Hasta La Gadget!

It’s that time of year again — back to school has arrived. Plenty of you will be shoving off to college for the very first time, and Engadget’s here to help you out. In the emotionally uproarious time that is now, you’ve probably realized there’s truly an upside to higher education: it’s a great excuse to get some new gear. And that’s where we come in. No matter what your budget, we’ve got you covered, with recommendations and options galore. Whether you’re going to be a new student in the brilliant world that is academia, or you’re the proud parent / guardian of one, we’ve done some leg work to make the transition a little bit easier. We decided that choosing gadgets in three “budget” ranges would be most helpful to you, the reader, and we’ve chosen a kit of gear we think any student would do well to grab up for each — covering laptops, netbooks, mobile phones, e-readers, laptop bags, and so on. Knowing that our readers re not one-size-fits-all, however, we’ve also chosen some alternate options in the categories where choice makes sense — choice is, after all, part of what we love about gadgets — without providing an overwhelming list. Of course, our choices aren’t meant to be all-encompassing, but we think they’ll provide a pretty good place to start your shopping!

Read on for our recommendations — we promise, they’re very very, helpful. Oh — did we mention we’re going to be giving away a bunch of this gear, too? Keep your eyes on the site in the coming days for more on that, and hit the links below for our guide.

Back to school guide: on the cheap
Back to school guide: mid-range
Back to school guide: money’s no object

Engadget’s back to school guide originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over 400 million transistors are packed on dual-core chips manufactured using Intel’s 45nm process. That’ll double soon, per Moore’s Law. And it’ll still be like computing with pebbles compared to quantum computing.

Quantum computing is a pretty complicated subject—uh, hello, quantum mechanics plus computers. I’m gonna keep it kinda basic, but recent breakthroughs like this one prove that you should definitely start paying attention to it. Some day, in the future, quantum computing will be cracking codes, powering web searches, and maybe, just maybe, lighting up our Star Trek-style holodecks.

Before we get to the quantum part, let’s start with just “computing.” It’s about bits. They’re the basic building block of computing information. They’ve got two states—0 or 1, on or off, true or false, you get the idea. But two defined states is key. When you add a bunch of bits together, usually 8 of ’em, you get a byte. As in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on. Your digital photos, music, documents, they’re all just long strings of 1s and 0s, segmented into 8-digit strands. Because of that binary setup, a classical computer operates by a certain kind of logic that makes it good at some kinds of computing—the general stuff you do everyday—but not so great at others, like finding ginormous prime factors (those things from math class), which are a big part of cracking codes.

Quantum computing operates by a different kind of logic—it actually uses the rules of quantum mechanics to compute. Quantum bits, called qubits, are different from regular bits, because they don’t just have two states. They can have multiple states, superpositions—they can be 0 or 1 or 0-1 or 0+1 or 0 and 1, all at the same time. It’s a lot deeper than a regular old bit. A qubit’s ability to exist in multiple states—the combo of all those being a superposition—opens up a big freakin’ door of possibility for computational powah, because it can factor numbers at much more insanely fast speeds than standard computers.

Entanglement—a quantum state that’s all about tight correlations between systems—is the key to that. It’s a pretty hard thing to describe, so I asked for some help from Boris Blinov, a professor at the University of Washington’s Trapped Ion Quantum Computing Group. He turned to a take on Schrödinger’s cat to explain it: Basically, if you have a cat in a closed box, and poisonous gas is released. The cat is either dead, 0, or alive, 1. Until I open the box to find out, it exists in both states—a superposition. That superposition is destroyed when I measure it. But suppose I have two cats in two boxes that are correlated, and you go through the same thing. If I open one box and the cat’s alive, it means the other cat is too, even if I never open the box. It’s a quantum phenomenon that’s a stronger correlation than you can get in classical physics, and because of that you can do something like this with quantum algorithms—change one part of the system, and the rest of it will respond accordingly, without changing the rest of the operation. That’s part of the reason it’s faster at certain kinds of calculations.

The other, explains Blinov, is that you can achieve true parallelism in computing—actually process a lot of information in parallel, “not like Windows” or even other types of classic computers that profess parallelism.

