How many times have you had to reinstall a printer on a system only to be unable to find the installation CD that has the drivers on it? Sure you can go on the web and probably find an updated driver that will fit the bill but it is still a hassle. HP appears to have solved this little problem by storing the drivers for popular operating systems on the printer itself. When you plug the printer into the USB port it automatically launches the driver installation software (or so says the guys over at EverythingUSB). HP’s new printers that feature HP Smart Install are now shipping and more are expected in the future. Hopefully other manufacturers will jump on the bandwagon and do the same.
In case you were not aware there are only four space shuttle launches left before NASA retires the fleet. Seeing a space shuttle launch first hand has always been a dream of mine but sadly probably one that I will never be able to take off of my bucket list. I was thinking the other day that the whole 3D revolution is interesting and all, but there is one thing I really wish producers would try to do before it is too late, capture a shuttle launch in 3D . I guess it turns out that they may have done that, and in IMAX to boot.
On March 12, 2010 a new IMAX film called Hubble 3D was released. Hopefully the entire movie is in 3D and not just the stuff taken in orbit. Of course, you have to have a 3D IMAX theater in your area in order to see it, and as far as I can tell our local one at the Science Center of Iowa doesn’t do 3D. Might have to make a trip in to Chicago or something to see it someday. Of course, anyone with a way to get me to a real launch can give me a call too….
In case you have not heard about it there is this new device coming out this week called the Apple iPad. If you have not heard about it then honestly, you probably need one more than the techies who are all drooling over them even before they have shipped. For those of us too cheap to shell out $500 for a new iPad take a look at the list below to get some entries into some free ipad giveaways on Twitter. If you hear of any more of them feel free to leave a comment and add them to the list.
Please remember that I am only providing this information that I have seen on Twitter over the last few days for ways to sign up to win a free iPad. I have no idea if each individual contest is authentic or not. The only thing for certain is that apparently giving away a free iPad is darn good publicity on Twitter!
Be sure to follow @gadgetstuff for new iPad contests as they appear in the Twitter feeds. I will keep this list up to date as best I can.
From Webs.com – #websdotcom AND http://bit.ly/ipadme
From iPadInsider – go to http://www.ipadinsider.com/free-ipad/ and read the details to send the tweet
PriceGrabber – @PriceGrabber: Who’s the lucky gal or lad, who will win our FREE Apple iPAD?! FOLLOW us, RT now, and find out on April 5 #PriceGrabber10K
jtgraphic – Follow @jtgraphic and RT to #WIN a #free #apple #iPad!! One RT per day is a valid entry – unlimited entries!
Digg.com – tweet this: the free @digg app comes to your iphone! to celebrate they’re giving out a custom colorware ipad each day for 2 weeks! http://bit.ly/diggapp
Picksthatmove – Follow @picksthatmove and RT to win 1 of 5 free iPads http://bit.ly/dCYG0J #contest #iPad
Happy Owl Studio – go to web site and read instructions then tweet about it http://www.happyowlstudio.com/win-an-ipad.html
An Almost Perfect Gaming Motherboard With Multi-Vendor Video Card Support
The MSI Big Bang Fuzion Motherboard
Running multiple video cards in a computer is one of several ways that gamers can tweak their frame rates to achieve the highest possible gaming experience. Until now however, users wanting to do this were limited to using identical video cards and connecting them together using the proprietary technology used by NVIDIA or ATI. With the new MSI Big Bang Fuzion Motherboard however, users have a new option. Thanks to a very special new chipset on the board known as the Lucid Hydra chip multiple video cards from different vendors can be used in the same system.
The Hydra chip literally looks at the graphic rendering tasks being sent by the game and distributes different portions of those rendering tasks to the different cards. Those completed images are then put back together by the Hydra and sent out to the monitor. While this is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the Big Bang Fuzion motherboard the mobo has a great number of additional benefits and tweaks that make it one of the year’s most intriguing pieces of PC hardware and the preliminary reviews seem to reflect that statement.
