Holiday Buyers Guide 2004

Tom's hardware Guide has a Holiday Buyer's Guide 2004 - Toys For Boys. Lovely gadgets and a lovely model showing them off too ;)

Look! No spokes

OSMOS wheels have no spokes. Or if you want it the way they say it on their site, "the wheel is free of midwheel structural constraints" :P. I saw something like this in a mag a long time ago. If I remember right BMW was messing about with it.

Old meets new

The people at L-mail let you use a browser to send an actual snail-mail-paper-based letter. This is fun.

Miss (Pixel) World

Franz Cerami, an Italian promoter is trying to start the world's first CG talent agency. Miss Digital World is his creation where artists can send in their digital beauties to compete.

New Google tool

Google has introduced a new beta tool to search literature, Google Scholar. This also brings with it some new keywords such as author:

RSS feeds on mobile

Abstract on W3.org explains Sony Ericssons stand on the web related to cell phones.

The things people collect

We all start some collecting hobby, and very often we give it up. Some people collect stuff that others would find pretty weird. Here is guy who collects sugar packets.
And this site is about someone who just loves stewardess uniforms. (I quite like this one) Even Indian Airlines is covered. I wonder how he collects all this though.

Ooh a practical gift

I feel like buying this for a few friends of mine. A useful implement I'm sure.

Making movies

Well making training videos really. I often feel the need to make instructional videos to distribute. While I have Lotus Screen Cam, playback requires their viewer and it limits me to Windows screen grabs. Now I have found something that promises to work across X Windows, MS Windows, OS X and X11. vnc2swf uses a VNC server as the capture source on these platforms and captures it on another PC as an .swf (flash) file. Distributing swf files is far less painful as most people already have the plugin in their browser.

MP3 player for the man who has everything

If you want a portable music player and have the money to throw away, you need the Excentrique MP-400. It does MP3, WMA, ASF, OGG and FM Radio. 1Gb storage. Oh and its coated with 24 karat gold.

Pocket on fire

Im working on a list of applications that I would like to see in a USB Flash Drive. I know there are several such lists out here, but this I am custiomizing for my engineers. This will take some time but I cant resist posting a few juicy bits.
There is now no reason to leave Firefox behind since there is a variant just for USB Drives - Portable Firefox. And while your about that you might as well take their mail client Portable Thunderbird along too.
Yes people if you have not yet got a flash drive this would be a good time to do so. At least a 64Mb.
I'm using a couple of external USB 2.0 hardware casings. The smaller one is with me most of the time. Bought it for Rs. 500 and stuck a 12 Gb notebood HDD into it. Sigh, as as soon as I can get a cheap 120 Gb..... OK I'm being silly.

Hardware DivX player

Mitashi has introduced hardware DivX players in India for Rs. 4,600. Its uprising that there seem to be so few hardware DivX players around, but there is a whole bunch of ICs available to playback DivX.

I still havent quite figured out the difference between MPEG-4 and DivX. Or, for that matter if there is any difference between them. Someone please explain it to me. Perhaps the difference is just the license.

Winamp bows out?

The developers of Winamp have quit AOL, so we probably won't see another version. No matter really. I have long since migrated to foobar2000. Foobar looks horrible but it works.

POP goes the Gmail

Gmail plans to add POP3 support to their service and also antivirus. Read the article on Infoworld. Now I need a smart phone with tons of memory.

3-D Display

Uh oh. The 3-D display of the Death Star seems to have become reality. Provision can project 3-D images into the air and lets you view them without using any glasses.

Lights

I love silly lights. Now I am looking at the Laserpod.

Skinning

Yu thought putting a new skin on your apps was fun. Making XP look like Mac? Well you can do that to your gadgets too. Go to SkinIt.

Palm OS 6.1/Cobalt

Even though it may not be released for more than a year, you can play with Palm's new OS. Download the emulator at Palmos.

If its Wednesday it must be IE

ZD Net UK has an article on vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer. Apparently security company ScanSafe has found that most attacks appeared on Wednesday.
Don't worry Firefox final release is only days away.

Notes on Mac

I'm sitting in front of this beautiful Apple iMac G5 and getting real frustrated. Everything is working fine, except for Lotus Notes. Notes crashes each time I click on it. Have'nt been able to configure it.

Blogshare

I have been messing about with Blogshare, a virtual share market that trades in blogs. Been driving up the price of Tushar's Blog. Its fun.