[MobileRatty] tag: regular

Wesc's ALP Horn Headphones for style and acoustics combined!

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:20:07 +0000

Breaking the norms of the regular round headphones are Wesc's ALP Horn Headphones. In a typical street style they are managing to create waves in circles where it matters. Comfort concerns can go for a toss when it comes...

ZYB - Sync your Cell Phones contacts to the Web

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:19:04 +0000

Think about it for just 1 second - you don’t remember any phone numbers any more, do you? Yup, neither do I. Problem is that many of those numbers I need are only stored in my cell phone. I’ve got a Palm and even now, I fail to sync it to the Palm desktop software on a regular basis. What would be easier is if I could just hit a button on my phone and get it backed up immediately. Enter zyb.com.

ZYB is an online service (go Web!) that works with most major mobile handsets and without any additional software in most cases. Naturally, ZYB promises that your contacts will be stored securely.

So that’s great, but is that it? Nope. ZYB thought about that and realized that in this day of Facebook, MySpace and a thousand other social websites, that they shouldn’t forget that component. You can share your contacts, or a subset of them with your friends and family. ZYB also sports a little Twitter-like feature called ‘Shouts’ where you can post a small message to your account that gets sent to your friends as text messages.

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Mi Jam iPod Laser Light Dock

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:12:26 +0000

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have an iPod Dock with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! Ask and you shall receive… The iPod Laser Light Show brings the party to life with red laser patterns on any surface you can point it at. The laser patterns move in sync with the music and when you adjust the sound levels, the patterns will grow or shirnk in size. Add a fog machine and and you truly have a party going on. If the party runs out of steam, the laser can be turned off and act as a regular iPod dock. Perfect for the dorm room party!

Highlights:

Stereo Speaker with excellent sound quality
Laser light show effects syncs with your music
Adjustable stand to project light show to wall or ceiling
Safe laser light: conforms to all applicable standards for safety
Audio-in jack
Retractable audio-in cable
Can be used with the AC adaptor provided or 4xAA batteries
Two modes: Audio only and Audio with Laser Light Show

$65 - Mi Jam iPod Laser Light Dock

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DIY Pedal Powered Snow Plow is fun even for your Kids!

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:19:55 +0000

DIY Pedal Powered Snow Plow is fun even for your Kids!

For the ultimate snow plowing this winter, you might want to consider making one of these DIY Pedal Powered Snow Plow which even your kids would love to ride on.

Kevin Blake, who by day is an engineer at Trek Bicycles, came up with the idea of using pedal power to push show about 13 years ago. In 1993 Blake built a recumbent commuter tricycle with a friend and remembers thinking “could I put a blade on the front and push snow?”

His friend was skeptical about it working at all because of traction and weight issues with the light weight trike. Undeterred, Blake figured that if he could “snowplow” with a regular shovel then it should be possible to use the legs in a pedaling motion to do the same thing.

via hackedgadgets, Hack Page

Brought to you by: Zedomax.com

DIY Pedal Powered Snow Plow is fun even for your Kids!

The Celrun LLUON A1 - IPTV PC

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:43:12 +0000

Check out this cool PC, the Cellrun LLUON A1.

The Celrun LLUON A1 can either be used as a regular TV or an IPTV.

It comes with an Intel Atom CPU, 1GB of Ram, A DVD and a 160GB HDD and the 18.4 inch LCD screen is capable of a resolution of 1680 x 954.

There is no word on pricing or availability as yet.

via Akihabara News

The Celrun LLUON A1 - IPTV PC

Apple and AT&T working on official iPhone tethering plan

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:23:32 +0000

Apple pretty quickly dragged the iPhone tethering app back behind the App Store shed, pressed a muzzle to its temple and pulled the trigger until the barrels went 'click, click.' Predictable, really. But do Apple and AT&T have any plans to offer tethering to their iPhone customers? After all, they already offer the service to their Blackberry customers? If not, where's the hold up: Apple or AT&T?

An annoyed Gizmodo reader sent Steve Jobs an email, asking what the deal was. Jobs' response was curt and to the point: "We agree [with all of your points] and are discussing it with ATT."

My guess is AT&T isn't going to sneeze at an extra $30 or so a month to charge their tethered iPhone customers, but AT&T is having enough of a headache keeping their 3G smooth without having to deal with Joe Poopsock's iPhone-tethered World of Warcraft raids. When the 3G issues for regular iPhone customers are fixed, they'll turn their attention to tethering.

