Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t have $65,000 and / or seventeen months to build yourself a Daft Punk helmet? Here’s the next best thing: crack open a Macintosh Plus, add an iPad, an old bicycle helmet and some electroluminescent gear, and get to soldering. Originally a school project for design student Terrence Scoville, this visualizer helmet now sits atop the cranium of DJ Kid Chameleon. Because there’s nothing like a few digital fireworks to celebrate an old computer’s birthday. Video after the break.

Continue reading Macintosh Plus celebrates 25 years by becoming ultimate DJ headgear (video)

Macintosh Plus celebrates 25 years by becoming ultimate DJ headgear (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on October 25, 2010 by CyberNet.

Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about. Don’t forget to send in your own tips, or just leave a comment on this page if you think you’ve got something we should include.

–News–

HP Slate Will Cost $799
Engadget has both some images and a video of the HP Slate in action, which will run you a cool $799 when it is released. Specs include a 1.86GHz Atom processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 64GB SSD for storage.

Summary of Apple Announcements
If you haven’t read about all of Apple’s announcements last week this will get you up-to-speed on the new MacBook Air, OS X Lion, Mac App Store, and iLife ’11.

Windows 7 Sells 240 Million Licenses
Microsoft announced that in the first year of availability they’ve sold over 240 million licenses of the Windows 7 OS, which makes it the fastest selling operating system in history.

Microsoft Office 365 Available Next Year
The cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 will offer online versions of the Office suite for a monthly fee starting next year.

HP Unveils webOS 2.0
The next generation of Palm Pre and webOS will include things like Flash Player, Skype, an updated Facebook app, and many enhancements throughout the entire operating system.

Hulu Blocks Google TV
Google TV users might be a little discouraged to find out that Hulu doesn’t work, at least for right now. There was a modification you could make to change the user agent, but that has since been plugged by Hulu. So you’ll just have to wait for the Hulu Plus subscription service to be made available.

Xbox.com Gets an Update
The redesigned Xbox.com now has a browser based Avatar editor, the ability to play web games with your Xbox LIVE friends, and more.

Dad and Son Send HD Camera and iPhone to Space
A father/son duo created a nice weather balloon rig that reached a maximum altitude of 100,000 feet, and captured it all on video. Thanks to the onboard iPhone they were able to retrieve the balloon about 30-miles from where it launched.

–Tips, Tutorials, and Reviews–

Insomnia Keeps Your PC Awake
Windows users can download this handy little utility if they want to prevent their computer from going to sleep. As long as the window remains open the PC will remain in “insomnia” mode.

Anandtech’s In-Depth Windows Phone 7 Review
If you enjoy reading long and detailed reviews about gadgets this is one you won’t want to miss. It covers just about every aspect of the new mobile OS.

Change Your Aero Color Based on Weather Temperature
Windows 7/Vista users can enjoy this nice free app that will adjust the color of the Aero glass to match the current temperature outside.

Opera 11 Alpha Available with Sample Extensions
The testing phase of the next major Opera milestone has begun, and there are some sample extensions available for you to take for a spin.

Desktop Email Notifications for Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, and More
This free utility will let you monitor and manage messages from all of your email accounts.

Play Most Video Types on Android with VPlayer
The free VPlayer app for Android lets users watch videos in DivX, Xvid, MKV, WMV, FLV, and RMVB formats.

No Hassle Way to Download and Convert YouTube Videos
The DownloadTube.org site lets you paste in a link to any YouTube video, and have it converted into a more widely supported video format.

Keep iTunes Libraries in Sync with MediaRover
MediaRover is a free Windows and Mac utility that will keep your songs and playlists in sync across multiple machines.

KeySharky Adds Hotkey Support to Grooveshark
Firefox and Chrome users can grab an add-on that provides customizable hotkey support for the Grooveshark music streaming site.

TinyUmbrella Updated for iOS Users
TinyUmbrella is a free app used to save your SHSH blobs so that you can rollback to an older version of iOS if needed. The app has been updated to include a new UI, and has some other features that are pretty nice.

