Hasta La Gadget!

Remember when Western Digital picked up SiliconSystems for a song during the height of last decade’s Great Recession? Here we are a year later looking at the first fruit of that relationship, as WD has just introduced its first consumer-oriented solid state drive in the SiliconEdge Blue and its enterprise-ready SiliconDrive N1x. Both 2.5-inch families feature a native SATA 3.0Gbps interface along with read speeds as high as 240 – 250MB/sec and write rates peaking at around 140 – 150MB/sec, and the former has already hit the test bench on a number of occasions. For those considering the upgrade, you should probably dive into those links below — most everyone came away feeling that the SiliconEdge Blue was a wee bit underwhelming for the price, with Hot Hardware noting that the “Micron C300 and Intel X25-M were measurably faster overall,” and the lofty MSRP just left ’em looking for more. Here’s hoping for a price drop and / or a SiliconEdge Black, eh?

WD’s first SiliconEdge Blue SSD launches, gets reviewed originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Swedish photographer Peter Karlsson has come up with a lightweight, strong and beautifully designed light stand. The skinny tripods are somewhere between a tent and the rigging of a sailing boat.

Peter, like many Strobists, uses small flash units for his work, the kind that slide onto the top of your camera. These small speedlights are surprisingly powerful and very portable. The problem is the stands they sit on, which are – if not exactly heavy – bulky and weighty enough to make you think twice about carrying more than one or two.

So Peter built these featherweight stands from flexible tent poles. They weight just 440 grams (15.5-ounces) each and extend from just 40cm to two meters (1.3-feet to 6.5-feet). This is less than a third the weight of a regular lighting stand.

The stands are standard tent-poles with elastic cord running through the core. To make one, Peter says that the “only needed skills are to cut rope and tie knots.” Instead of using a standard (heavy) clamp to attach the flash and soft-box to the top, Peter hangs it there with more cord. Height adjustment is done by lengthening or shortening this rigging. It’s not for using outside on a windy day, but for indoor location work, its ideal.

The video runs a bit long, but it is exquisitely shot, and explains all you need to know.

Homegrown ultralight lightstands [Svarteld]

Tent Pole Light Stands: More Details [Stobist]

An Adobe employee over in the company’s official forums dropped a bomb earlier this month that they’ve now decided to pass on releasing Flash 10.1 for Windows Mobile 6.5, instead moving straight to 7. The official explanation is that “WinMo6.5 does not support some of the critical APIs that we need,” but frankly, this sounds like a load of crap — since the project was announced last year, there’s no way it took them this long to figure out that an official cut for 6.5 wouldn’t be technically possible. If we had to guess, the real justification also explains why Adobe has been so quiet on the matter: 6.5’s now viewed as a dead-end platform since 7 represents a clean break for Microsoft, and the company feels like it can’t be bothered to invest the necessary time, energy, and money to see the project through. In all likelihood, Adobe was briefed on 7 prior to its official announcement at MWC, and that’s when the decision was made. Of course, that’s all pure speculation on our part — but regardless, don’t get your hopes up, HD2 owners (unless you get an upgrade, that is).

Adobe taking a pass on Flash 10.1 for WinMo 6.5, will go straight to 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rejoice, owners of netbooks with Intel GMA 500 graphics: Flash Player 10.1 Beta 3 is here, complete with hardware video acceleration for your machines. That should make Hulu and YouTube HD usable on machines like the Sony VAIO P and VAIO X, the Nokia Booklet 3G, and the previous-generation Dell Mini 10. The new build also bring support for the Broadcom Crystal HD accelerator found in Pine Trail Atom machines like the newest Dell Mini 10 and HP Mini 210 — support we found sorely lacking when we reviewed the Dell. We just tried it out on our review HP Mini 210 and it managed 720p YouTube just fine, although 1080p was a no-go — we’re waiting on some updated Broadcom drivers though, so don’t take that as gospel quite yet. We’ll have much more on that in our full Mini 210 review; for now you should all get downloading and let us know how it’s going in comments.

Update: Success! We updated the Broadcom drivers on our Dell Mini 10 and downloaded the fresh Flash 10.1 Beta 3, and as you can see in the video below 1080p YouTube HD content plays smoothly. It’s almost everything we’ve ever dreamed of for our netbooks. We are still having issues with the HP Mini 210 which uses the older BCM70012 Crystal HD card, but will have an update on that in our full review soon.

Continue reading Flash 10.1 beta 3 released, adds support for Intel GMA 500 and Broadcom Crystal HD chips (Update: 1080p Flash on a netbook!)

Flash 10.1 beta 3 released, adds support for Intel GMA 500 and Broadcom Crystal HD chips (Update: 1080p Flash on a netbook!) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Harry Benson, the legendary Scottish photographer, sat down with NYT’s Gadgetwise blog and shared some tips on taking photos in low-light situations.

Benson’s photographs include celebrities such as Michael Jackon, every president since Eisenhower, and the legendary photo of Ethel Kennedy going straight for him right after Bobby was shot.

Here’s what he recommends for good low-light shots. For the record, Benson uses a Canon 1D Mark III, with the 24- to 105- millimeter lens. For low light, he goes to Canon f/1.2L 50-millimeter 1.2. But the following tips should work even if your camera, and lenses, are not quite as awesome as his.

• Use program (P) mode to get best results and capture detail in every corner.
• Don’t set ISO at the very top. Don’t go beyond 1000 because it gets noisy.
• Don’t trust autofocus in a dark situation — it takes too long to make up its mind.
• When shooting a very important shot, use manual focus — especially in the dark.
• Don’t use flash. You lose a lot of humanity with flash.
• Film is unreliable. Digital frees up your brain from all the technical stuff

Most importantly, according to Benson, is not to be afraid. “You’ll be surprised just how good your photos will be. I’ve just been awakened to see what digital cameras can do in low-light. Be brave about it.”

Photo: wili_hybrid / Flickr