Rumor: Apple and AT&T developing iPhone tethering plan [Gizmodo]

Linux on board: Developing for the Nokia N810

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:22:00 +0000

The Nokia N810 alarm interface allows developers to efficiently and easily set alarms programmatically. Peter Seebach illustrates how a small command-line program can hook into this API and make good use of it.

The most serious limitation of the Nokia 770 as a potential PDA replacement was the lack of any way to set alarms that could wake the device. A much-improved alarm interface was introduced on the N800 and is still present on the newer N810. In this article, I take a look at the C language API to the alarm interface, and suggest an interface to make this available to shell scripts or programs in other languages.

First, a brief overview of the N810 is in order. The N810 is an embedded handheld system with an 800x480 display. It has Bluetooth, wireless, and USB connections. The underlying kernel is a 2.6.21 Linux® kernel, adapted for the hardware.

The N810 is fairly similar to the previous N800. New features include GPS and a built-in keyboard. The only way in which the N810 might seem less flexible than the N800 is that it provides only a single available MMC/SD card slot. The N800 provides two slots for user-provided MMC/SD cards, both full size. The N810 comes with a hard-wired 2GB card in the "internal" slot and a miniSD slot for removable media. (This can be quite frustrating if, like me, you've accumulated stacks of SD media over a few years of playing with embedded systems.)

The development environment for the N810 is essentially the same as that described for the N800 (see my other articles on the 770 and N800). There have been updates to Scratchbox and the maemo environment, but the essential process remains the same, and the Scratchbox and SDK install remain quick and easy. There are two major changes that are likely to affect a regular developer. The first is that xterm is installed out of the box; this is a big improvement. The second is that, when you install the openssh-server package, you are prompted to set a new root password. This is a big step up from the previous behavior: a default root password of "rootme". Obviously, you should pick some other password.

The alarm API

The alarm API was introduced in the maemo 3.0 release last year. It presents a set of calls to interact with the alarm daemon, which provides alarm services. You should prefer using this interface to trying to write your own, and you should definitely stay away from writing your own timer code in an environment like the N810. Power management on embedded hardware is an advanced topic, and it is easy to get it wrong; instead, just hand the job off to the specialized code provided.

Even if your alarm code is written elegantly and well, there is a compelling advantage to a centralized service. Imagine that you have written a perfect alarm interface, which has to wake the system only rarely, perhaps once every five minutes or so. This will have almost no impact on battery life. Now, imagine that other people, just as skilled as yourself, write similar interfaces. With several of them installed, the system must wake up several times every five minutes. Worse, users tend to pick different intervals. So, if you have one thing that wakes every three minutes, and one every five, and one every seven, you end up with the worst of all worlds: even though no individual alarm goes off more than once every three minutes, you actually have an alarm about once every two—and worse, pairs of alarms going off may involve separate wake and sleep cycles. So use the standard API.

The alarm API can do a number of things. In essence, it can configure the behavior of a scheduled notification with a great deal of flexibility. An alarm event may or may not involve a display to the user. The three primary things alarm tasks can do are display messages, run programs, or send messages over D-Bus to other applications. You might not think of all of these as alarms, but they share substantial functional overlap with the simple reminder messages that a calendar application could provide. In short, if you are implementing enough alarm functionality to support calendar applications and the like, it is better to generalize a little further and handle everything.

Alarms are stored as XML in /var/lib/alarmd/alarm_queue.xml. This file is moderately human-readable, but does make liberal use of magic numbers to encode flags. You can get a lot of insight into the components of alarm event structures by creating events using other applications, then reading the XML stored in this file.

Click to read more

LP 2 CD for easy conversion

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:00:30 +0000

We have seen our fair share of LP conversion devices in the past, but the LP 2 CD this time round takes a different route by converting all your old records into CD format directly, all without the need for a PC.

Step up, the LP 2 CD: a one-stop-shop for popping your 33, 45 and 78 rpm records direct to compact disc, with zero bother. And because it doesn’t need to run through a computer, you can hook it up to a pair of speakers to use like a regular stereo for records and compact discs. The LP 2 CD cuts out the middleman by incorporating a flash memory and CD burner, so you never need to connect to a PC or Mac at all; it’s all right in one place with no cables for the mice to nibble through. Just whack your old vinyl platters on to the turntable, start playing the record and press the record button on the control panel. Your grooves will be automatically transformed into digital sound files as they play and stored on an inbuilt flash memory that can handle up to 80 minutes of music at once. A nifty track recognition mode senses the gaps between songs and splits the track listing up for you so you don’t end up with one long recording.

