Archive for: July 2008

Filed under: Ask Engadget, Digital Cameras, Displays, Misc. GadgetsFrightening though it may be, the fall semester is just around the corner. You know what that means? You’ll actually have to get up at — wait for it — an appointed time. Carissa, being the proactive student she is, posed that quest…

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Gadgets

Filed under: Cellphones
We’re not certain how that one got past Apple’s App Store censors, but the intelligent kids at Nullriver have released what appears to be the first tethering solution for the iPhone. The $10 NetShare app is just a SOCKS proxy that urls an ad-hoc WiFi network to the iPhone’s 3…

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Gadgets

Filed under: Gaming, PeripheralsIf you didn’t think every single third-party peripheral provider would try to snag a piece of the band game pie, we guess you thought wrong, huh? With outfits like Mad Catz and Ion already jumping in, it was only a matter of date before Logitech threw on its tightest …

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Gadgets

Web-based RSS feed aggregator Spreed is casual reading’s worst enemy. A speed-reader extraordinaire like Robert Scoble might enjoy it as a way to dig through even more stories a day, but at its heart it’s kind of like visiting an aquarium with one of those moving sidewalks; you’re still seeing wha…

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Web

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Yep, just like we’d heard, the Phoenix lander has identified water in a soil sample it collected in Mars earlier, and NASA’s extended the mission for another 90 days to go look for more. There’s no analysis of the ice yet, but it doesn’t look like there’s any biological ma…

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Gadgets

Filed under: LaptopsSo now that HP’s joined Dell in releasing information on which laptops have those defective NVIDIA GPUs, we can sort of piece together which chips are faulty — and just as had been rumored, it looks like basically every Geforce 8600M and 8400M chip is affected. That’s not good n…

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Gadgets

On Thursday, mobile browser start-up Skyfire announced the opening of a private beta for the Symbian Series 60 (S60) platform–nearly a week after a Symbian users Web site busted the news.

Skyfire is positioned as a resource-light Web browser that relies on Web servers to deliver a desktop browsi…

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Web

Filed under: Laptops
It looks like those already sold on Dell’s slightly less business-like Vostro 2510 laptop don’t have to wait too towering to get their hands on one, as the just-leaked laptop is now configurable on Dell’s website with an estimated ship date of 3 to 5 days. As we had heard, the b…

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Gadgets

There are probably lots and lots of lawsuits going on every day in the technology world, and generally, they are fairly uninteresting to all of us. Exceptions exist, of course, and the case of Apple and PsyStar is definitely one of them. It’s a lawsuit that could analysis one of the most debated iss…

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OS

I'm the type of person who's afraid of hard drive failures, so in addition to trying to keep my data backed up, I keep a small collection of drive diagnostic utilities ready for those moments when I hear clicking from my external drives or from inside my system. HDDScan, a free app designed to scan your drive for bad blocks, to perform a S.M.A.R.T. check of your system, and even to analyze drive temperatures, is the newest addition to my collection.

HDDScan is a tiny Windows app that's free and works with Windows 2000 (with SP4), Windows XP (with SP2), or Windows Server 2003. Sorry Vista users, it's not supported yet. If you do have a supported system though, HDDScan can tell you exactly what your hard drive might be suffering from. The app supports most popular internal drives, including ATA/SATA and SCSI drives, and even supports scanning physical drives when they're configured in a RAID array. If you're using an external Firewire, USB, or USB Flash drive, HDDScan can examine those as well.

The download for HDDScan is only about 2MB, and once the app is installed, it can perform verification and read/write tests to collect information about how well your drive is performing, what its average seek time is, and so on. The app supports S.M.A.R.T. testing, so if your drive supports it as well (and virtually any modern hard drive does), you'll be able to run S.M.A.R.T. tests on the drive to determine if the drive passes or fails, is operating within temperature limits, actively monitor temperature, and more.

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Filed under: Desktops
So we hate to break it to the good guys at Tom’s Hardware, but while we’re impressed that they managed to overclock a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 to 5.1GHz using a cryogenic cooling system, it’s not nearly shut to the world record they’re claiming — we’ve seen P4’s at up to …

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Gadgets

Last weekend I had the pleasure of spending about $85 on gas during a road trip to upstate New York. Thankfully, the journey only included one toll, but when I used to live in DC, the journey between our nation's capital and my parent's house in NJ routinely sucked up about $15 of my hard-earned cash.

Naturally, Google wants to help. The online search giant on Thursday unveiled an "avoid tolls" function to the driving directions on Maps.

"When half your wallet is already going toward gas, it's nice if you can save some money for ice cream instead of dumping it all off at the toll booth," Google product manager Dave Barth wrote in a blog post.

After you've input your addresses and received results via Maps, click on the "show options" link, select "avoid tolls" and Maps will recalculate your journey.

But will avoiding tolls send you so far out of your way that you actually waste gas and spend more money?

Avoiding tolls on my trek from Washington, DC to northern New Jersey adds about 20 miles to the trip. If we're talking about my Saturn, which got about 28 miles to the gallon highway (I think?) that's maybe an extra $3, so I'd save about $12 but add a half-hour of travel time.

Bad news for people looking to get into Manhattan by car - you're going to pay no matter what. I clicked "avoid tolls" to get into the city from NJ, but it still directed me through the toll happy Lincoln Tunnel.

There's also the option to avoid highways, but that basically makes most trips about twice as long. No tolls and ...