InsanityTech – Software & Hardware

It seems that these days you can’t trust anybody. Everyone wants to mess with you and take your money when you least expect it. This is the case of the LCD price-fixing lawsuit filled against LG, Sharp and Chunghwa Picture Tubes. And guess what? They all pleaded guilty in this case started by the US Department of Justice and are bound to pay a combined $585m fine. LG only will throw $400 mil out of the piggy bank for conspiring to fix prices from September 2001 to June 2006 and Sharp will lose $120 mil for double-crossing Dell, Motorola and Apple with panels.

That is nice, but what happens to us mere mortals whose money totals the $585 mil? Good luck I guess. Over and out.

Here we have a pair of headphones, entitled AX Pro. We can tell you that it is compatible with your PC, PS3 and XBOX360 for blasting baddies and cursing or giving directions in multiplayer games. It comes packed with full surround hardware decoding, a total of 8 speakers to give the impression of hearing the front, rear, center and subwoofer channels of a surround system in one pack.

For a price of $180 I can say it’s quite a bargain, but then again, so is a cheap surround speaker system.

Didn’t it ever happen to you to see something very beautiful and not have a camera on you? I know it happened to me. And what do I do? I imagine how it would look in a frame by using a finger L-shape frames. A guy named Mac Funamizu is working o a gizmo to make this habit people have to actually take pictures and film. The actual camera will be in a pair of sunglasses that the user will have and what you see through the glasses is how the picture will look like.

The margins of the pictures will be within the fingers and you take the picture by winking. That is all I know about this technology, so stay tuned to find out more.

I don’t know about you, but I am mostly old-school to the bone in almost everything. This article I wrote is about something real old-school: old-school gaming. 50 years ago Dr. William Higinbotham, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory was cooking a simulation of bouncing balls and missile trajectories that could predict the paths objects could take. Boring until now. But in the middle of the process he thought he might apply this to tennis. And thus he created Tennis for Two, the world’s first video game. The circuits and components too a few days to design and the actual machine was built in about three weeks.

On the 28^th of October, 1958 the game got its first test by a public. But it wasn’t average public, as the game didn’t get patented because it was made in a federal-owned lab and the rights for the game would have belonged to the government. But, in some way, Dr. William Higinbotham is the godfather of video games.

This is something I find useful for a change. I have seen many car crashes and I have also been a victim of a stupid and blind driver (a woman). But that is not the point of the article. The point is that Fujitsu is cooking up a new gizmo that will detect whether a driver is about to fall asleep or not. A sensor will be set up on the steering wheel and will keep track of the driver’s heart beat from his hands that lie on the wheel. When we start to fall asleep, our heart beat rate tends to become regulate and then the anti-sleep system will turn the radio on, roll the windows down and other stuff to get you back on track.

Hopefully this technology will come alive sooner than later as it can save many lives, drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Fujitsu hopes that the technology will be implemented by 2010.

For me there are three kinds of news: important news, stupid and useless news, and last but not least, news that put a smile on your face. The thing I am going to talk about in the lines below is from the last category. I needed a reason to smile today and here I have it.

Presenting, the Darth Vader toaster. It’s for all you Star Wars fanatics out there. I am a big fan of the series, but I am not sure about this one. If I buy this one, the next thing will be Star Wars toilet paper. This toaster is just a toaster that burns an impression of Darth Vader on your slice of bread and nothing more. Oh yes, and it’s black and it has the Star Wars emblem on it for $54.99 to make sure you get it first.

I just keep hitting stupid and useless things to talk about, don’t I? But some of them are just too stupid and useless to be ignored, and so is this one: the GPS underwear. I am not talking about a James Bond movie or conspiracy theory flicks, this is real folks.

In case you know that you live with your head in the clouds and get lost going to buy bread, or you live a dangerous life and your job requires that you get kidnapped at least twice a week, this is the perfect gift for you. Also it can be a gift from jealous boyfriends or girlfriends for their mates.

Me, I don’t know. I can’t even express an opinion about this contraption.

Alienware, the creators of the best gaming laptop launched their new laptop computer powered by the world’s first mobile quad-core processor, the 3.06Ghz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300. This baby is called M17. Apart from having the quad-core processor, it also packs the ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU performance gaming platform, which supports 2 or more discrete graphics processor units simultaneously. 3GB of DDR3 memory keep the engines running smoothly, dual ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 graphic cards with DirectX 10.1 support color the 1920 x 1200 Extreme High-Definition LCD. All this at less than $2000. Not bad if you ask me.

But if you money is not an issue and you need more power you can have a max of 4GB of DDR3 memory and dual 500GB HDD’s, a Blu-Ray drive. The exterior is protected by the Stealth Black, a soft external later in matte black. And we can’t end the article without mentioning the Skullscalp signature which is ment to show you that you are in the presence of an Alienware. Hats off!

I sensed it was about time for me to write about something that is serious and that is classy, because you can’t just clown around every day. And deciding this, I came across the very stylish Asus B80A Laptop.

The B80A has a 14.1-inch widescreen display and runs with the Intel Centurion 2 Processor Technology with smart power consumption and high-speed wireless connectivity support. We will also get with this baby a built-in fingerprint reader and the Trusted Platform Module hardware-based encryption. That is protection right there.

For all you slippery fingers out there, this laptop has a spill-resistant keyboard that can take up to 50cc’s of liquid. Under the hood there is also HDMI connectivity allowing us to hook up with a large display or to a sound system to get the party started.

Up to 4GB of system memory will keep the engine going while the hard drive can go to 320GB. The nowadays mandatory DVD burner, 1.3 MP web camera and 2.1 Bluetooth all here, so you don’t have to worry about anything, except having the money to buy this baby.

Western Digital is the company we all know for making HDD’s, but now they are testing the waters in the video streaming territory. Their finger for testing is called WD TV HD Media Player. Armed with 2 USB 2.0 drives that work simultaneously, you just plug in an watch on your HDTV. Also the Media Player comes with a remote and with a browsing software. The price tag shows $130, which is rather reasonable.