Posts for 'Household' Category

To meet the growing storage needs of laptop users, Samsung Electronics on Tuesday introduced a 500GB hard drive that could provide a notebook PC with as much as 1TB of storage.

The Spinpoint M6, a 2.5-inch hard drive, fits into the chassis of commercial and multimedia notebooks, said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales at Samsung Semiconductor. Two drives can be combined for 1TB of storage, he said.

The company was able to fit three 167GB platters in a small frame to achieve 500GB of storage in one drive, Higginbotham said. The hard drive spins at 5,400 RPM.

Priced at $299, the hard drive will ship to PC makers and retail stores later this month. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on which PC makers will be using the drive.

This is not the first attempt to put 1TB of storage in a laptop. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Asus announced the M70S laptop, which combined two 500GB drives from Hitachi.

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There are some chores in life that must be done despite being a drag to go through. Among them include mowing the lawn and painting the fence, but then again that’s what children (when they’re old enough, of course) are for, right? One of the bigger challenges would be painting your home, and woe to you if you have a relatively huge house. Giving your abode a fresh coat of paint on the outside every five years will definitely keep the neighborhood looking spiffy, but how many of us actually look forward to that "event", preferring instead to lounge in our armchairs while flipping channels on the TV? What happens if I tell you that there is a new type of paint that covers your home with a lovely coat of energy generating solar cells? That news ought to make you jump right off your seat at roll up those sleeves almost immediately.

While most households have already moved towards a digital photo album, the majority still archives those photos on a hard drive somewhere without a physical album to look at. Digital photo frames offer a temporary solution, and the iRiver Siren digital photo frame is the latest device of its kind to join the fray. Looking more like a classic photo frame than anything else, the Siren is made of mahogany and comes with a 5.6″ QVGA LCD display at 320 x 240 resolution. It is compatible with SD, MMC, Memory Stick, and CF cards just in case the 512MB internal memory is filled to the brim. The Siren DF150 will be released in Japan early next month for approximately $125 a pop. Have you made the digital photo frame jump yet?

Do you have a bunch of CDs or DVDs messing up your desk? How about getting organized with this dice shaped CD holder that keeps up to 60 of your discs protected and away from your curious eyes of strangers? There are a lot of different CD holders on the market, but none of them is as cool as this one, at least in my opinion.

It is interesting to note that while smoking was considered ‘cool’ many years ago, it seems as though the tide has turned now where healthy living is the ‘in’ thing. The USB Ashtray comes to the rescue of those who have not yet kicked the habit, drawing smoke into the center inlet by a powerful motor and filtering this smoke to dispense clean air instead. This helps keep your office smelling great without the musty, lingering scent that cigarettes always leave behind. The USB Ashtray can be powered via USB or a quartet of AA batteries, depending on where you are at the moment. It can be purchased for $16.50 today.

Gadgets have raised our level of comfort.

The portable rocking chair allows you to relax when going camping.

This camping gadget is made from solid steel. It folds for easy transport.
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Gratitude to gadget leaders Brando, the modest memory card reader at the present comes in the form of a can while throwing in a trio of USB 2.0 ports for your convenience as well. Supported formats include SD, xD, Memory Stick, miniSD, and microSD (sans adapter), so Compact Flash folks are out of luck. This tiny device measures a mere 59mm x 59mm x 49mm and weighs 60 grams. You can pick one up today for $17. This makes a great traveling companion, as you can never have too many USB ports. Now I’m hungry for a tin of minestrone soup.

The Canadian company "Straight Line Designs" creates furniture that’s different from everything you’ve ever seen. The designers play with traditional furniture and add incredible details, to create such classics as the melting cabinet, the "cracked" dresser and the Sullivan clock which looks like a person posing with arms at the hips.

Other interesting pieces are the accordion cabinet and the boom cabinet, on which the six drawers are actually hung on the wall. The company also creates customized projects such as beds in shapes of a train locomotive, a castle, a beehive and even an aquarium. One of the coolest of them all is the table that looks like a dog pissing on your carpet, but my favourite is really the pet camper. I really want one of those. 

There is at the present a machine that exhibits the newest game scores on a retro-looking stadium scoreboard spank accurate in front of you. You no longer need to have an Internet Explorer/Firefox window open at all times, waiting for MLB.com’s website to upload those scores. No sir, the Liveboard from Vroop does all that for you, giving you one of the quickest and most efficient methods when it comes to pitch-by-pitch updates. How is this possible, you ask? Was it done via a little sprinkling of fairy dust? Find out further after the jump.
Scores are displayed courtesy of a Bluetooth connection between the Liveboard and your computer. Whenever you want to view scores on the Liveboard, just boot up your computer and load the Liveboard manager application (takes approximately 1 minute to download) in order to sync the scores. LED lights on the Liveboard will then display the corresponding score, inning, balls/strikes, base occupancy, and even the batter’s jersey number in real time.

Epson has now plunged the Epson PowerLite S5 multimedia projector that arrives with SVGA declaration and a brightness height of 2,000 ANSI lumens, all for the relatively attractive price point of $649. The PowerLite S5 weighs a rather light 5.8 pounds and is said to bring “versatility, power, and affordability to entrepreneurs, educators, and business professionals alike”. The S5 is also equipped with the latest generation of high aperture 3LCD (three chip) technology for vivid, sharp, and intense images, giving users fantastic color reproduction and detail.