So what’s that good for? For example, a password that might take years to crack via brute force using today’s computers could take mere seconds with a quantum computer, so there’s plenty of crazy stuff that Uncle Sam might want to put it to use for in cryptography. And it might be useful to search engineers at Google, Microsoft and other companies, since you can search and index databases much, much faster. And let’s not forget scientific applications—no surprise, classic computers really suck at modeling quantum mechanics. The National Institute of Science and Technology’s Jonathan Home suggests that given the way cloud computing is going, if you need an insane calculation performed, you might rent time and farm it out to a quantum mainframe in Google’s backyard.

The reason we’re not all blasting on quantum computers now is that this quantum mojo is, at the moment, extremely fragile. And it always will be, since quantum states aren’t exactly robust. We’re talking about working with ions here—rather than electrons—and if you think heat is a problem with processors today, you’ve got no idea. In the breakthrough by Home’s team at NIST—completing a full set of quantum “transport” operations, moving information from one area of the “computer” to another—they worked with a single pair of atoms, using lasers to manipulate the states of beryllium ions, storing the data and performing an operation, before transferring that information to a different location in the processor. What allowed it to work, without busting up the party and losing all the data through heat, were magnesium ions cooling the beryllium ions as they were being manipulated. And those lasers can only do so much. If you want to manipulate more ions, you have to add more lasers.

Hell, quantum computing is so fragile and unwieldy that when we talked to Home, he said much of the effort goes into methods of correcting errors. In five years, he says, we’ll likely be working with a mere tens of qubits. The stage it’s at right now, says Blinov, is “the equivalent of building a reliable transistor” back in the day. But that’s not to say those of tens of qubits won’t be useful. While they won’t be cracking stuff for the NSA—you’ll need about 10,000 qubits for cracking high-level cryptography—that’s still enough quantum computing power to calculate properties for new materials that are hard to model with a classic computer. In other words, materials scientists could be developing the case for the iPhone 10G or the building blocks for your next run-of-the-mill Intel processor using quantum computers in the next decade. Just don’t expect a quantum computer on your desk in the next 10 years.

Special thanks to National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Jonathan Home and the University of Washington Professor Boris Blinov!

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about quantum computing, quantum leaps or undead cats to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

See that guy about to get creamed by that huge wave? That’s Clark Little, master of wave photography. He gets wetter than other shooters capturing ocean motion, so we asked him for his trade secrets. The biggie: “Hold your breath.”

You’re a surfer who has gained fame as a photographer—what exactly is your background?

I’ve been on Oahu’s North Shore for over thirty years—so I’m kind of raised here on the shore and in the Waimea Bay shorebreak. I’ve surfed the shorebreak off and on for years, and the love and joy for the oceans has always been with me. So, a couple years ago—maybe two and a half years ago—I decided to bring a camera. My wife wanted a picture for the house and I went and did it. What I do when I go out is use my surfing experience with the camera.

There’s a photo of you inside this overhead barrel (above) and you’re kind of just standing there, with camera in a hard casing with a dome for the lens and a handle on the bottom. Why do people use that setup in the water?

I preset everything before I go out in the water. When you’re out there and the big waves are coming in you don’t have time to look through a hole and be fiddling with things. You just point and shoot—once you have that sweet spot on all the settings it’s pretty much keeping the drops from the dome. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time. That’s where the knowledge comes in, so you can get into the most gnarliest impact zone as possible but you don’t get hammered.

For the most part, I try to stake out the back. I get doughnuts and get beat-up sometimes for sure, but at the same time I love to be in there and feel the thunder and the bass and the turbulence. It’s pretty cool. Mother nature has a lot of beautiful things to offer. It can get scary also—don’t get me wrong—but the ocean is my comfort zone fortunately, and I want to be out there. It’s not like I have to be out there, but I want to be out in the ocean, you know?

When you’ve got a camera in your hand and a big wave is coming, explain what your body does. What do you do with your body to make sure that you don’t lose your camera and you don’t get hurt?

