Zath! Archive for

November, 2009

Star Wars Force Trainer – Use The Force Jedi!

How have you managed to live so far without the Star Wars Force Trainer? Are you one with the Force? I’m sure we’ve all pretended to use the force at some point whether it is to open the automatic doors at the supermarket, or attempting to bring the TV remote across the room purely out of laziness. Well, for the real Star Wars fans among us this is the perfect opportunity to do just that. Sort of.

The Star Wars Force Trainer allows you to use your brainwaves and the motion of your hand to manoeuvre a star wars-esque ball up and down a star wars-esque tube. It doesn’t really sound that exciting when it comes down to it, but the technology behind it is pretty revolutionary and it’s the closest you’re going to get to using the Force outside of playing a video game like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.

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Refresh Charging Station – Clear Your Desk Of Mulitple Chargers!

What is the Refresh Charging Station for? Well if you’re anything like me, then you have a lot of gadgets such as phones, laptops, MP3 players etc. Lying around a lot of the time and of course, they need charging every now and again. And charging each of these gadgets, as we know requires a charger, which can be bulky, ugly and generally clutters everything up.

The Refresh Charging Station combines all your chargers into one single area which will turn your cluttered desk into one neat, sleek charging area leaving you more space to work and play.

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Pub Landlord Fined £8000 For Customer’s Pirate Download On Wi-Fi

One of the great things about Wi-Fi networks is that they are dead easy to set up, and thus let people easily access the Internet when they’re out and about – and that is why thousands of restaurants, pubs, fast food outlets and cafés (such as Starbucks) across the country are jumping onto the Wi-Fi bandwagon. But some may be feeling a little less confident about their decision thanks to this recent news.

The managing director of ‘The Cloud’ which is a company that provides wireless hotspots for the aforementioned establishments has said that over the summer a pub owner has been fined £8,000 because one of the people using his Wi-Fi illegally downloaded copyrighted material.
The owner of the rights to the material (the identity of which is not known) took the pub owner (the identity of which is also unknown) to court, and the result was this fine which presumably aims to persuade others to take stricter measures.

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LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 – Build And Program Your Own LEGO Robot!

LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 is probably the most amazing thing you will ever see in your whole life. Well, almost. This super advanced robot allows you to build your very own machine out of not so ordinary LEGO.

Considering you can construct this thing yourself with little or no knowledge of building robots, it is excitingly capable. There are 4 different types of robot possible to construct from the set, which comes with instructions for all 4 in the box along with a quick start guide and easy to use ‘drag and drop’ software to program and control your robot from your computer.

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Thunderbird 3 Review (Desktop Email Client)

I’ve used Mozilla Thunderbird for as long as I can remember; I much prefer desktop e-mail clients to their web counterparts and Thunderbird’s my number one choice on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. When I downloaded the Release Candidate 1 of Thunderbird 3, I was faced with a plethora of new features to sink my teeth in to, so where do I start?

After mourning the loss of my many incompatible add-ons, I struck up the courage to create an account in Thunderbird 3, and if you’re new to Thunderbird or you’re setting up another account, you’ll appreciate how easy it is to get up and running.

Rather than manually input the details of your email provider, all you need to do is type in your email address and password and Thunderbird sorts the rest out for you. I tested this with 3 email accounts, each on different providers and Thunderbird set up each one with no problems. If you want/need to set up an account manually, don’t worry, you can still do so!

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Alien Abduction Lamp – Shed Light On Cow-Nappings!

The Alien Abduction Lamp is an extremely realistic LED lamp which will almost have you believe that a cow is being abducted in your room! A high quality metal lamp with energy saving LED’s that provide great amounts of light in a ‘fun’ way without enlarging your carbon footprint.

The UFO is made from high quality steel with a ‘pearl black’ finish which is aesthetically pleasing and the windows which alternate between a green and yellow glow. Inside lies a stereotypical green alien with a flat face, huge eyes and no eyelids. The cow being abducted is actually removable so perhaps you can pretend that it has already been and gone.

