The USB Ashtray Predicts When You’ll Die

You can buy USB gadgets to perform any number of useful and entirely useless functions. Some are designed merely to look good sat on your desktop while others actually have a genuine purpose. The USB ashtray kind of falls under the category of serving a genuine purpose while serving a purpose that probably doesn’t really work and scaring you half to death. Yes, it’s an ash tray and yes it’s supposed to cut down on the smell and vapour of nicotine that’s hanging around in the air but it also monitors your smoking habit and will predict roughly when you’re going to die from lung cancer.

Is it accurate? We don’t know because nobody’s around to ask unfortunately, but the egg shaped USB ashtray is definitely a unique USB gadget that serves more purpose than the average USB George Foreman grill or the USB Noodle Strainer; although we do question why it’s egg shaped but perhaps we’re missing a glaringly obvious link here. The USB ashtray isn’t going to be much use at work or in any Internet cafes or WiFi hotspots, of course, but it could be useful at home should you wish to reduce the amount of smoke and the smell of nicotine.

As far as USB gadgets go, the ashtray is actually a pretty useful one. The powered fan essentially sucks the smoke through a deodoriser although it does have to be plugged in to the PC to work because it doesn’t run off separate batteries which is a bit of a shame but then we are talking about a USB ashtray so it does kinda make sense.

Rumours On The Next PSP Are Go

The PSP is, in our opinion, the closest you can get to next-gen gaming in a hand-held device. In the same way that the Xbox 360 and PS3 are designed for hardcore gamers while the Nintendo Wii is aimed more at the pick up and play type market, we firmly believe that the PSP is the handheld of choice for serious gaming and the DS is designed for more innovative and even quirky gaming. With that said, we were also slightly disappointed by the “upgrade” that the PSP got with the release of the latest version, the PSP 3000.

Well, as is the case pretty much all year round but especially in the build up to the E3 exhibition that starts in June, rumours are abound that the next generation of PSP will offer greater improvements and more innovation over its predecessors. Specifically, it is set to offer a larger screen than the 3000 and, at the same time, will also sport slide out controls. Other rumours include the fact that the UMD Game Drive will be dropped in preference for downloading games via WiFi or bluetooth which could also mean greater online possibilities.

In turn, the change over to DLC (Downloadable Content) is going to require extra hard drive space and so the new version is expected in 8GB and 16GB flavours with the possibility of an uber 32GB version also on the horizon. Possibly touch screen… potentially have a camera… and may have a screen resolution of 800 x 480… these are also other possible rumours along with the fact that the name will be PSP Go rather than PSP 4000 – the current name used internally within Sony. However, nothing has yet been confirmed so keep your eyes open and your ears… erm… to the ground?

The Aston Martin One 77 Overview

The Aston Martin One-77 is the sort of car that will have the nation’s car reviewers brawling in the street as they attempt to be the first to drive it. Already its snapshot appearance at the Geneva Motor Show has whetted the appetite. The car is going to be super exclusive; only seventy seven will be built, hence the name. At a cost of £1.2million ($1.2million), it will be a first come first served for the world’s richest people to aim for. However, already there have been over two hundred and fifty expressions of interest for the One-77.

No expense was spared on the One-77, and its designers say that it represents the culmination of all that Aston Martin has learned since it was established in 1913. The aim was for it to be the ultimate expression of the talent at Aston Martin. Although there may be some divided opinions on the car’s aesthetic appeal, there is no argument at all about the mechanical design of the Aston Martin One-77.

An aluminium body rests on a carbon fibre monocoque body. The engine is a 7.3 litre V12 monster created by Cosworth. Aston Martin claims that it will produce 700 horsepower and take the driver from zero to 60mph in approximately three seconds. Top speed is two hundred miles per hour.

Aston martin wanted to produce something which was as exciting under the bonnet as the exterior shell. They spent the first part of the project identifying the best technology available, the concept was to be front engine, rear wheel drive. The idea became to transfer the technology and specifications from the DTM race series and apply it to a state of the art road car. This resulted in the lightweight, but rigid structure that became the body. It was built in conjunction with Multimatic (MTC), the leaders in carbon composite technology. They are experts at dynamic simulation and advanced vehicle analysis.
The One-77 features the latest suspension technology with inboard suspension front and rear, and employs double wishbones at each corner. Push rods transfer movement to the spring/damper units which are mounted horizontally. This is an idea taken directly from racing car design.

Dynamic Suspension spool valve technology is featured on the fully adjustable dampers. This is a world first for a road car. Even in motor sport, this is still state of the art technology. Once the new owner takes delivery of the car, Aston Martin engineers will show up to set the suspension characteristics to the owner’s requirement.

