Hasta La Gadget!

The Polaroid Dua might be the company’s first desirable product in years

Polaroid, fresh from ruining its reputation in the instant camera game, has turned its attention to flashes. And lights.

The latest product from whichever consortium currently owns the Polaroid brand name is the Digital Dua, a combo flash and LED lamp for stills and video-cameras.

The top section contains a regular auto-zooming flash, which will zoom in and out with the lens on any Nikon or Canon SLR. This flash has a guide number of 45 meters (148 feet) at ISO 100, swivel and bounce head and output can be varied down to 1/16th of full output. It works in auto mode, but also looks like a decent manual strobist’s flash.

Then we look at the front and see another panel, this time lit by three 1-watt LEDs. This is the videographers lamp, and could theoretically also be used as a modeling light for the strobe up top. It will run continuously for an hour.

The Dua also comes with a diffuser and a reflector panel, and has a built-in slave unit for remote triggering.

SLRs have been shooting both video and stills for a while now, so it was about time somebody made a light that could do both. What’s more, it’s not too expensive. The Nikon version costs around $160, and the Canon-compatible model $200. Available now.

Polaroid Announces New Digital Dua Flash [PR Newswire]

See Also:

• Polaroid Stages Comeback With Instant Printing Digicam
• Review: Polaroid PoGo Printer Spits Pics on the Quick

Ready to play PC with your smartphone? If you aren’t picking up a Lapdock 100 from AT&T on the 17th, you won’t have to wait very long — Motorola’s faux-laptop phone dock has been outed for a October 21st launch date for Sprint via an employee rewards email. Passing the Lapdock 100 Sprint Rewards Me training quiz nets employees $10 in Sprint scratch and the opportunity to sell you a rig that lets a handful of devices play netbook. The laptop shell gives users a full Firefox browser, Quick Office, Google Docs, Adobe Flash, a PC-like File Manager and a luxurious 10.1-inch screen. Still no word yet on just how much this ultra-portable peripheral will set us back, but we’ll keep hoping that it’s cheaper than the Atrix 4G’s axed lapdock.

[Thanks, David]

Motorola Lapdock 100 hits Sprint October 21st, earns employees extra scratch originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Oct 2011 09:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re ripe for an ioRefresh and thankfully here it is: the ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo will be out from November, bringing hugely faster speeds at a much lower dollar-per-gig compared to their predecessors. The single-level cell version of the next-gen Duo (depicted above) will deliver 700,000 read IOPS, 900,000 write IOPS and a 3GB/s bandwidth that could possibly surpass OCZ’s Z-Drive R4. Prices start at $6,000 and top out at something too ridiculous to mention for a maximum 2.4TB of storage. But you’re an enterprise, remember, so at least try to haggle before you settle for a cheaper alternative. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Open your IOPS to ioDrive’s next-gen SSDs

Open your IOPS to ioDrive’s next-gen SSDs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Later tonight Adobe Flash 11 and AIR 3 will hit the tubes delivering with it a host of new features, including hardware acceleration for 2D and 3D graphics — at least for desktops. Stage 3D support will be added to the mobile variants for Android, iOS and BlackBerry at a later date. AIR 3 will also be sprucing up connected entertainment devices, like Samsung SmartTVs, with the ability to deliver Flash-based games and content to your home theater system. What’s more, Adobe has baked in support for both Dolby Digital and DTS surround sound. That means both 5.1 and 7.1 sound can be built into an AIR app, whether it be a game or streaming video, and pumped out at up to 512Kbps though your Blu-ray player or other connected theater component. For more, including a demo of a Flash app on a phone and a TV communicating, check out the trio of press releases and video after the break.

Continue reading Flash 11 and AIR 3 landing tonight and delivering 7.1 surround sound to connected home theaters

Flash 11 and AIR 3 landing tonight and delivering 7.1 surround sound to connected home theaters originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on December 30, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since consumers started gaining access to the internet, cookies have been controversial. They have a lot of legitimate uses, such as helping websites remember that you’re logged in. On the other hand, privacy campaigners have often voiced concerns about ad networks using cookies to gain information about your surfing habits. Although browsers will let you disable regular cookies completely if you want, this doesn’t keep sites from storing a more sophisticated type of cookies on your computer…

How is it possible that sites can still track you even if you’ve disabled cookies? The answer lies within a browser plugin that is installed on approximately 99.0% of Internet-enabled computers worldwide: Flash. In version 6 of the popular plugin, something called Local Shared Objects was introduced. This allows websites to store a small amount of data on your computer. But hey, wait a minute… that sounds an awful lot like the concept of cookies.

There are three major reasons why we should be cautious with Flash cookies:

• By default, every website is allowed to use up to 100kB of storage on your computer. Regular cookies are limited to 4kB. That may not sound like a lot of space these days, but that’s huge in cookie terms.
• Flash cookies never expire, unlike regular cookies.
• Even when you opt out of cookies entirely in your browser’s preferences, Flash cookies can still be set unless you disable Flash entirely.

Calm down
Don’t panic. Flash cookies don’t will not send your social security number to criminals or anything like that, but it is important that you understand what they could be used for to make an informed decision about them.

Let’s have a closer look at a common “evil” use of cookies in general: marketing. Sites A, B and C display ads from ad network X on their site. If you go to site A for example, the ad network can place a cookie on your computer that contains the URL you just visited. As you go from site to site, perhaps including site B and C, the network can collect the URLs that display their advertising to generate an anonymous profile about you, containing such information as your interests, political orientation, beliefs, age and the region where you live.

So basically Flash cookies do what regular cookies do too, except that Flash cookies can contain more data and never expire. If that doesn’t sound bad to you, Flash cookies are nothing to worry about.

Finding your Flash cookies
To help us find and delete Flash cookies, we’re gonna need a Firefox add-on called BetterPrivacy. After installing it, you can start it by going to Tools > BetterPrivacy. If you take a look at the screenshot, you can see that I’ve been playing a Flash game called Level Up and that I have been using Gmail’s web interface. All entries that begin with a hash are harmless because they’re related to Flash’s preferences.

There are two entries that caught my eye: cnettv.cnet.com and vizu.com. CNET TV appears to have stored data in a file called OVPMetricsProvider.sol, which leads me to believe this cookie is used solely to do detailed site analytics. I didn’t remember going to Vizu.com, so I looked it up. A quick search revealed that it is an analytics company, therefore people who are concerned about their privacy probably don’t want this cookie around.

Deleting Flash cookies
Unfortunately, BetterPrivacy can’t block Flash cookies as of yet. You can however let it delete your Flash cookies on demand with a hotkey or automatically every couple of hours. I’m not too paranoid about my privacy, so I went with the less radical solution of having BetterPrivacy delete my Flash cookies when quitting Firefox. All these options can be accessed on the second tab of the add-on’s preferences window.

Much like regular cookies, Flash cookies also have legitimate uses you don’t want to block. After all, you don’t want to lose your progress in that Flash game you’ve nearly finished. Luckily you can whitelist certain Flash LSOs so that BetterPrivacy won’t delete them. This can be done by going to the first tab of the settings window, selecting an entry and clicking the ‘Prevent automatic LSO deletion’ button.

The tips in this article only cover Firefox. If you have Opera/Chrome/IE/Safari tips that fit in with the article, please do share them with us in the comments.

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