The entire LP 2 CD package will ship in a solid metal casing, featuring a high-quality belt-drive, premium tone arm and cartridge. It might retail for a rather pricey £299.95, but think of the benefits of transferring your LP collection (or your grandfather’s) over to the CD format. Time to move on with the times, man, never mind the warm tones that pro-LP folk always tout.

[ LP 2 CD for easy conversion copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Cool Gift Idea: Digital Picture Frames, check out our reviews.

USB Hub + Torn Up Graduation Gown = USB Hub Monster, Kids Afraid Of The Computer

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:00:54 +0000

Want to make your own USB Hub Monster? It doesn't look very hard. You just take a regular hub, add a bunch of USB cables with armature wire taped to them, and then tear up the college graduation gown you keep in the closet but break out every year during graduation and wear to the bars to score free drinks, tear that sucker up, wrap the hub and legs, and presto: a, um, USB Hub Monster! Add red LED eyes for a real monster-y effect. Or, add some beef flavor to make it something your dog will tear up, like it wasn't going to anyways. Hit the jump for one more picture of the monster in use.

Sony's Thinnest Walkman Player Ever Has Active Noise Cancellation, Song Suggestion Software [Digital Audio]

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:00:00 +0000

Sony's S-series Walkman is their new high-end digital audio player that is not only their slimmest player to date, but has active noise cancellation and the SensMe music suggestion engine. Sony bundled 13.5mm EX headphones with the S-series players, as well as a pass through cable that connects to an in-flight entertainment system and uses the noise canceling capability of the Walkman. In addition Sony released their midrange E-series and entry-level B-series Walkman players.

The S-series has a 2-inch QVGA screen, that not only plays back WMA, AAC and MP3 audio formats, but also WMV and MP4 video. SensMe is featured on a Walkman player for the first time, previously only on Sony Ericsson Walkman-branded phones. For those unfamiliar, the SensMe engine analyzes a song for various qualities and maps it on an X-Y chart. From there you can select what type of music you want to listen to according to "mood". The S-series is only 7.5mm thick, has 40 hours of audio playback and 10 hours of video playback on a single charge.

The E-series is Sony's mid-range Walkman offering, which features the same audio and video playback the S-series offers, but lacks the noise cancellation and SensMe features. Unlike the S-series, the E comes in multiple colors, including black, red, blue and pink. It has 45 hours of audio playback and 8 hours of video playback. The E-series is also available in 4 GB and 8 GB sizes.

The B-series is Sony's no-nonsense line of Walkman players that only play music. But in addition to audio playback, the B-series also serves as a voice recorder and FM radio. It has 16 hours of battery life and also comes in multiple colors like the E-series. The B-series plugs directly into your USB port for drag and drop file transfer and comes in 1 GB and 2 GB sizes.

All the players above are expected to be available in September. The 4 GB S-series will cost $150, while the 8 GB will cost $180. The 4 GB E-series will cost $100 and the 8 GB $140. Lastly, the 1 GB B-series will sell for $45 and the 2 GB will be $60. [Sony]

SONY RAISES THE CURTAIN ON NEW WALKMAN PLAYERS THAT DELIVER HIGH-QUALITY AUDIO AND VIDEO

SAN DIEGO, Aug. 28, 2008 – From noise-cancellation for frequent travelers to affordability for customers on a budget, Sony today unveiled three new Walkman® players (series S, E and B) that have something to offer nearly every customer segment.

“Whether the fit and finish, the engineering or the integration of unique technologies, each of these new series has different points of appeal,” said Mitch Li, product manager for Walkman players in the Digital Imaging and Audio Division at Sony Electronics. “These new Walkman players satisfy the need of consumers who don’t want to sacrifice sound quality for the digital music and MP3 experience.”

S-Series Walkman Players

The top-end, format-friendly Walkman S-series broadens options for enjoying tunes from multiple sources, including many download stores and personal music collections. The supplied Content Transfer software even simplifies “drag and drop” transfer of non-DRM music, videos, podcasts and playlists from online music services to Walkman players. If you’re migrating your personal collection of ripped tracks from another MP3 player, there’s no need to re-rip all your tunes from your CDs.

Support for popular audio and video codecs is enhanced because the S-series Walkman devices play Windows Media Video (WMV) files with DRM, allowing you to enjoy rights-protected movies and video clips from other media collections.

Additionally, the S-series Walkman players are the first MP3 players with Sony’s SensMe™ Channels function, which automatically creates channels that can align with a user’s preferences. Based on Sony’s SensMe Channels function, the S-series players analyze a user’s music collection and suggest channels based on each song’s speed, mood and rhythm. They create a choice of 11 themed channels from upbeat pop to emotional ballads.