The attention to detail is applied to the outside of the car also. Every component has been crafted from the best materials available, and has been sculpted to produce an aesthetic masterpiece. Even the parts that no-one sees have been crafted to money no object standard.

The potent 7.3 litre engine has been mounted lower in the car to make the centre of gravity as low as possible. The engine has been placed slightly further back in the car to assist excellent road handling. Nothing has been left to chance. The Cosworth built engine has again been chosen to ensure that the car meets the highest standards possible for a road car. As you might expect, the car has had tyres specially designed for it. Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres have been specially designed for the One-77. A new six speed gearbox, a new generation of Aston Martin transmission is controlled by column mounted paddles. The lessons learned in the design of the new gearbox are likely to find their way to future Aston Martin models.
The brakes of the One-77 are Aston Martin’s lightweight carbon matrix technology. Re-engineering has allowed Aston Martin to reduce the heat transmitted from the pads to the brake fluid, and the pads have also been engineered to ensure maximum contact, which ensures better stopping power. Brake cooling has been improved to take into account the One-77′s increased performance.

The car has been designed to be amongst the best road performance cars on the planet. Thanks to the advances which Aston Martin have made to virtually every aspect of the car, the front engined, rear drive lay out, Aston Martin have produced a performance car which will produce an unrivalled driving experience, whilst producing a car which is beautiful and extremely pleasing to the eye. The attention to detail both below and above the surface have allowed Aston Martin to produce a car which others will be measured against. It will be interesting to see how much of this new design and technology will find its way into future Aston Martin models.

Windows 7 October Release Looking More And More Likely

Microsoft has officially announced that Windows 7 will be released “in time for the holidays”. There’s supposed to be a very good handful of new features that will be part of the release and the full program is now in its final (though perhaps toughest for the engineers) stage of development. No new features are likely to be added but bugs, glitches, problems, and a few more optimised bits and pieces will be added before the expected October release. Additional features will instead be reserved for future updates to the release.

Advances in touch and handwriting recognition are among some of the techy new additions; the majority of home computer users probably won’t benefit from them immediately, but it will open doors for software developers and users alike in the future. Performance is also going to enjoy a supposedly serious boost with improved multi core performance, and support for various graphics cards from a number of different manufacturers.

A new version of Media Center as well as a new gadget for Media applications and integration with other devices will continue to take the Windows operating system into the world of multimedia and hoe networking.

The Windows Control Panel will also have many new additions that include the ClearType Text Tuner. Users will be able to pin applications to the taskbar, which is a handy sounding replacement for the quick launch bar. You can even make all windows transparent so that you can view the desktop quickly and easily before clicking the view desktop button.

All sounds pretty good to us and it’s only a few months away.

Carl Zeiss Cinemizer Plus Works With iPhone

Carl Zeiss has recently been ploughing a lot of time and effort into the creation of Nokia lenses and the such, but that’s not all they get up to in the world of optics. One of the more recent additions to the Carl Zeiss portfolio, in fact, is the Cinemizer Plus headset; compatible with iPhone, iPod, and several other handheld devices it can replay video footage into the headset (also known as glasses) and the two tiny plug in ear phones offer audio accompaniment.

Wearing the headset and watching footage over it is, apparently, the equivalent to watching a 45 inch display sat six foot away so the £399 price tag is really more than reasonable. The biggest thing to note about the Cinemizer Plus range though is that this is the first headset that officially carries the works with iPhone badge although earlier models have been able to show off a works with iPod badge too.

Adapters come with the Cinemizer so that you can plug it into either the standard iPhone or the 3G version, and adapters for the iPod too. What’s more, each eye has its own focus tweaking button so you can get exactly the right settings even if you have dodgy eyesight in one eye and not the other. The built in batter offers up to 4 hours of playback time and because it has its own battery it means that you won’t be draining that of your iPhone or iPod while watching the latest TV or film.

The Water Clock – Zen Time Telling

When it comes to incredible, if sometimes pointless, gadget designs clocks tend to perform pretty well with designers turning their hand to creating some of the most unique and unusual mechanisms and displays in order to help sell their wares. In the shape of the water clock, we’ve got perhaps one of the most innovative and definitely cool looking clock designs – like many of these designs, it isn’t cheap and it might be best not to use it next to the bed in case you inadvertently choke on the hour hand when you reach for a swig of water in the night.

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Amazon Download Sale – 39p Per Track

If you’re on the look out for cheap, popular music then the relatively fledgling Amazon download store is apparently the place to hit at the moment with the price of a single currently cheaper than that of a single more than 40 years ago (none of the “good old days” nonsense this time around, eh?). While the music industry at large might try to tell us that this is a bad thing, and it will certainly mean less and less royalties for the artists, what it means in real terms to you and I is that we can purchase singles from the top 100 download list for an impressively low 29p per track.