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Self Assembling HUD Contact Lenses For Soldiers? (Future Tech)

Ever since the head up displays (HUD’s) were used in the Second World War people have always speculated of an ‘in-eye’ head up display. Now we are closer than ever to this, what seems to be, very futuristic technology.

Researchers at the University of Washington have been tackling the huge task of integrating the electronics required into a contact lens. The answer lies in getting the lens to assemble itself. The lens which looks like a fine white powder consists of sensors, antennae, semiconductor circuits and LEDs which must all be a certain shape.

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USB Tape Express – Audio Cassette Tape To MP3 Converter

The USB Tape Express is an ingenious piece of technology that converts almost any type of audio cassette into digital audio for your PC and/or MP3 player.

Connecting via USB, the device uses EZ tape converter software, compatible with Windows or Mac OS X to guide you through the transfer to MP3. Firebox.com claims the software to be ‘idiot-proof’ so it should be an easy enough process for just about anyone to use, perhaps your parents will find this item particularly useful and would be able to tell you about these strange items they used to use in their youth – audio cassette tapes!

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New 5th Professor Layton Game Announced (DS)

Professor Layton and Pandora’s Box has not long been released over here in good old Blighty, but a fifth title of the franchise has now been announced.

The games are a massive hit over in Japan and have become so over here to since the release of Professor Layton and the Curious Village last year.

The new title will be called Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask and have a Japanese release date of autumn 2010 so far. The announcement was made during the launch of the fourth title Professor Layton and the Devil’s Flute.

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Stealth Laptop Sleeve (Postal Envelope Bag)

Crafted from super strong fabric, the Stealth Laptop Sleeve gives you the power to carry your laptop with you wherever you may go, without having a sling a laptop backpack over your shoulder. It looks just like an old manila envelope so passers-by won’t be looking at you with a painful look of disgust and sharing whispers about your tatty 90’s IBM laptop bag.

Of course, this doesn’t really happen, but either way, it’s something different. A novelty method of safely transporting your notebook PC so you can be a little bit out of the ordinary, but also it will actually deter those more unscrupulous types who might be looking to steal a standard looking laptop bag.

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AppFresh Review (Mac OS X Application Updater)

I love the ease of updating applications in Mac OS X, be it third party or system applications, but ensuring every one of your apps is up to date is a hard thing to do, especially ones you don’t see often but do a key job.

When I was looking for something to update every application I have, I came across AppFresh, a free download that not only checks to see if there are any updates available for your programs, but downloads and installs these updates for you, helping to keep not only your programs up to date, but even your widgets, preference panes and plugins, which I thought was a great addition. It’s similar in idea to Filehippo application updater for the PC, but perhaps even better!

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Star Theatre Planetarium – Bring Space Into Your Home!

The Star Theatre Planetarium is an easy way to recreate the night sky in any of the rooms in your house. The ultra white LED lights on the planetarium project an almost realistic star gazing experience in your own home.

If you’ve ever been to a planetarium, you may have been amazed by what you saw, well this little gadget brings the same technology to you so you don’t have to leave your house to have the same experience.

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Livescribe Pulse Smartpen Gets An App Store – Does A Pen Need One?

I’m sure when your writing your first thought is ‘How much better would my pen be with its own app store?’ Although it may sound way over the top for a pen it is actually done quite well and has many entertaining apps. I am of course talking about the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen.

This pen has a 96×18 pixel screen and 2GB/4GB of storage space for its 30+ paid and free apps from the classic hangman to Hebrew chanting. This pen can also record your notes in two ways; it creates digital copies of everything you write and records audio at the same time.

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GrooveNeo iPod Alarm Clock Radio Docking Station

The GrooveNeo iPod Alarm Clock Radio is more than just an alarm clock. It’s also an iPod dock with an integrated AM/FM radio. Features 2.75” stereo speakers so it should produce pretty loud and clear sound quality, although don’t expect anything Bose like from this device. Having said that, I’m sure it’s sufficient for waking you up in the morning.

