Its Electronica

Most water coolers are meant to be a place where office gossip is circulated while acting as a water dispenser second. With the Klimatec Base 1 AirWater Machine, you will see more geeks surround it, at least for the first few weeks of it’s existence. This self-filling water cooler is able to extract water out of thin air, purifying it and then turning it into the life giving liquid we all depend on. The output is pretty impressive - 20 litres in just 24 hours, and it can even be solar-poweerd, allowing you to attach an optional fridge if you prefer cold drinks. There’s no word on pricing, not even on the product page itself.

ViewSonic has a brand new 26″ lcd monitor that will definitely fill the need for those who want more viewing real estate on their desks. Features of the VA2626WM LCD monitor include :-

• 1,920 x 1,200 resolution
• 6,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio
• HDMI connectivity
• DVI and VGA connectors
• 2.5-watt pair of stereo speakers

From tomorrow (1st July), Sky will be re-branding their Sky HD service to “Sky+ HD“, and reducing the price significantly. I believe the name change has been done to avoid confusion with people thinking that Sky HD does not include the recording and pausing features as offered by the Sky+ service.

Now for the interesting part, Sky has reduced the price of the Sky+ HD box by £100!, down to £149 from £249. I’m sure this price drop will make Sky’s HD service a whole lot more tempting! Sky+ HD really does offer the best HD service in the U.K, you can read my Sky+ HD review here, and join Sky at the best prices here.

There has never been a better time to join or upgrade to Sky HD.

If you’ve ever wanted to know where your dog goes during the day and did not want to install expensive surveillance cameras throughout the house and yard, here is a gadget you are sure to like. It is a USB camera that attaches to the collar of your beloved pooch and snaps pictures of what is in front of them.

Called, the Pet’s Eye View, this USB camera snaps 640×480 pictures and can be set on a timer depending on how often you want to see what your pet sees, either one minute, five minutes, or 15 minute intervals. The USB camera also features a rechargeable lithium ion battery and includes a four foot USB cord to download pics to your PC.

My only complaint is that the Pets Eye View can only take around 35 pictures so additional memory would definitely be my suggestion in the next model. But for now, however, you can pick one up for yourself for around $50 dollars and find out what your canine is up to while you are gone.

Read more at 7Gadgets.

There is a rumor on the NGOHQ forum saying that someone has been able to modify (“mod”) a set of ATI drivers to run NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated PhysX code on older (pre-4800) ATI cards. At the moment, there is no proof that the claim is true, as the author of the forum post did no release the modified material for others to try. That seems pretty fish to me, as it seems to be a long shot to “port” (rewrite) PhysX over ATI without rewriting the CUDA driver and also parts of the ATI graphics driver that would access CUDA data. All that without the most recent top-secret ATI driver source code. Of course, “in theory” everything is possible, but “in theory” all the traffic from Google could also be diverted to this blog by accident… (and that would make us very happy)

PS: if the guy could actually do it, I’d like to order a DX10 driver for Windows XP, that would be far more useful…

If news reports coming out of Malaysia are to be believed, a number of BitTorrent tracker sites have been closed down by order of the Malaysian government.

ISPs in the country were ordered to suspend the hosting accounts of specific sites by the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs under the Copyright Act 1987. This has lead to several torrent sites going offline with little or no warning. ISPs have contacted the sites involved saying they had no choice as the order came directly from the government.

An administrator from a tracker site hosted in Malaysia contacted TorrentFreak.com and said:

Malaysia’s government suddenly forced all torrent websites to shut down today until further notice, a complete surprise to torrent admins and the offshore hosting companies in Malaysia.

Hosting company Shinjuru, who operate in Malaysia, confirmed the suspensions saying:

We can confirm that this is accurate. We had enforcement officers from MDTCA visiting the office to confirm the closure of BitTorrent sites hosted on our network. We will comply to all shut down instructions from the local authorities or agencies with warrants or documents.

It was initially thought the action was part of a wider initiative against piracy by the Malaysian government, but it seems like it is limited to a few key sites. These include Extremebits, Rapthe and Superfundo.