–Downloads–

• Digsby Build 84 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• FeedDemon 4.0.0.1 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Firefox 3.6.11 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Foobar2000 1.1.1 ^{Beta 2} [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Google Chrome 8.0.552.5 ^Beta [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Growl 2.0.5 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Miranda 0.9.8 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• PDF-XChange Viewer 2.057 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Picasa 3.8.117.16 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Pidgin 2.7.4 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Revo Uninstaller 1.90 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• SeaMonkey 2.0.9 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• Thunderbird 3.1.5 [Homepage] [Mirror]
• uTorrent 2.2.0 ^RC1 [Homepage] [Mirror]

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

And so, at Steve Ballmer’s keynote, the company announced that the next version of Windows will support not only x86 offerings from Intel and AMD – themselves moving closer to ARM-like system-on-chips – but ARM designs from companies such as Qualcomm and NVIDIA as well. Microsoft noted that the new chip support was requested by its partners, implying that PC companies want to take advantage of the long battery life and thin form factors enabled by ARM architectures, but also bring along Windows’ broad driver and software support. Microsoft clearly considers the tablet another PC, albeit one that Windows’ hardware and user interface layer needs to support better. However, in striking back at Android evolution, Microsoft risks collateral damage to its own mobile OS. Can Windows Phone 7 co-exist with a ARM-based version of the real thing?

Continue reading Switched On: Making the call on Windows Phone 7

Switched On: Making the call on Windows Phone 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Got an old Dell, HP or Apple laptop sitting around with a defective NVIDIA GPU? The company’s finally ready to compensate you. That proposed class-action settlement from late last year has been approved by a California court, and the company’s taking claims for repairs, replacements and reimbursements at a specially-designated website until March 14th. If you’ve got an affected Dell or Apple MacBook Pro, you can get the faulty chips replaced free of charge, while HP owners get a whole new replacement computer, though considering the choices there are the budget Compaq Presario CQ50 or an ASUS Eee PC T101MT, you might be better off selling your old parts on eBay. Finally, if you’ve already paid to get your components replaced and have the docs to prove it, you might be able to get refunded — NVIDIA’s set up a $2 million pool to be divided among all such reimbursements. Find everything you need at the links below.

[Thanks, Kalyan]

NVIDIA’s faulty laptop GPU settlement starts paying out, file your repair and reimbursement claims now originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Jan 2011 14:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Who could have guessed, in January 2011, that we would publish 453 stories on Apple’s yet-to-be-announced iPad?

And yet that’s the number we did publish, and four people guessed exactly that number.

A little over a year ago, we challenged you to guess how many stories we’d publish in 2010 on the topic of Apple’s forthcoming tablet.

We knew it was a hot topic: Every story we’d written to that date on an “Apple tablet” got tons of attention, and lots of comments (both pro and con). We’d seen tantalizing rumors, and figured it would either be a hot product or a spectacular flop. We knew we’d be writing a lot of stories on the topic to meet the demand for information on it.

Little did we know that we’d average about 2 stories for every workday.

We received over 10,000 entries for the contest. Guesses ranged from 0 to 99999999999999999999 (followed by a lot more nines). There were some nerdy guesses too, like 3.14159 and 6.0221415 × 10²³. There were some snarky answers, like “365*x where x=# tablets sold” and “0 (i hope).” Someone even tried to inject a function in order to capitalize on the wisdom of the crowd, with an entry that read: =AVERAGE(A2:A1000)+1. Sorry, that formula did not compute.

Eliminating the truly absurd guesses (anything over 10,000), the average of all remaining guesses was 309. Not too far from the actual number, but not nearly close enough for the averaging function to have worked in any case.

To count the number of iPad stories, I used a Google search to find all stories published on Wired.com from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010 that included “iPad” in the title. I turned off any content filtering and told Google to show me all the duplicates.

Searching on the titles was the easiest objective way to determine if the iPad was a major focus for the story, and not just something mentioned in passing.

In addition, because the name “iPad” was only used after Apple’s iPad unveiling on Jan. 27, 2010, I also did a search for stories with “Apple tablet” in the name published from January 1 to January 30, 2010.

I put both search results into a spreadsheet, sorted by name, and eliminated duplicates as well as any automatically-generated category and tag pages.

The resulting total was 453. I found four entrants who had guessed that number, so used a random-number generator to pick between them. I did so blind: The columns showing any personally-identifying information were hidden from the moment the contest started. It was only after picking the winner that I revealed the columns containing his name.

And so our winner is Mike Gorman.

Mike, you’ll be getting an iPad from Wired. Congratulations.

Photo credit: Robert Occhialini/Flickr