Kit Eaton

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Medion’s New GPSs Are Really Secure, Need Your Fingerprints to Navigate

Medion’s new GoPal GPS units have an unusual extra feature intended as a deterrant for thieves: fingerprint scanners. The GoPal X5535, P5235 and P5435 all have a tiny scanner and will only work when they recognize one of five stored prints, making them useless if stolen. They’ve all got 5-inch screens, though the P5235 has … Continued

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Tiny Sony Laptop Hits FCC—Is This A Sony Netbook?

The computer rear-end in this photo is a Sony machine that’s just hit the FCC. There’re a couple of things that make it interesting: it’s labeled with PCG-1P1L, making it synonymous with Vaio numbering. It was tested for 802.11 Wi-Fi in b, g and n flavors, with Bluetooth and both EVDO and HSPA. Its label … Continued

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Fujitsu’s Laptop4Life Scheme Gets You A New Laptop Every 3 Years ‘Til You Die

Craziness: Buy one Fujitsu laptop, get a new one every three years until you’re dead. That’s basically the crazy principle behind Fujitsu’s Laptop4Life program. Sure, you have to buy the extended 3-year warranty at first, not damage the old machine too much, and hang onto the receipt for grim death, but then you’ll get a … Continued

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Harion Glass Speakers Look Like They’re Worth A Fortune, Because They Are

Japanese firm Hario just came up with this rather beautiful new speaker system, dubbed Harion. So far, so groovy. It’s made of heat-resistant glass (the first to be like it, according to Hario) and the woofer, two tweeters and two mid-range speakers proved so complex to create that it took a small army of companies—23 … Continued

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Russia’s New Armor-Fooling Rocket Grenade Is An “Abrams Killer” Apparently

The new rocket-propelled grenade RPG-30 anti-armor weapon recently unveiled in Russia has a sneaky trick to help it get past active defenses—it fires a tiny decoy rocket flying ahead of the main warhead. This is to confuse defensive systems into attacking the decoy, meaning they’re too busy to successfully defeat the real weapon inbound just … Continued

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MSI U110, U115 Netbooks To Pack Draft-N Wi-Fi, Faster Processors

We’ve only just been getting excited about MSI’s U120 3G-packing netbook, but now it looks like MSI has even more interesting machines just around the corner. Apparently due sometime in January, the U110 and U115 will run Atom Z530 chips, drawing less power than the “typical” N270 netbook processor. And they’ll pack a hybrid drive … Continued

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Duo Wireless Penmouse Adds Touchscreen Tablet Tech to Laptops Cheaply

Modding your laptop to add a touchscreen is certainly possible, though you’ll need to be pretty competent with tools: with the Duo gizmo all you need to be able to do is clip it to your screen. The two-piece device has a sensor you pop on top of your monitor or laptop screen and a … Continued

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Landport Cubes Squeeze Powered Speakers In Just 1-Inch

Portable speakers for MP3 players are two a penny, but not many are not far off a penny in size: Landport’s Cubes are though. They’re just an inch cube, but fit in stereo speakers, 3.5-mm jack plug, rechargeable batteries and a mini-USB port. They’ll run for 4-5 hours on a charge, too. Just don’t go … Continued

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Nikon’s D3X Masterpiece DSLR Goes Official With An $8,000 Price Tag

The rumors pointed pretty firmly to it, and then some leaked specs detailed what it’d be like, but now Nikon’s new pro-level D3X DSLR has arrived officially. Touting it as a 24-megapixel “Digital Masterpiece,” with exceptionally low noise sensor, 5fps full-frame shooting speed and with file sizes of 138MB, Nikon’s saying the camera’s available now … Continued

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Micron Demos Super-Fast Solid-State Drives Running At 1GB Per Second

Micron touted its super-fast RealSSD drives with 250MBps speed a few months back, but now its demonstrated a tech that’ll blow them out of the water: 1GBps transfer rates. It’s a bit cheaty since it uses two SSDs for a total of 16 data channels to access the flash memory, but that does give it … Continued