Of course, another major loser from this is likely to be Apple’s iTunes service, who recently removed the rigidity from their own pricing to offer a sliding pricing mechanism between 59p and 99p per track. While that may work out cheaper in some cases than the previous flat 79p per track, it is still some way short of Amazon’s deflated prices.

As a legal music downloader, you’re far from short of options and the Times Online estimates that there are currently more than 50 websites and services where you can legally download tracks for a cost. Unfortunately, not all download sites are created equally and you may be hard pressed to find one that fits all of your needs. Itunes may have its knockers but the software is fairly intuitive and easy to navigate while the ability to now download mp3 files is also a vast improvement. However, Amazon’s own service is not that far behind in terms of ease of use or ease of navigation and with these prices it is certainly worth a try.

Source – Times Online

AMD Stepping Into The Gadget Chip Market

Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, has announced that it is taking another step into the creation of different chips. The computer chip manufacturer has recently undertaken the relatively new and upmarket task of creating chips for servers, in the shape of its Opteron chip set and is now set to move to the creation of smaller chips that are designed very specifically for integration into gadget type products rather than full on computer and server products. The energy efficient chip may only register at 533MHz but it is believed to give Via Technologies 800MHz chips a run for their money in the performance stakes.

The chip may well prove to be good news for pretty much everybody too. It consumes, uses, and requires far less energy than its counterparts and other AMD processors so it doesn’t need any dedicated fans or cooling. It runs using just 0.9 watts of power and is small enough to be used in set top boxes, TVs, and handheld devices. What’s more, it’s still an x86 chip and that means that it can still be used to run desktop software – it could mean huge leaps in the production of Internet TVs and devices that combine many more features than they are currently able to so great news for us tecchies.

Such is the lapse of time between releasing information and releasing actual products nowadays, AMD has stated that the chips are likely to be integrated into devices that will be on our shelves later this year which really isn’t bad going when you consider how long some advances can take before going from drawing board to production.

Source – CNet

The World’s Largest Underwater Museum

Quite often there comes a time when we find ourselves diving (quite literally, in this case) into the weird world of weird art and this is certainly one of those times. What’s more, if you ever visit Mexico (and, indeed, if you’re ever allowed to visit Mexico) then you too could be diving into the weird world of weird art too thanks to the quite unique sculptures of British artist Jason de Caires Taylor that will be sunk to the depths of one of the world’s most visited sites in the National Marine Park of Cancuna.

Between 250 and 400 sculptures will be sunk to the depths and placed between natural choral and sea life in order to create what will hopefully become man-made choral. Jason de Caires Taylor said that he hopes that it will become the beginning of the world’s largest underwater museum. The main piece, which will look something like the picture above although on a considerably grander scale, will encompass between 300 and 400 lifelike figures.

Over time, more artists will be encouraged to submit their own sculptures and work to be included in this unique scheme. Unfortunately, de Caires Taylor is, like much of the world, stuck outside Mexico at the moment since the outbreak of swine flu and has currently only finished two of the sculptures and considering plans are to have the first stages completed by September of this year, hopefully he’ll be able to get back out there and continue his work singing art to the sea bed.

Source – Wired

Dell Launch girlie Della site in US

You can just imagine all the suits in Dell sat around a huge desk in the boardroom brainstorming when some bright spark threw in ‘lets launch a special Dell site for girls’, much nodding of Dell executive heads ‘and call it Della’, much more nodding of heads ‘we can make the girls feel like they are really included’. At this point (if there had have been a woman in that meeting) someone should have said ‘do you not think that people might see it as a little bit, well, sexist?’

You have to admire Dell for trying to appeal to the ‘fairer sex’ but is it really necessary? Surely women are just as capable as men to manage to purchase a laptop without the need for special pink, fluffy, cuddly images. It is a little demeaning to a woman to have it assumed that they are so dim that they need a whole section just for them. Certainly it is even more insulting to their intelligence when they include ‘useful’ Tech Tips like ‘Get Moving: tools like Gyminee help you track workouts. You can even map out new running routes’ or ‘Get Organized: Sites like lifeorganizers give you tips on everything from organizing your home office to planning your next vacation’. Now forgive us for saying, but shouldn’t tech tips on a computer site be aimed more towards common technical problems, such as how to deal with Conficker or how to unfreeze a PC!

Luckily for all the British women who visit Dell they won’t (at the moment) have to endure the patronising ‘Della’ pages. Come on Dell for goodness sake women nowadays can be captains of industry and even god forbid the Prime minister of an ally of yours! They don’t really need whole sections on colour coordinated accessories for their laptop or tips from a ‘featured artist’, they just want to know how much guts is under the bonnet!

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