First of all you get a good breath. It’s just anticipating. If I’m standing knee deep and a ten-foot wave is coming in, I’m actually going towards the beach because it’s sucking me out. You want to get in towards shore because you don’t want to miss the wave. If you get sucked out, sometimes it’s past the wave. You want to be in the impact zone, so you’re going the other way, knowing kind of where it’s going to break for the most part—you’re anticipating the sweet spot. And so you’re going the other way, and right when it breaks, you’re going to pull the trigger and try to get as many frames of that gnarliest barrel shot as possible. Of course after it breaks, for the most part, you try to sneak out the back of the wave.

You’re wearing fins?

Yeah you’re wearing fins for sure. That’s my life vest to be honest. I wouldn’t go anywhere without swim fins.

Is that because you have to carry a camera in your hands, so you can’t be paddling?

Yeah, the camera definitely is not light. It’s a chunk. When the waves are big, you forget about it, believe it or not. When you’re rocking and the waves are huge and you’re excited, you don’t even know. It’s like instinct, the hand goes up and click click click, and down and back and behind the wave, it turns in to an instinctive kind of thing.

Sometimes I run up and down the shore to get into position to get those weird ones that break right on the sand. For those I don’t wear fins because I gotta be fast—move in, move out. You get toasted every time you get the ones that are on the dry sand because there’s no way out, you can’t really get out the back of them. You just have to roll with it up the beach 30 feet or 40 feet.

Without giving away your secrets, can you tell us about your camera and your settings?

I use a Nikon D3 with a 16mm fisheye lens, and then I also use a D200 and D300 with a 10.5mm lens. I preset the focus—there’s like a sweet spot on that. Depth of field is insane with that setup, so, pretty much everyone else can figure out the rest of it.

I’d like to see you with a Canon 5D Mark II and get some video to be honest.

There’s also the Nikon D300s. I could use my same waterproof housing and lenses and go out there and get some footage, I don’t know what 24fps would look like, but at least we could get an idea with this new camera.

All right so, just imagine you’ve got this buddy with no experience. How does someone with a point-and-shoot camera take pictures of waves?

For me with experience it’s different, but for the inexperienced, to start off I would just go with like a little SD Canon and a little underwater housing that costs around $150. [Ed. note: You can also buy one of the new waterproof point-and-shoots from Pentax, Canon, Panasonic or Olympus.] You definitely gotta know how to swim, and you gotta have swim fins. You obviously gotta know your limits.

Be familiar with the ocean. Watch the waves prior to going out for at least 20 to 30 minutes, because sometimes there will be lulls or periods when there are no sets and then out of the blue a big 6 to 8 foot wave can come in and clean house. So you have to respect the Mother Nature, that’s huge. Once you get out there, you just give it a whirl and try to take some images. You gotta keep the lens clear, the front of the case. You can use Rain-X or you can spit on it. There are different methods that people use to keep it clear.

How many hours a week do you shoot?

It all depends—when the waves are good I’ll go out for a five-hour session and pretty much be fried all day. Or I’ll even do two two-hour sessions. On average, I would say at least a couple hours a day. When it’s good, I’m out there five hours.

Are you hunting waves the way surfers hunt waves? Going to places looking for hidden breaks?

I have a couple spots that I’ll call secret. There are maybe one or two guys that have found them. In general, I’m lucky to get everything right here in my home, and when I’m home shooting big Waimea shorebreaks or Waikiki shorebreaks, for the most part I’m by myself, which is good. A lot of photographers don’t want to get into the big shorebreaks and shoot waves. So I’m lucky in that aspect and I can just feel the motion of the ocean and play.

It’s like a playground for me. I’m like a kid in candy store, just having fun getting these images and coming home and looking at them and then sharing them with the world. It’s hopefully a win-win situation and, besides my family, it’s my joy.

Some people are painters, and they paint—it’s cool and it’s amazing and their talents are awesome. But it’s kind of neat to add that extreme factor to the art, trying to capture the art of the wave.

If you enjoyed Clark’s story and his amazing wave photos, check out hundreds more at his site, where you can order prints or limited-edition posters. Also, check out his brand new coffee-table book of shorebreak art, with forewords by Jack Johnson and Kelly Slater.

