BlackLine’s GPS Snitch tracks straying partner’s joyrides
Oh yeah, we’ve seen GPS devices intended to sit secretively within the confines of a motorcar and beam back real-time tracking data to the powers that be, but typically, they’re fairly subtle about their purpose. Not so with the brashly named GPS Snitch, which makes no bones about its intentions of helping you catch that unfaithful SO or your rebellious teenager. As expected, this unit simply hides within one’s vehicle and can notify administrators via SMS / e-mail as soon as motion is detected or a pre-determined perimeter is exceeded. Additionally, you can track the vehicle’s progress through BlackLine’s website, and just in case the week of battery life isn’t enough, it can be hardwired to the car battery for logging extra long road trips. Ready to quell your suspicions? Grab one now for $399 plus applicable service plan fees.
source:engadget
Cartoon banned by the Mormon church
Discover the Great Southern
Matthew Evans passes through Margaret River and finds a foodie heaven in the south.
I once fell for a girl from Albany, a town on the cusp of southern Western Australia. I fell for her wit and smile, for her historic if slightly daggy city, for her region’s beaches dotted like a lamington’s long white coconut strands along the Great Southern’s shores. The girl’s gone but the love affair continues with the region’s cool-climate wines, its stunning Billawarra yoghurt, with its whales that breach in the stunning turquoise waters of King George Sound.
A town of almost 30,000 people, Albany was the first European settlement in WA. It was dependent on whaling for much of its early life, before it grew in status as regional centre of the Great Southern. The whaling station was the last to close in Australia, in 1978, and operates as a museum. These days the town has a university campus, a terrific arts centre and a thriving literary and music scene. It is also the centre of a burgeoning food region.
It seems the Great Southern, always the bridesmaid to flash and brash Margaret River, is on the verge of something great, both in terms of tourism and the tucker. It’s remarkable the region - which takes in the towns of Albany, Mount Barker and Denmark in a slice of south Western Australia two-thirds the size of Tasmania - isn’t more widely known. Blame it on the relatively dull four-and-a-half hour drive from Perth, perhaps. Albany isn’t much further from Perth than Margaret River but it lacks the latter’s millionaires and the infrastructure, though Albany has an airport and regular flights. It also has better and safer beaches and much for the taste junkie to discover.
There’s a relatively new distillery, Great Southern Distilling Company, doing single-malt whisky and gin on the outskirts of Albany. You can pick your own berries. Cherries and asparagus can be found at farm gates when the time is right. Billawarra, the two-cow dairy near Denmark, makes and sells yoghurt that is identified as coming from each hand-milked cow. Perhaps you’d like Heidi today, or Tulip?
My favourite focal point has always been Albany’s farmers’ market, a compact, highly sociable gathering that starts with the tinkling of a brass bell at 8am each Saturday. It’s testament to the stallholders and market co-ordinator Ian Haines that everything simply must come from the region. And while it’s not small in area, the Great Southern is sparsely populated and the temptation must be to bring in food from further afield. Thankfully, purity means you can buy Ray Gerovich’s pork that ranges free on the outskirts of town, the yabbies and organic beef are local, and there’s even Great Southern milk, Ravenhills.
source:smh
Kodak intros new EasyShare photo frames with Quick Touch borders
It’s been a little while since we caught sight of Kodak’s last batch of digital photo frames, but the company’s now come back for another go ’round with a trio of new EasyShare frames, each of which pack Kodak’s newfangled “Quick Touch” borders. That feature lets you scroll though photos simply by sliding your finger along the border, as well as giving you control over all the frame’s other functions via the interface pictured above. Apart from that, the frames appear to be pretty standard fare, with the M820 and M1020 models boasting 8 and 10-inch screens, respectively, along with the usual audio and video support, 128MB of built-in memory, and accommodations for all the most used memory card formats. If that’s more than you need, you can also opt for the 7-inch P720 model, which hangs on to the Quick Touch border but drops everything but the most basic photo frame features. Look for all three of ‘em to start shipping on April 16th, with the P720, M820 and M1020 setting you back $120, $180, and $230, respectively.
