intense interest in what Google has been building on barges in the San Francisco Bay and in Maine’s Casco Bay, the mystery may well be over: The tech giant is developing a reconfigurable, invite-only showroom for Google X-related projects and products.

According to a report from CBS’ San Francisco affiliate KPIX, Google has been working on the project for more than a year, and the plan is to make the showroom movable and also capable of being taken apart and reassembled as needed. The idea is that elements of it could be on the water one day, or on a ski slope the next. The edifice will have three floors of showrooms and a party deck, KPIX said, citing “a source who has been on board the vessel.”

KPIX also reported that the project has been “personally directed” by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Google X is the tech giant’s secretive research unit. Its efforts have ranged from the Google Glass computerized eyewear to Google’s self-driving cars, and last spring it … [Read more]

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XBMC: SMB on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)

This article was written on May 03, 2012 by CyberNet.

Mac lion smb samba

When setting up my XBMC instances, I wanted to have a central machine in my house serve up all my media, and for that I chose to use my Mac OS X Lion machine. Since my XBMC machines are being powered by Windows 7 I ran into a bit of a predicament. In Mac OS X Lion, Apple started using the SMB2 protocol that Microsoft introduced in Vista back in 2006. Naturally this would be a welcomed change since the original protocol has been around since the Windows 3.1 days, but XBMC doesn’t include support for SMB2.

There are some alternative protocols you can try using, such as AFP or FTP, but even those have their drawbacks. XBMC 11 added built-in support for AFP shares which is file sharing protocol that Apple prefers. In my case AFP isn’t even an option since Windows doesn’t natively support AFP, which means my XBMC machines don’t see the AFP shares. As far as the FTP goes Apple removed that functionality in Lion, but it can easily be restored. I didn’t want to go that route though because FTP connections limit some of what you can do with the media in XBMC, such as not being able to delete videos directly from the XBMC interface. So for me Samba/SMB was still my best option.

After some searching I came across a free app called SMBUp that restores the old-school SMB protocol compatibility in all its glory on your Mac OS X Lion install. You just have to download the app, open it up, and it will install a version of Samba that works beautifully with XBMC. As you can see in the screenshot above you’ll be provided a full interface for managing all of your shares, and you can even enable guest access to shares making it even easier to hook XBMC up to them.

A lot of geeky people will argue that using the older protocol will drastically limit your transfer speeds compared to other methods, but I have not found that to be the case. In fact before installing SMBUp I was able to transfer files at 92MB/s to a Windows machine, which was being done with the newer SMB2 protocol. After installing SMBUp I saw speeds to the same machine reach 98MB/s, and that was with the older protocol. Not bad, and that shows that my gigabit network is on par to my expectations.

Tip: Most people treat the Samba and SMB terms as one-in-the-same, but in reality they are not. SMB/CIFS is pretty much only found in Microsoft Windows, whereas Samba is the free and open source version that you’ll find in the Mac and Linux OS. Samba was originally developed by reverse engineering SMB.

SMBUp Homepage (Mac only; Freeware)

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PocketStation, the PS1’s memory card with a screen, teased for November return

You might remember the PocketStation, but most of you probably don’t — it was a Japan-only peripheral that launched over there way back in 1999. Another thing rising from the dead today, Sony Computer Entertainment Japan has just released highly-confusing teaser video promising a big PocketStation …