Summermodo is a chance for Giz to get outside and test our gear where it belongs.

Modern consumer cameras can manage almost anything you throw at them, but sometimes even the swankest DSLR just won’t do. In photography, when the conditions get crazy, the cameras get crazier.

Here are ten cameras designed to capture the kinds of images that humans by all means shouldn’t be able to see, and that you and I will probably never have the opportunity—or need—to shoot.

Nobody knows exactly what Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS will look or act like, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of what they’re going for. Here’s how to live out Google’s online-only OS vision, right now

Before we dive in, it’s worth talking about exactly what we’re going for here. What “theory of Chrome” are we planning to adhere to? Or perhaps more to the point, what the hell is Chrome? From Google:

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks” and “most of the user experience takes place on the web.” That is, it’s “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel” with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors (like your standard Core 2 Duo) and ARM processors (like inside every mobile smartphone). Underneath lies security architecture that’s completely redesigned to be virus-resistant and easy to update.

From our own Matt Buchanan:

If I had to guess, I’d say Chrome OS is somewhere in between an entirely browser-based OS and a generic Linux distro, though leaning toward the former.

In other words, Chrome, as we understand it, and as Google describes it, is a Linux OS that lives on the web, depending almost entirely on Google’s suite of services, which are served through a special, Google-designed interface. We have no way of knowing what this mysterious window manager, menu system or desktop environment will look like, so we can’t replicate that. The web half of Chrome OS, though, is already in place, and ready for us to clumsily unify. So, we’ll make our own stripped-down operating system. Here’s how:

Get Yourself Some Linux
Before embarking on this goofy afternoon software project, we need a launchpad. Specifically: Linux. You could go with almost any distro and accomplish the same effect, but this guide will be focused on a distribution called Xubuntu. Why Xubuntu? Because it strike a perfect balance between being extremely compatible and easy to install—on both counts, it really is—and, since it’s essentially just a version of the uber-popular Ubuntu Linux distro with a stripped-down, super-fast desktop environment called XFCE, it’s quick, and lightweight. Anyway, head over the the Xubuntu website and start downloading. (Go with 9.04 the latest stable version.)

There are a few ways to handle this. If you’re planning to install Xubuntu on a netbook—Chrome’s first and most natural target—you’re probably going to need to create a bootable flash drive. Ubuntu provides some fairly fantastic instructions for doing this on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. If you’re trying to do this on a regular laptop or desktop, or you have an external optical drive, you’re going to want to burn your downloaded ISO to a CD and install from there. Alternately, you can order a free install disc from Xubuntu. Lastly, if you’re like me, and you just want to test this out in a free virtual machine like VirtualBox, all you need to do is boot a new system from your downloaded ISO. At any rate:

During the installation, you’ll be prompted with a number of options. Make sure to check the “Log In Automatically” radio box—it’ll make your boot-to-browser experience a little smoother later on.

Once you’ve finished the installation—this should take no more than a half-hour, really—you’ll find yourself with a pretty, fresh new Xubuntu desktop. It’s really nice! But now, it’s time to start replacing it.

Choose Your Browser
So obviously, you’ll need a browser. This is the center of the Chrome experience—the window through which you’ll access Google’s suite of services, and which you may never leave. It needs to have support for all the web’s various technologies, be it Google Gears—a plugin that lets Google services store data offline, so they can load faster and function offline—or Flash, which makes the internet significantly less boring. Chrome OS will ship with Google’s Chrome browser, obviously, but the Linux port is a little sickly right now. Gears, for example, doesn’t really work right now, and Flash, though technically available, crashes constantly. But if you really want to stay as Googly as possible on this project, you can get Chrome for Linux (Chromium, it’s called) by adding these lines to the “Sources” list in a program called Synaptic, which manages Linux applications through one, unified interface, and is accessible in your System menu.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

You can find out how to enable Flash here. Pro tip: don’t bother with this.

Counterintuitively, the best way to get the Google experience on Linux is with Firefox. Xubuntu comes with Firefox, but you’re going to need to spruce it up a little. Ok, a lot.

