devices

Technology can be a hazardous to your health, and gadget-related dangers come in all shapes and sizes, from BlackBerry thumb to mouse elbow. One of the most common complaints we hear is from laptop users literally burned by overheated systems. While desktop PC hot-rodders have all kinds of elaborate water-cooling contraptions at their disposal, laptop owners are stuck with decidedly more low-tech solutions.

Many users would never dream of resting a laptop directly on their legs without a pillow, magazine, or some other improvised shield in place. After all, with faster processors, smaller cases, and increased workloads, the modern laptop … Read more

Frankly, convergence devices scare me. That's because I have a vested interest in the continued existence of MP3 players and PVPs as standalone devices. Luckily for me, cell phones have mostly failed to offer a truly enjoyable music browsing experience thus far. They don't have a lot of built-in memory (though the increasing inclusion of built-in memory slots is certainly cause for concern...mine, anyway), and their batteries aren't yet robust enough to safeguard against that ever-pressing issue: draining your power rocking out and then being unable to make or receive important phone calls. So I can … Read more

Boing Boing has alerted us to a public-domain audio recording of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection that you can download and plunk onto your iPod. Now, I did a bit of the History of Science thing in college, and I must have taken at least four seminars in which Origin of Species was on the syllabus. I can consequently tell you that this is the most boring book ever written.

Yes, it's difficult to express just how influential a work of research and literature it was, and it's still obviously … Read more

The espionage community has apparently taken up some hobbies since the end of the Cold War--including interior design.

The "GSM Table Lamp" may look like an innocent accent piece from Crate and Barrel, but it doubles as an eavesdropping device that can pick up audio up to 20 meters away. But what really stands out is its global monitoring ability.

As long as it's in a region with GSM coverage, Red Ferret notes that you can call the lamp from anywhere in the world. And no one will be the wiser, as it's activated automatically and … Read more

Devicescape is a free Wi-Fi helper service that was announced at the Demo 07 conference this past week. It's designed to take the struggle out of connecting to various commercial Wi-Fi hot spots while on the go. After downloading the low profile Devicescape application to your PC, Windows Mobile smart phone, or Wi-Fi-enabled handset, you can instantly connect without having to manage log-ins or remember passwords.

The Devicescape client works with a number of Wi-Fi services, most notably T-Mobile's HotSpot service, which can be found in over 8,000 locations (mostly Starbucks). Devicescape is at work on interoperability … Read more

The first Demo 07 pitch today: DARTdevices. The company makes a technology that allows data and apps on mobile and fixed devices to sync up. So if you have a laptop, a camera, a phone, and a PDA, you can share the laptop-connected printer among all of them, automatically sync pictures, and even run the same games.

Users can add devices to their "crew" of devices even if they don't have DART software in them yet. That's the magic part. Cute demo tidbit:the presenter says, "If you think true mobile interoperability will happen only … Read more

Bored with what LaCie has to offer? Seagate has announced the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition for Mac.

The metal-and-rubber external storage device offers up to 160GB of storage space and weighs less than half a pound. It includes software for automatic backup and file synchronization that will work for any digital content, including video files, photos and music tracks. Its firmware, called Maxtor DriveLock, works to protects data from prying eyes even if the internal hard drive is removed from the device, according to Seagate.

The Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition for Mac will sell for $130 for 80GB, $… Read more

Just a few days after one Adobe Photoshop co-architect rained on the 64-bit chip parade, another is trying to rein in expectations for another hardware advance: dual-core processors.

Photoshop co-architect Russell Williams cautioned that multicore processors don't necessarily speed up operations. Recapitulating Adobe's gripe about 64-bit chips, Williams said that memory access performance is a limiting factor that multicore designs don't fix.

"If your system is bandwidth-limited and the operation you want to do involves moving a big chunk of data from here to there while doing a limited number of arithmetic operations on it, adding … Read more

In the end-of-'06 wrap-up madness, there are a whole lot of people talking about Web 2.0, YouTube, social media, connected-home technology, the Wii and its corresponding Wiinjuries...the list goes on. But there's been almost no mention of the rash of completely useless USB-powered devices that infested the gadget market in 2006 with a viciousness that can only be compared to bubonic plague in a medieval village or head lice in a kindergarten classroom. I mean, they were everywhere. They're so ubiquitous, in fact, that I've decided I'm not going to touch 'em in '… Read more