NewerTech has a brand new peripheral in town - the quad-interface Voyager SATA I/II hard drive docking station. This model supports all the most commonly used connections of today, including SATA, FireWire 400/800 and USB 2.0. It is able to accept just about any SATA-based hard drive regardless of whether they're 2.5" or 3.5" in size, and supports up to 2TB capacities. Hot-swapping of drives is supported, allowing you to treat your collection of hard drives as though they're really spacious USB flash drives. Other features include an LED power and activity readout, an eject button when you need to remove a hard drive and a weighted base with (this is important) non-skid rubber feet. You can pick one of these puppies up for $100. It won't look stunning, but this is more function than form.

Permalink: NewerTech Quad-interface Voyager SATA I/II Hard Drive Docking Station from Ubergizmo (US, FR) | Good deals | Hot: Storm Review

Star Wars fans will get the reference above, but that's not the main point of this story. The 2009 Optibike OB1 is an electric bicycle that is powered by a lithium-ion battery, boasting a GPS to help you stay true to your destination, while its built-in PDA is able to keep track of the vehicle's performance - hopefully it is waterproof to a certain extent since you can never be too sure when the heavens are going to open up and pour down their blessings whenever you head to the great outdoors. The two hour battery life ought to be sufficient for intra-city use, although having exhausted it, you can always rely on your two legs to keep you moving. Only two dozen OB1s will be manufactured this year, so be prepared to break the bank if you want to bring one of these puppies home.

Permalink: Optibike OB1 Does Not Come With Astromech Droid from Ubergizmo (US, FR) | Good deals | Hot: Storm Review

Source: Gizmodiva

Continue reading AOC keeps it simple with $160 F19 LCD monitor

Filed under: Displays

AOC keeps it simple with $160 F19 LCD monitor originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Dospara of Japan is offering its limited edition Note Cartina UM netbook, cramming in the following into a $415 product :-

• Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor
• 8.9" LCD display at 1,024 x 600 resolution
• 120GB hard drive
• 1GB RAM
• Linux/Windows XP operating system
• 1.3 megapixel webcam
• 3-in-1 memory card reader
• Wi-Fi connectivity

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]]> Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:19:57 +0000 shiba inu puppies puppy ball mia category clumsy paws scrunch time comments aki email Puppy Cam! http://mobileratty.com/article/ad175379582fd68a60beb7ec3751afd5 http://mobileratty.com/article/ad175379582fd68a60beb7ec3751afd5 This is a litter of Shiba Inu puppies brought to you in live, streaming video. Why? Because they're cute and I want one (the one in the yellow collar). Porn aside, this is clearly what the interweb was built for. So I can lie here on the couch and watch a gaggle of puppies , without fear of shit on my own carpet. You know, sometimes life isn't so bad after all. Oh my god my yellow one is running in his sleep! Precious. Now the green one bit the red one to wake him up! I think I'm gonna cry. Shiba Inu Puppy Cam Thanks Heather. This is, in fact, the cutest thing I've seen all day.]]> Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:55:53 +0000 shiba inu puppies puppies yellow yellow collar interweb gonna cry porn video live Live Streaming Puppy Video: What The Interweb Was Built For (No, Not Porn) http://mobileratty.com/article/e7458335e9d76f26b5b777dd2636d677 http://mobileratty.com/article/e7458335e9d76f26b5b777dd2636d677

Awww. How cute does it get? This sextet of Shiba Inu puppies just turned 5 weeks old, and you can watch them in action, live. The three males and three females can't seem to get enough of each other, and we can't seem to get enough of them, either.

By the way, what an excellent use of the Internet! It's "unlimited" bandwidth that makes such things possible, something that might go away with greedy service providers contemplating download limits instead of figuring out how to expand U.S bandwidth to match the rest of the techno-proficient world.

But anyway, quell any anger that might have stirred up by watching these adorable puppies, reveling in the joy of being alive. Which one of the playful pups do you think will emerge as the pack leader?

Puppycam, via Boing Boing

Last week, CNN's attempt to display the future of TV news ended up making 3D look like the gimmick that it is. Yep, 3D is a gimmick, most associated (outside of CNN) with those stupid glasses designed to fit Blockheads from Venus. But as you know, there are many different scientific approaches dedicated to tricking you into thinking bullets—or other deadly projectiles such as children—are popping out of the screen and coming right at you. Here's a quick and dirty guide to 3D magic.