In-Flight Noise Cancellation

Whether commuting, flying high or just listening to music at home, the new S-series Walkman players help diminish background noise while improving your overall listening experience. The top-end S-series Walkman players feature integrated active noise cancellation with supplied 13.5mm EX noise canceling headphones and an accessory cable that extends the noise canceling functionality of the device. On airplanes, travellers can – for the first time – connect the S-series player directly to a plane’s audio video system with the included accessory cable and enjoy regular in-flight entertainment with the bonus of high-quality noise cancellation.

Just 7.5mm thin, the super-light S-series is the slimmest Walkman player in any of the new series. It has a bright, high-contrast 2-inch QVGA LCD screen (measured diagonally) that has an ultra-quick response time, with smooth playback at up to 30 frames per second and selectable horizontal/vertical viewing. The interface can be personalized with the user’s choice of 10 pre-installed wallpaper images or their favorite digital photo.

E-Series Walkman Players

The E-series combines high-quality video and audio performance to create the perfect device for enjoying favorite photos and video clips. Like the S-series, all E-series models are format friendly, easily playing back ripped tracks from your personal music collection, music store downloads and rights-managed video clips. Non-DRM files can be transferred by “drag and drop” from online music services to Walkman players.

Support for popular audio and video codecs is enhanced because the E-series Walkman players can also support Windows Media Video (WMV) with DRM, allowing rights-protected movies and video clips from other media collections.

B-Series Walkman Players

The affordable entry-level Walkman B-series player offers the high-quality sound that users have come to expect from Sony. The ultra-portable devices can connect to your PC’s USB port for easy “drag and drop” file transfers. Like all other Walkman models, open support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 codecs enables users to buy, copy and manage music to fit their needs.

The stylish design is enhanced by an illuminator that pulses in time with the music when the bass button is pressed. The device has an FM radio for enjoying favorite stations and a voice recorder that’s great for capturing memos, shopping lists or random thoughts while you’re on the move.

Battery Life

The battery life is up to 40 hours of music playback for S-series, up to 45 hours for the E-series and up to 16 hours for the B-series. The battery life is up to 10 hours of video playback for S-series, up to 8 hours for the E-series. The battery life is also up to 30 hours of audio playback for the S-series when the noise-cancellation feature is activated. Actual battery life may vary upon usage patterns, product settings, battery and environmental conditions.

Sony’s Open Platform Means More Choice

The E- and S-series Walkman players support an open platform, providing more choices for downloading and managing music and video collections online. The devices can support security-enhanced Windows Media Audio (WMA), as well as non-secure AAC, linear PCM and MP3 music formats plus JPEG files for photos, in addition to the WMV with DRM, AVC (H.264/AVC) Baseline Profile and MPEG-4 video codecs.

Pricing and Availability

The S-series of Walkman noise canceling video MP3 players come in two different storage capacities in black:

* The NWZ-S736F has approximately 4GB of internal storage and will cost about $150.
* The NWZ-S738F has approximately 8GB of internal storage and will cost about $180.

The E-series of Walkman video MP3 players will be available in the following configurations:

* The NWZ-E436F comes in black, red, pink, blue, has approximately 4GB of internal storage and costs about $100.
* The NWZ-E438F comes in black, red, pink, has approximately 8GB of internal storage, and costs about $140.

The B-series of Walkman MP3 players come in two different capacities and four colors:

* The NWZ-B133F player has approximately 1GB of internal storage; comes in black, red and blue and will cost about $45.
* The NWZ-B135F player has approximately 2GB of internal storage; comes in black, red and pink and will cost about $60.

Presales have begun for the new Walkman models online at www.sonystyle.com/walkman and at Sony Style stores. The players will be available in September across the country at military base exchanges and at authorized dealers nationwide.

[MobileRatty] tag: regular

Wesc's ALP Horn Headphones for style and acoustics combined!

ZYB - Sync your Cell Phones contacts to the Web

Mi Jam iPod Laser Light Dock

DIY Pedal Powered Snow Plow is fun even for your Kids!

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The Celrun LLUON A1 - IPTV PC

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Apple and AT&T working on official iPhone tethering plan

Linux on board: Developing for the Nokia N810

LP 2 CD for easy conversion

USB Hub + Torn Up Graduation Gown = USB Hub Monster, Kids Afraid Of The Computer

Sony's Thinnest Walkman Player Ever Has Active Noise Cancellation, Song Suggestion Software [Digital Audio]