MSI Big Bang Fuzion Motherboard Specifications
As Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective points out in an interview and walk through video, the MSI Big Bang Fuzion motherboard is packed with features, enough that it will fill the needs of even the most demanding computer user:
3 PCI Express x16 2.0 Slots
2 PCI Express Slots
2 Standard PCI Slots
ATX Form factor
Up to 16 GB RAM
6 SATA connectors plus on board RAID support
8 Channel Realtek Audio
Gigabit LAN
12 USB 2.0 ports, 1 Firewire port, and 2 eSATA ports
Ability to use Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors (LGA 1156 Socket)
The only significant power user features missing from the Big Bang Fuzion are the lack of USB 3.0 support and the lack of a front panel eSATA port.
Conclusions About The MSI Big Bang Fuzion Motherboard
In terms of features and convenience the MSI Big Bang Fuzion truly provides everything in one beautifully crafted motherboard, but these conveniences come with a price tag that places it out of range for all but the most die hard gamers. At the time of its release the Big Bang Fuzion Motherboard was listing for nearly $400. Once the price starts to drop though, grab it!
No home should be without an emergency radio of some kind to use in times of crisis. These small, self powered, portable emergency radios are also great to take along on camping trips and to keep in the car in the winter in case of trouble. This side by side comparison of several popular emergency radios is intended to help the reader make a reasonable and informed choice when shopping for an emergency radio for the home.
In my closet at home I have two boxes full of old collectible plates with images of the old Star Trek series on them. Once you have finished laughing and making snide southern country boy jokes at my expense I will point out that they were investments, not love affairs with the franchise. Still, today when I saw a post over at Everything USB mentioning the upcoming release of the new Star Trek reboot will be available on USB stick I was intrigued.
Apparently starting November 17th you can get a special collectors edition USB key in the shape of a Star Trek logo that holds on it a standard definition DivX copy of the movie. It is DRM encrypted and can only be played on up to five different computers but apparently you can also burn it to DVD. Read the whole article to find out more, but they make a good point that the movie is only taking up around 1gig of the 4gig flash drive, so it would have been possible to throw out a Hi-Def version if they had wanted to.
Unable so far to find this available in the USA, but Amazon and other stores are preselling the Star Trek 2009 DVD and Star Trek 2009 Blu-Ray already. Looks like you get far more on the discs than you would with the simple little USB key so my money will probably be going for the discs.
Leave it to the guys over at Samson Electronics to come out with a new twist on digital audio recording technology. I am a big fan of the other Zoom digital audio recorders such as the Zoom H4n, as many other music educators are as well, but they now have released a new hybrid unit into the marketplace known as the Zoom Q3. The twist is that this little unit not only records stereo audio, but it has a built in video camera to record video with at the same time. At first glance I was kind of confused as it didn’t make much sense to me, but then I saw the potential applications of having both things available in one compact place. Imagine throwing this thing on a tripod during a marching band rehearsal to not only record the audio but also the video at the same time. A director could easily use the same thing in a classroom to record himself conducting while still getting high quality stereo audio at the same time.
I have not held a unit in my own hands yet to try it, so part of me wonders how this would be any better than a traditional video camera or one of the popular Flip video cameras, but the ads I have seen say that it uses the same microphones as the H4n so my guess would be that you are probably buying the unit for the audio more than the video. It only records in 640×480 pixel resolution which is perfect for putting on YouTube but lousy for anything that you might want to save on to DVD or watch on a larger TV screen.
The form factor seems to be a bit of a step back from the stylish solid feel of the H4n, and the lack of many buttons on the unit makes me wonder how hard it will be to quickly adjust the settings on the unit. Still, I will have to wait until I see it in person to make a real judgment call. Also the 2GB SD card seems downright puny for recording video and stereo audio at the same time. Still, all of the other portable digital audio recorders from Zoom have been really good, so I hope that this one follows suit. If anyone has actually had a chance to try out the Zoom Q3 Digital Audio and Video Recorder please leave a comment and let us know what you think!
I came to the realization a few weeks ago that I had to move beyond the built in parental controls in Windows to something a little more flexible to limit the amount of time my son was spending playing games. The problem I had with the Windows parental controls is that it only allowed me to set times of the day that he was able to play. Our schedule varies greatly from day to day, and with only one game computer in the house sometimes he would not be able to play at a certain time and would come crying to me saying that he had been cheated. After digging around through a bunch of other parental control software titles like NetNanny and Cybercop I finally downloaded and tried TimesUpKidz, and found that all my prayers had been answered.
