Author Archives: Jonas Review Editor

I’m not sure if all this is from the Video iPod, but if it is, I’d like to thank Apple. Their latest iPod has certainly become a catalyst for some change in how TV content is going to be distributed. First, some popular ABC shows (like “Lost”) are available as downloads at iTunes stores. Then, NBC News decides to stream their nightly news broadcast for those that missed it (often me). But, I didn’t expect CBS to be giving their content to the search engines to store for them. This could be huge as Google has been playing in video recently, but really didn’t have much content. CBS could easily solve that problem. Even Google may have to go out and buy some hard drives to store all of this if it works out. In the meantime, it’s nice to see the networks coming out of the dark ages.

“REUTERS reported that CBS is talking to both Google and Yahoo about storing TV shows and news archives.
And in another demonstration of convergence, the BBC said yesterday it will be streaming some of its live TV coverage on its web site.

But convergence of PCs and broadcast technology could be as threatening to big outlets like CBS as online news has been for print titles.

Quite a few traditional media outlets have realised that they’re a bit behind on the old online publishing front, which threatens their traditional revenue streams and staff laden business models.”

From The Inquirer.

Tis the season for computer bargains! Don’t waste your precious time, fight the crowds, and drive around any more than necessary. Interested in a holiday notebook purchase? Laptop Logic has done the legwork for you; let your fingers do the clicking to the best deal. How good you wonder? How about their “best deal,” an HP notebook from Wal-Mart for the amazing low price of $378.

“This machine has a lot to offer for the money. Its biggest advantage is the AMD Sempron processor, with PowerNow! technology. While performance will be similar, or even slightly slower than the Celeron M competitors, the big advantage you’re going to see here is battery life. This chip has a 25W TDP, higher than the Celeron M’s 21W TDP, but the big thing here is PowerNow! The Sempron chip’s clock will dynamically fluctuate based on load, just like the Turion 64 and Pentium M. Due to this, users will probably see around 2.5-3 hours of battery life on the reasonable 6 cell battery. The rest of the specs are pretty standard, except when you browse to the memory. 1GB maximum DDR RAM? We’re not sure HOW they pulled this off, but HP’s website does not lie (or does it?). While 1GB will be more than sufficient for the average user, or the kind of use buying a sub-$400 laptop, it is something to keep in mind for the long run. All of the other machines have 3 USB 2.0 ports compared to the ze2108wm’s 2 ports, but it does have a higher capacity battery and the more advanced Radeon Xpress 200M graphics.”

This is definitely worth waking up early to snag. Roll back prices never looked this good- best of all no rebates! Read all about it here.

If you’ve got some extra time this weekend, and a free serial port (remember those?), this is a project to consider. Sure, there are many more elegant solutions for controlling your music player. My personal favorite is the Logitech diNovo Bluetooth Media Commander which has the added benefit of being wireless. However, for a home brew solution, this project looks pretty good.

“Nowadays, Winamp has full support to keyboard shortcuts. But some time ago, when Winamp didn’t have this feature, I was thinking in some way to make a easy way to change music by simply pressing one button, it would make things faster and would help me to change music during games. So I decided to make a external control panel, to make it easier to change musics, volume up or down, toggle shuffle and many other features by pressing just one button. I found one winamp plugin that shows how to configure a external control using the Serial Port, being able to make 4 or 15 buttons control. I decided to make this, step-by-step, how to do it, hope you enjoy.”

Disguised well, this could be the center piece of a “computer jukebox.” Who says that geeks can’t rock?

Ready to go? Here’s the link.

New technology often creates new problems. When Apple introduced the iPod, their scroll wheel was praised for its ease of use. Now music fans could scroll away to find just the tune they were looking for. Users loved it, and sales skyrocketed, and the rest is history.

However, folks may have scrolled too much. In what one site is dubbing “ipoditis,” doctors are seeing an increase in repetitive motion injuries involving the thumb.

“Music fans may enjoy the ability to spool through 10,000 songs on their iPods, but medical experts warn that jumping from tune to tune has its risks.

Carl Irwin, from the British Chiropractic Association, said: “This is a really serious problem. The action needed to move the wheel on an iPod is totally unnatural and effectively separates the joint in the thumb every time you use it.

“This causes inflammation in the thumb or fingers and can be very painful. We have also seen cases of iPod users where the problem has spread to their elbow and neck.”

Does this make an argument for just shuffling your tunes? I’m not sure, but this repetitive motion injury is on the rise. We’ve explored this before, here at LD, with our look at the Vertical Mouse.

WiFi antenna have always been a bit of a home brew affair. First there was the cantenna, which was made from a Pringle’s can. This got one upped by the coffee can antenna. Over the summer, Popular Science published plans for a parabolic antenna.
Now the folks are getting serious. Engadget is showing the plans for an antenna made from a mini satellite dish. There are material lists, and photos of each step. This thing is quite strong. We’re talking 18 networks at once, from up to 8 miles away! Remind me to turn on the WEP on my router.

Optical drive enthusiasts are definitely impatient people. Why else would they constantly remove a perfectly functional piece of computer hardware (namely their optical drive) to swap in one that is just a little faster? First it was CDR speeds, then DVDR speeds, and lately DVDR dual layer speeds. DVDR disc writing speeds maxed out at 16x a year ago. A full DVDR disc could be cooked in 6 minutes, and no one expected any faster as rotational speeds maxed out.

Well, counting on the fact that we always want things one notch faster, Plextor is planning on introducing a DVD writer that can write DVD+R discs at the breakneck speed of 18x! Personally, I think this is very fast, will probably put the hit on write quality, and can’t wait to try it.

See more info here.

I’m constantly amazed by these offers that seem too good to be true. After all, what is better than free? Well, if it seems too good to be true, it ussually is. This latest offer from Visa is an example of this.

I received an offer from Visa this week for a free Dell Laptop that they say is valued at $850. Naturally I’m skeptical, but before I threw the ad in the trash I looked over it to see what you had to do to get the “free” computer.

To qualify for your “free” computer you must transfer a balance of $5000 to the new card and maintain a balance of $3,500 for 18 months. If you don’t have $5,000 on another card to transfer you can take out upto $2,500 in cash advances to make up the difference. This means you need to have at least $2,500 on another card in order to transfer it to the new card.

After some serious number crunching, they figure out that the “free” laptop ends up costing over $900! Now that’s an offer I can definitely pass on.

Some users downloaded too much stuff from Napster have larger music collections that come close to the current capacity of current iPod offerings of 60 GB. If their collection is that large today, imagine what will happen now that the Video iPod can play back videos. And don’t forget about the thousands of 7 megapixel photos that you’d like to be able to share at all times. One analyst is hypothesizing that a terabyte iPod could be available in 5 years. While a capacity of 1 terabyte seems daunting (remember 1 terabyte=1000 gigabytes!), why do I think that some power users will be able to fill that up, with a few more tracks to spare?

“Apple could possibly create an iPod with 1 terabyte of storage, as well as a true “iPhone” says one analyst. “A terabyte iPod might sound crazy today, but we believe in five years a terabyte iPod will emerge as a portable home media center,” says Piper Jaffray senior analyst Gene Munster in an research report obtained by iLounge. “We continue to believe that Apple will enter the mobile phone market. We would not expect an ‘iPhone’ to be launched for at least 12-18 months.” “

From iPod Lounge