Most 3D operates on a single basic principle—tricking our dumb, binocular brain into interpreting a 2D image into one with depth. The most basic way to do this is stereoscopy, which is essentially showing a slightly different image to each eye which the brain mashes together into a 3D image. We've broken up the million different ways to do 3D in a few broad categories.

Stupid Glasses
It's easiest to do stereoscopic images with glasses or other nerdtastic eyewear to change how you see stuff—hence there are a lot of variations in 3D glasses tech.
• An anaglyph image is the old school 3D we all know and got headaches from: An image has two different color layers, one for each eye, with slightly different perspectives and when we look at them through those awesome plastic glasses (usually with red and blue lenses) that block one layer in each eye, our dumb brain takes the resulting separate image from each eye and mashes them together to make a 3D scene in our head.

• Polarized 3D glasses are the more modern choice for cheap 3D for the masses—you've worn them at IMAX if you've caught a 3D movie there, or at Disney World, since the big thing they allow over an anaglyph is full color. They work kind of the same way as the red/blue glasses though—two synced projectors throw images with slightly different perspectives up simultaneously, but at different polarizations. The polarized glasses only allow a single corresponding polarized image into each eye, and the brain does the hard work again, combining two separate images into a single 3D one.

 • LCD shutter glasses are excellent because they're so ridiculous. They actually block vision alternately in each eye in time with the refresh rate on the display by rapidly darkening each lens, while the display alternately shows images with a slightly different perspective (this is called alternate frame sequencing). It's essentially the "show different stuff to each eye" principle taken to its logically absurd conclusion—literally blocking the sight of the unwanted eye. Yes, these complicated puppies usually run over $100, and can give you a headache on a monitor without a high enough refresh rate.

No Glasses Required
Okay, so you don't wanna wear glasses. No problem—you just move the one-image-per-eye dance to the display itself.
• A parallax barrier is one of the more popular ways for swinging 3D without glasses—you see it in Sharp TVs for instance. It actually works a lot like polarized glasses, it just moves where the obstruction magic happens to the front of the TV. Instead of having glasses filter the image for each eye, the screen's parallax barrier—think of it is a very finely grated fence with precisely angled holes—directs different light into each eye, and your brain turns the mixed signals into a 3D image. The bad part? With a normal parallax barrier, the screen is permanently in 3D mode and you don't have exactly have a wide viewing angle. Sharp's trick for 3D in LCD displays is fancier—there's a second LCD that creates the parallax barrier with a polarized grid of lines, which is nice because you can turn it off and go back to regular 3D viewing.

• Integral Imaging is a form of parallax actually. You've got a bunch of supertiny micro-images that you actually peep through an array of spherical convex lenses, one per micro-image. All these micro-images come together when you look at them to form a 3D image.

• Another form of parallax is continuous-motion parallax. Here, HoloVizio's system dumps pixels in favor of voxels, which can project multiple light beams in multiple directions simultaneously.

3D in 3D
So far, we've just talked about 2D images on a flat screen, which your brain is fooled into thinking are three-dimensional. The other side is creating images in real 3D— you know, meatspace. Still, most of them make use of lighting and projection tricks too.
• The Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California has come up with a cheap way to create images in 3D space (as opposed to planar space) by using a spinning mirror called a light-field display. Basically high speed video is projected onto a quickly spinning mirror, which then "reflects a different and accurate image to each potential viewer." The system uses an algorithm to figure out the correct shading and occlusion for the image.

• Japanese researchers' new plasma-laser hologrammy device takes advantage of the "plasma emission phenomenon near the focal point of focused laser light." By manipulating the laser's focal point, along the x, y and z axes, they can display real 3D images in mid-air.

• Heliodisplay actually creates a surface in mid-air to project an image onto, which allows you to do the "Help me Obi-wan Kenobi" type of floating holograms that look 3Dish, though they're actually planar (2D) images. Yep, it's expensive.

FAKE FAKE FAKE
There are lots of suggested 3D images out there that aren't any kind of real 3D—videogames are of course the most obvious. But why pick on them when you can pick on CNN?
• Sorry Wolf, but we gotta hit people with the truth: CNN's "holograms" are totally fake. We already explained this before, but no one was projected in front of Wolf Blitzer. He was looking at a wall. What we saw at home as computer-generated: A bunch of HD cameras filmed the hologramee from all sides, computers crunched that data and delivered whatever angle the studio camera needed at the time. As long as the source angle was synced to the studio angle, it looked, to viewers at least, like a 3D "hologram." Nice try, Wolfie. Call us when you score an R2 unit. –With Reporting by Seung Lee

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about 3D, double Ds or croissan'wiches to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.