The volume of the sound and the brightness of the red LED display makes it a pretty good alarm clock with a remote control so that you can position anywhere in your room. It can wake you up with any playlist of your choice, or even podcasts which is pretty cool as I’m sure there are some songs on your iPod that you wouldn’t want to wake up to. Or you can just set it to the old fashioned buzzer sound.

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LaCie LaCinema Classic HD – 1080p Home Media Center Server

We’ve had VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray but I think the next big step forward is surely towards the world of the hard drive, and as they increase in number, ability and prominence and decrease in price and number of potential problems then we can expect to see them being accepted more and more.

And so the scene is nicely set for the LaCie LaCinema Classic HD which was released this week and boasts all of the features you would expect from as top of the range model including things like full High Definition playback, networking capabilities and the potential to act as a Home Media Server.

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PoGo Instant Photo Printer – In Your Pocket!

The PoGo Instant Photo Printer from Polaroid is full of new technology such as Bluetooth and inkless printing – this is how they’ve followed up on their previous PoGo Digital Camera effort. The built in Bluetooth allows you to wirelessly print photos from your mobile phone. So if you’re out and about taking snaps you can print them off and keep them looking shiny in your little photo album.

This portable printer connects to your camera via a USB cable which unfortunately is not included in the box, but once sorted with that, it’s extremely simple to connect your digital camera or mobile phone and start printing your pictures.

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MiniMee Personalised Custom Keyring

You must have seen those adverts all over the internet for ‘cartooning’ yourself. If not then you probably have seen those artists down by the beach or in city centres who offer to draw hilarious cartoons of you. Either way, the MiniMee personalised custom keyring is even better.

For just £19.95 you can have a small 3D version of you made to hang on your keychain!

All you have to do is send in a plain photo of yourself with no goofy sunglasses or interfering friends in and 3 weeks later you receive your mini keychain. You also have to disclose your eye colour to avoid confusion with photos.

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Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2 Review (PS3)

I was desperate to buy Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2, but I thought I was going to have to wait until Christmas to be able to afford it. But thankfully, the supermarkets decided to slash the price and I bagged myself a copy for £26 and it was worth every penny.

The game follows on from the first Modern Warfare and once again, terrorists are causing problems and need a slap on the wrist and a good telling off. Last time we played as Soap McTavish, but this time around, you’re a different character and Soap leads you through the missions along with the every present Captain Price.

I was a little disappointed with the length of the main storyline as I would love it if it was a real epic 15 hours long. This is my favourite storyline of the franchise so far and certain parts have had people making major complaints about, ie the airport terminal which is why Russia banned Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

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USB Snake Scope Camera

Long, strong and semi-flexible. The USB Snake Scope Camera can worm its way into all those awkward places that you can’t see without shifting furniture etc. It’s great for those annoying Christmas moments where you drop your quality street down the side of the sofa.

The tiny camera is capable of producing VGA quality video at 640×480 resolution and comes with twin LED lights to light up whatever it is you’ve lost. A great addition is a removable magnetic head to draw in any screws, nuts and bolts that get dropped.

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BenQ LED Eco Monitors Released For Under £100 (G920WL and G922HDL)

As we near the Copenhagen conference the glare of public interest is shifting from the financially deprived recession to the environmentally deprived globe, and yet again eco warriors are back on the agenda – so what better time to release some LED monitors that fit nicely into both categories?

The snappily named BenQ G920WL and G922HDL (yes, that is sarcasm!) both line themselves up as the eco-option which I’m sure will prove popular, and the same can be said for the pricing, but let’s have a look at the specs first.

The only real difference between the two is the size of them: the G920WL is the larger of the two and weighs in with and 19 inch screen, 16:10 ration and 1440 x 900 WXGA+ resolution whilst the ever so slightly smaller G922HDL is 18.5 inches and thus has a 16:9 ration with a slightly diminished resolution of 1366 x 768.

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