The Rapthe website has been replaced with the following text:

ExtremeBits.org and RapThe.Net were suspended due to pressure from the Malaysian government. We have backups of everything - nothing is lost! Sites have now moved to new servers, and will be back up the 17th of july. Please do not remove torrents etc, we WILL be back up on the 17th! See you then! Enjoy your summer! /x0r

Read more at TorrentFreak.com

Matthew’s Opinion
This kind of action shows you just how quickly services can disappear from the Internet with one decision from the government where they are hosted. An investigation and possible court action will follow, but for the time being the sites are just not there anymore.

I am hoping the ISPs involved received evidence and a warrant for the suspension of the sites. If they were just told to suspend and complied that is wrong. Customers should only have their service affected if legal documents are produced, based on evidence presented to a judge or giving authorities enough to act upon.

Rapthe believe they will be back up in just over 2 weeks. It looks like they are just going to move everything over to a different host and probably in a different country. It makes you wonder how many places are left in the world these sites can move to without suffering pressure and action from local authorities.

Back in 2006 Nintendo were sued by Texas-based company Anascape over patents they had apparently infringed. Those patents related to the design of the Gamecube, WaveBird and Wii Classic controllers. More specifically, the patents relate to the use of a number of analog sensors and analog pressure sensors.

Microsoft were also sued, but have settled with Anascape. Nintendo fought the claims, but a judge ruled in favor of Anascape awarding them US$21 million. Nintendo appealed this amount in an attempt to bring the value down, but the U.S District Court has denied the appeal so the US$21 million stands.

Charlie Scibetta, senior director of public relations as Nintendo of America said:

Nintendo does not agree with the ruling of the trial court on the remittitur motion …Nintendo intends to appeal this case to the Federal circuit court.

Doug Cawley, lead consel for Anascape also commented, saying:

We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful consideration in upholding the jury’s decision … Although not a giant corporation like Nintendo, Anascape has every right to protect its technology.

Even though Nintendo are going to fight on, the court agreed with the patent infringements based on the evidence presented. It looks unlikely they will get anywhere by continuing to fight and it may end up costing them a lot more than US$21 million with all the additional legal fees.

Still, the patents have been infringed, which means there will be ongoing costs possibly with a royalty payment as well. By getting the amount down it may have some knock-on effect for the royalty or license charge in the future.

We will have to wait and see how this pans out, but it doesn’t look good for Nintendo.

Read more at Next-Gen.biz

A survey by the European Union has found that many Europeans are ditching their landline phones all together.

According to the survey, 24% of European households just use a mobile phone. If that wasn’t bad enough for traditional phone service operators, another 22% were using their computer to make calls over the Internet.

What’s kind of interesting about almost one in four households using just a mobile phone is that many subscribers have reported problems with their service. One in four mobile subscribers reported having occasional problems connecting to their mobile network. Another 28% reported that they are sometimes cutoff while in the middle of a call.

I must admit that’s it’s not too surprising to see people ditching their landline phones for mobile phones or an Internet-based phone service. There are just too many financial incentives not to maintain a landline phone and a mobile phone.

This survey should be a wake up call for traditional phone service operators in Europe. They need to work harder at transforming their business in order to retain customers before the service they offer becomes technically obsolete. In many ways, it already has.

Read more from the European Union press release.

You know, when I got a MacBook with an 80GB hard drive it seemed huge. But after about five minutes of BitTorrent shenanigans, I realized my naiveté. I also realized that offloading files, especially music files, to an external drive is problematic.

The point of a notebook is portability, and hooking up a USB drive just to listen to podcasts in the kitchen (what can I say, Danny, Jose and Dylan; your soothing voices stop the mayonnaise splitting every time) is a pain. What I need is something like Maxtor’s Central Axis, a one Terabyte NAS (Network Attached Storage). It has a gigabit ethernet connection to keep speeds up near those of a local drive, and two USB ports to add further storage when you need it.

And even if you are not hooked into the network via CAT5, you can still get your media wirelessly when whipping together eggs and oil in the evening (via a Wi-Fi router). It’ll even stream movies to your X-box or PS3 without a computer in between. The price is a not unreasonable $330, available July.

Product page [Maxtor via Uncrate]

FROM GAMERTELL - The newly designed and uber cool Bat Pod will be on display at the park’s main entrance Saturday July 5, 2008, from noon until…
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