The thing that makes TimesUpKidz so nice is how customizable it is. I can create settings for any user with an account on the machine and set time limits in many different ways. The way I finally set things was to limit time to one hour of access on school days, with a little bonus time on the weekends. The system keeps a log of how much of this time my child uses each day. If you truly want to teach some time management skills set TimesUpKidz to provide a set amount of play time per week. If the child uses it all up in one day, so be it, they will not be able to log in again until the next week. You can also set the system to require a child to take a break after a certain amount of play time, say like taking a fifteen minute break after playing for one hour.
The TimesUpKidz program obviously has some interesting applications for other uses as well. For those who spend too much time behind their computer set the system to force a break every hour or two or simply set limits on how much surfing you can do in one sitting.
The TimesUpKidz software comes with a free thirty day trial, and purchasing a license only costs $29.99. I am not the type of person that buys a lot of shareware software but TimesUpKidz does everything I need it to and does it exactly the way I need it done in terms of controlling my child’s access to the computer. Highly recommended!
NASA and space travel have always been fascinating to me. I remember as a kid going to Space Camp and dreaming of one day being an astronaut. Obviously that never happened (too scared of heights for one thing) but I still have a collection of old NASA mission patches that I started collecting back during my impressionable youth. None of them are nearly as cool as the patches that Wired.com managed to find in an article they recently posted on their web site. The three part article shows many of the more humorous mission patches (both official and unofficial) that have been used over the decades of manned space flight.
My personal favorite? That of the C.O.L.B.E.R.T, the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, made to honor comedian Steven Colbert for whom the space station’s treadmill is officially named.
Last year I had a near catastrophy at work. I am a school teacher that travels from building to building as a part of my teaching duties and I carry a laptop around with me. The students use it on a regular basis to record themselves playing their instruments and to use a program called SmartMusic Studio. One day a student forgot to remove the microphone from her instrument and in her joy of finally passing the song she turned and pulled the laptop off the top of the piano and onto the floor. The laptop survived but just barely.
A few months later I found a product called the Replug Break Away Audio Cable Connector that is essentially a magnetic break away audio plug that works with any existing 3.5mm headphone jack. Simply take your headphone (or microphone) cable from your laptop, iPhone, or MP3 player and plug in the Replug between the headphones and the device. If you walk too far away and start to bend or pull too hard on the connection the magnet breaks away and prevents the cable from snapping its contacts or from breaking the internal connections inside the deviceFor the laptop example it probably would have prevented it being pulled onto the floor altogether, as it would have snapped off when the student walked away from the laptop. I was lucky that the laptop survived, but it could have just as easily broken the microphone port as well. The Replug sounds like a great idea and it is priced very conservatively at around $9 on Amazon and comes in both black or white.
How many times have you had to reinstall a printer on a system only to be unable to find the installation CD that has the drivers on it? Sure you can go on the web and probably find an updated driver that will fit the bill but it is still a hassle. HP appears to have solved this little problem by storing the drivers for popular operating systems on the printer itself. When you plug the printer into the USB port it automatically launches the driver installation software (or so says the guys over at EverythingUSB). HP’s new printers that feature HP Smart Install are now shipping and more are expected in the future. Hopefully other manufacturers will jump on the bandwagon and do the same.
Computer Hardware, New Gadgets | admin | 
April 14, 2010 6:42 pm | 
Comments (0) 
I came to the realization a few weeks ago that I had to move beyond the built in parental controls in Windows to something a little more flexible to limit the amount of time my son was spending playing games. The problem I had with the Windows parental controls is that it only allowed me to set times of the day that he was able to play. Our schedule varies greatly from day to day, and with only one game computer in the house sometimes he would not be able to play at a certain time and would come crying to me saying that he had been cheated. After digging around through a bunch of other parental control software titles like NetNanny and Cybercop I finally downloaded and tried TimesUpKidz, and found that all my prayers had been answered.
Last year I had a near catastrophy at work. I am a school teacher that travels from building to building as a part of my teaching duties and I carry a laptop around with me. The students use it on a regular basis to record themselves playing their instruments and to use a program called SmartMusic Studio. One day a student forgot to remove the microphone from her instrument and in her joy of finally passing the song she turned and pulled the laptop off the top of the piano and onto the floor. The laptop survived but just barely.
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