Make That Browser Work
First, you’ll need Flash. Open Synaptic—mentioned above—from your Applications>System menu, and search for an item called “Flashplugin,” (it’s Flash Player 10) or navigate to the item as shown in the below screenshot.
Click “Apply” and let the installer run its course. Now, Firefox should support sites like YouTube, Pandora, et al.

Now, you’ll need Google Gears. This is a simple Firefox extension, which you can download here. This’ll help make living online feel a little less like, you know, living online—think offline archived email. Most of Google services can use Gears, so you’ll want to go through each site’s settings page to enable as many “Gears” or “Offline Access” options as possible. Docs and Mail are where you’ll see the biggest differences, since Gears turns them from web services into full-fledged offline apps, transparently. Pretty amazing stuff, and one of the few features we know will be in Chrome OS.

Next, you’ll need the Google Toolbar. This, in absence of whatever interface voodoo Google is sitting on, will serve as a sort of constant dashboard for Google services in the meantime. Along with providing shortcuts and notifiers for services like Gmail and Googel Caldner, it’s got a few little tricks that’ll make your browser feel more like a proper OS. For example: in the Google Toolbar preferences, you can check options that enable both automatic Gmail-ing or Mailto: links, and automatic opening of many document formats in Google Docs. You’ll want to enable these, since we’re trying to create the illusion that the rest of the OS doesn’t exist, which an errant OpenOffice window or email client could shatter, God forbid.

Lastly, grab yourself a copy of an extension called Speed Dial, which will give you a Grid-based homepage of favorites which you can populate with all the core Google Services you’re going to need—Gmail, Reader, Google Docs, Google News, etc—and which will be the first thing you see when you open your browser, and eventually, your OS. Set the initial configuration as I have on the left.

And if you’re really into this idea for some reason, you can download a Firefox skin that looks like Google Chrome here.

Getting Rid of Everything Else
Now that you’ve got everything you need to live wholly within Google’s ecosystem, a la Chrome OS, you need to remove everything else—that means excess browser clutter, system menus, and pretty much anything else that stands between you and your Google suite.

The first step will be to strip out your Firefox interface, which is probably looking a bit bloated by now. I’ve posted my small-screened solution below, which you can replicate by dragging and dropping icons however you please in Firefox’s View>Toolbars>Customize menu. The above configuration lets you totally remove the Bookmarks and Navigation bars, which saves a good deal of space. Feel free to play with this for a while—you might find that you don’t need one input box or the other, or that you can get away with much less of an interface than I have.

After grinding down Firefox’s interface to an acceptable size, you’ll need to go to work on your desktop. Before you can kill all the menu bars and shortcuts you don’t need, you’ll need to make sure Firefox automatically loads at startup, so you’re basically booting into the browser. You can do this by navigating to Applications>Settings>Session and Startup, and adding a new startup item with the values seen below. (The last one if the only one you can’t change—it’s the one that launches Firefox).

Now, it’s time to murder everything else. Right-click on either the top or bottom system panels—the Start Menu-like things on the top and bottom of your desktop—and click “Customize Panel.” From here, you can remove the top panel, and set the bottom panel to “autohide.” Once you’re done, restart. Upon boot-up, this is about all you should see:
Welcome to Chrome! Kind of!

See What You Think
As I said before, what you’ve just slapped together here is not Chrome, and Google’s final product will probably look nothing like this, superficially. But this little web-savvy Frankenstein OS does, I think, capture something of Google long-term vision, in which everything we store, use and experience on our computer is based online—preferably on their servers—and native applications are nothing more than a small, necessary evil. This experiment is less about guessing the specifics of Chrome OSes interface, under-the-hood workings or usage model (three things which I’m fairly sure this fails at) than it is about deciding whether or not the the idea of Chrome OS suits you, and how you use your computer. That, at least, you can get a taste of. So, how do you like it?

So that’s about it! Please add in your experiences in the comments-your feedback is a huge benefit to our Saturday guides. Good luck with your OS impersonation, and have a great weekend!