source:engadget
Apple patent apps reveal plans for iPhone as “lifestyle companion”
While it doesn’t exactly come as much of a surprise, it seems that Apple has plenty more goodies in mind for the iPhone (and, presumably, the iPod touch), with a recent batch of no less than six patent applications revealing some of its plans to turn the device into what it describes as a “lifestyle companion.” In this case, that rather vague term refers to what is effectively an upgrade to the Nike+iPod system, with the iPhone’s accelerometer and other built-in capabilities also coming into play in addition to the usual external sensors. It doesn’t stop with workouts, however, with the patent applications also indicating plans for a diet coach of sorts, which could even make use of the iPhone’s camera to scan bar codes on products. Those components would also of course all work together, with the system able to suggest workouts based on your diet and physical condition and vice versa. Of course, these being patent applications, there’s no indication as to when we might actually see such a a system, but it sure seems a good deal more likely than some of Apple’s other ideas.
source:engadget
Sigma’s DP1 with DSLR-sized sensor reviewed, raises bar
It’s always worth noting when a reviewer says that a device, “sets a new standard for image quality in a compact camera.” That’s PopPhoto’s conclusion after testing the Sigma DP1 with a DSLR-sized, FOVEON X3 CMOS sensor packing 14 megapixels. The image quality and color accuracy remained “stellar” right up to ISO 800 where other compacts shackled with tiny sensors begin to lose control of the noise. The biggest nits are with the sluggish 9-zone AF system, an unsophisticated flash, lack of image stabilization, and delays between shots. Fix those while whittling-back the $800 street price a bit and PopPhoto believes the DP1 could go mainstream.
source:engadget
Dash Express review
We’ve been waiting to get our hands on the Dash Express ever since we heard about it way back in 2006, and though we’ve seen a ton of photos and even toyed around with a beta version of the GPRS / WiFi-connected navigator, actually using the device for a lengthy period of time revealed some pretty interesting things. The main verdict: yeah, it’s way pricey, but if you’ve got the scratch, this is the GPS you want — and if the community features take off like Dash think they will, it’s going to be a game-changer. Read on for the full review!
source:engadget
NTT DoCoMo hopes to diagnose disease, predict other misfortunes from cellphones
We like to think that NTT, Japan’s dominant telephone company, is a serious corporation. So when NTT DoCoMo issues a press release claiming to have successfully demonstrated the world’s first “molecular delivery system for molecular communication,” we figure this must be significant. The technology and biochemistry at the foundation sure seems to be. In an experiment, NTT DoCoMo confirmed the use of synthesized DNA to transport specific molecules through the body. The process converts chemical energy into mechanical work so there’s no need for an external power supply or control mechanism. The hope then is to one day plant a “biochip” in a cellphone which can read “excitement, emotion, stress or disease” from the simmering juices (blood, sweat and tears) pooled inside the meatsicles of “living organisms.” This is where things start to fall apart. Seeing as how this is Japan, that ambiguous target audience means you and your pets. Robots too, just as soon as they get skin. And when the English press release claims that a bio-chipped phone could be applicable to “fortune telling” — well, we’ve lost all hope.
source:engadget
Study finds teens don’t really care about their hearing
Those darn kids — they just don’t listen! And soon, according to a report, they won’t physically be able to listen. It seems that modern teens, with their cloaking jackets, space telephones, and telepathic headsets fail to obey the simplest tenet of leisure-time music enjoyment: keeping their iPod and Zune volumes at a semi-natural level. In focus-group discussions, researchers found that high school students in the Netherlands were aware of the potential hearing loss which can be caused by high volume listening, yet had no immediate plans to crank their jams at anything but 11. Typical of our misguided youth, the teens feel that they have a “low personal vulnerability” to hearing loss — researchers also noted that they believed they were bulletproof, could fly, and would never, ever lose touch with people who signed their yearbook. The study’s findings suggest that the answer to this problem may lie with manufacturers of hardware and solutions like volume caps or warning lights, rather than with the self-control of the end user.
source:engadget