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Straight-Up Wall Chess Makes Knocking-Over Your King More Dramatic

Sure, these chess sets aren’t quite as neat as the vertical Tri-D chess in Star Trek, but by turning the game through 90 degrees and hanging it on the wall they do turn it into a sort of art masterpiece. That’d be assuming you play well—with my playing style it’d be more like a kid’s … Continued

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Nikon Black Friday Deals Surface

Nikon’s just come up with news about what kind of deal you can get on some of its cameras on Black Friday. There’s a $50 discount on the 10-megapixel Coolpix S550 (down to $150) and $100 off the 18x zoom P80, making it $300. But the D60 gets an even bigger chunk off with a … Continued

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Atari 2600 Crammed Into Sega Game Gear Is Wonderfully Backwards Mod

An awkward cross-breed time-travelling mongrel is a fairly fitting description for this mod that’s jammed an Atari 2600 emulator into the shell of a Sega Game Gear. Sure, it’s not the prettiest of mods, but taking the ’80s-era Atari and squishing it into the ’90s-era Sega took some tricky work: it has a built-in 40-game … Continued

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Simple Hack Adds Power-Charge USB Slot to VGA Socket

Sometimes the simplest hacks are the most useful: If you’ve got a laptop with limited USB ports and you’re in the market for something small and handy to let you charge a device over USB, then this is for you. All it takes is a male-male VGA adapter, a spare USB socket and some accurate … Continued

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Sixense Truemotion 3D Controller Makes Wiimote Look Like A Toy

While the Wiimote control came as a fabulous gaming surprise, it has its sensitivity drawbacks, something that the Truemotion 3D system really overcomes. Check out the demo video—it’s amazing. Sixense designed this thing to use magnetic field detection so it can track both your hands on the controller position in full 3D real-time, with an … Continued

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Eco-Friendly 360 Paper Bottle Concept Makes Tetra Paks Look So ’60s

I tend to avoid bottled water—my tap-water’s fine and way cheaper—but since millions don’t think the same, this concept from designers Brand Image would be a way to reduce the eco-impact of all those nasty plastic bottles. The 360 is a paper bottle, molded from 100% recyclable, food-safe paper, and its simplicity makes even the … Continued

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Toshiba Pops Out 16GB microSD Card, Ultra-Fast 8GB and 16GB SD Cards

Sandisk may have a 16GB microSDHC card already a little sneakily on the scene, but now Toshiba’s announced it’s joining the game with one of its own. The card is compliant with SD memory standard version 2.00, as are the other two cards Tosh is making: The 8GB and 16GB SDHC cards with a maximum … Continued

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Best Buy, Macmall Start Mac Discounts For Black Friday Now: Up to $250 Off

Fry’s MacBook deal may have turned out to be too good to be true, but these sales prices are real: Best Buy and Macmall are offering up to $250 off Macs. The full list is here, helpfully compiled by MacRumors, with that $250 being on 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros at Macmall with on-sale discount … Continued

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Artist’s Uranium-Glass Kits Let You Play God, Create New Universes

The “many worlds interpretation”, parallel universes, the Trousers of Time: call it what you will, but quantum theory has some surprising ideas about what happens after a quantum event, which artist Jonathan Keats is exploring in this new “toy”. It’s a ball of uranium-doped glass (no, really—it’s uranium!) next to a scintillation detector crystal inside … Continued

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Sega’s Disco Karaoke Machine Twirls Its Disco Ball, Connects to Cellphones

Two things set this Sega Hitokara karaoke machine apart from the rest: it’s connected to a cloud-based database of 43,000 songs via cellphone and it’s got a whirling, light-up mirrored disco ball. Ohboyyes. Granted you’d have to be a fan of both karaoke (you strange person) and cheezy disco lighting, but what the heck—it’s a … Continued