Looking for a netbook to buy for my girlfriend—she always talked about getting a laptop to work at home, but was too timid financially to walk the walk—I found a vendor selling an MSI Wind U210 for around $485. That’s more expensive than NewEgg’s price of $430, but the extra cash was well-spent on a 9-cell battery. Here’s what I did before handing the netbook over to my girlfriend:
Took Pictures
Here are some pictures of the MSI Wind U210, featuring the netbook in various angles. Click on a thumbnail to see a large-size version of the picture:
Used Ninite
Ninite, if you recall, …read more

If you’re on the market for a “compact super zoom”, or a point & shoot camera that’s capable of 12x optical but is still small enough to fit in your pocket, you’re in luck. Digital Photography Review (DPReview), a site known for its detailed multi-page reviews of cameras, tested a bunch of compact super zooms a few months ago. Pitting the following cameras together:

Panasonic ZS1
Panasonic ZS3
Sony H20
Canon SX200
Samsung HZ10W
Olympus Stylus 9000

…DPReview’s staff arrived at this very clear conclusion:
…the Panasonic twins ZS1 and ZS3 emerge as the obvious choice for general use, offering an extremely versatile 12x zoom range from proper …read more

By now you’re probably sick and tired of blogs all over listing Halloween-themed gadgets, how you can use gadgets to be scary, bla bla bla. It’s not like I made such a list last year anyway, so I’ll just hook you up with this electric chair haunted house prop, scary video below. It’s definitely relevant to Halloween!
Even better, this is a DIY project! Too bad you probably don’t have time to make something like this now, with trick-or-treat scheduled for later tonight. Ah well, the instructions will probably still be available from Makezine indefinitely, so maybe you’ll have something ready …read more

For owners of any Symbian S60 5th edition phone (Nokia’s 5530, 5800, or N97): today’s the last day Playlist DJ can be downloaded from store.ovi.com for free!
The app promises the ability to build playlists based on the “moods” you set on the app’s sliders. Obviously, you can download through a computer or on your phone itself.

Dungeons & Dragons on a multi-touch surface, with support for other RPGs promised? Definitely neat stuff, and it also inspires “now why didn’t I think of that?” moments. A brief 3-minute demo of Surface Scapes follows!
Now if only the creators, students at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), can come out with a polished final product. I’m pretty sure Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), owners of Dungeons & Dragons, would love this. At the very least, WOTC can turn Surface Scapes into an expensive new toy designed to make die-hard fans spend even more.
Totally immersive and addictive? Check! Let’s …read more

Continuing our focus on the Internet (it is, after all, 40 years since the Internet started to exist as the ARPANET): the ICANN recently approved non-Latin web addresses. In layman’s terms, web addresses will no longer be limited to characters within or similar to the English alphabet, or numbers. We’ll probably see website domains in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian scripts.

It’s news that should please the Internet’s non-English users and domain name speculators alike. The former will now enjoy a web that’s no longer limited to English, potentially opening it up to new users. The latter will now have more names …read more

During the same year man walked on the moon, the first node of what later became the ARPANET—predecessor to something we all know as the Internet—was set up. UCLA’s Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Leonard Kleinrock, played a big part of this, developing the “basic principles of packet switching” that made such a groundbreaking achievement possible. The dude won a National Medal of Science last year for this, and he’s the one explaining how what’s basically the first internet connection was made in the video below:
n operation that’s done literally millions of times today was much harder to execute way …read more

If the Top 20 Nations in Internet Speeds and Costs, according to the ITIF Broadband Rankings, are accurate, then can we assume that the cost for really cheap yet super-fast internet access is a higher cost of living?

Here’s the table ranking the top 10 countries. Thanks to the US-centric tech media, poor America is listed at number 15, with an average connection speed of 4.8Mbps, with an average $3.33 cost for a 1Mbps connection.

Here’s a months-old comic that compares what what British writers Aldous Huxley and George Orwell though of the future, based on their most famous works, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Despite Orwell’s classically haunting belief that technology will make us slaves to a totalitarian government, Huxley’s fears that technology is making us more shallow depressingly seems more plausible (click the thumbnail below for the full version):

The comic above is basically a visual version of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Source

Photographer Jason Magbanua was lucky enough to get a pre-production Canon 7D unit. And since he was only given less than two days to try it out, he decided to create a mini-documentary. Perya features what’s apparently a staple of his home culture, and shows off the 7D’s 24p 1920 x 1080 video capture capability, and good performance under low-light conditions.
The video benefited from Magbanua’s wide arsenal of lenses. According to him, it features no color grading or even lighting whatsoever. Here’s the video description, edited for clarity:
We wanted to document something truly Filipino and came up with the idea …read more