Why English is Hard

Big difference between “attendee” and “attendant” — one attends, the other attends to. 🙂

Brother’s RL-700S prints out RFID cards

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Filed under: Peripherals, Wireless

It’s just too fitting that a company dubbed Brother would unleash a printer that enables even the little guy to become a Big Brother, but the RL-700S printer can indeed pop out IC tag labels with embedded RFID by the dozen. Presumably marketed towards businesses who need to keep better track of personnel, this machine also sports an RFID reader to keep a digital eye on those passing by, and even laminates the cards so that your dutiful subordinates will never suspect that their hard-earned “Employee of the Month” card is actually an undercover tracking device. Additionally, users can even pick up an optional PS-9000 module that enables network printing, and while we’re not savvy on the price, it looks like it’ll only be available in the oft surveyed nation of Japan anyway.

Dell’s ultra-thin LCD concept with DisplayPort going retail?

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Displays

Remember that super swanky Dell monitor concept we went ga ga over back at January’s CES? Yeah, we still find it hard to believe it’s a Dell design. Well, it’ll apparently be up for sale later in the year. What’s more, it features the new VESA approved DisplayPort 1.1 interface which allows Dell to keep the panel depth to a crazy thin 0.5-inches. Although DisplayPort is said to support a resolution 4x that of today’s HDTV resolutions, the panel on this pup was only pumping an estimated 1920 x 1200 when we saw it. No specs or price but we expect good things given Dell’s past performance in delivering top-notch displays on the cheap.

Researchers tout better, brighter LEDs

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Displays

A pair of researchers at UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science seem to think they’re well on their way to building a better LED — one that’s not only brighter than existing LEDs, but more energy efficient and less expensive to boot. According to Physorg, the team’s biggest success so far is red phosphorescent LED (or PLED) that delivered a record-breaking 18 lumens per watt (compared to an average of 12 lumens per watt with current red LEDs). The key to that, it seems, was to simplify the LED as much as possible, which they did by adding a polymer powder and liquid mixture to a “previously top-secret material” developed by Canon. The resulting “paint-like product” was then used to coat a layer of glass, with a charge then added to get the whole thing going. From the sound of it, these new wonder LEDs should be making their way into consumer products sooner rather than later, with Canon (naturally) reportedly already having licensed the technology and the first commercial products expected in “about three years.”

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AppleTV hacked to run Xgrid

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Home Entertainment

It’s no secret that the Apple TV is just a stripped-down Intel Mac running a lightly-tweaked version of OS X, so simply getting an app to run on the system isn’t really a big deal — we’ve seen full installs of OS X running on the device at this point. On the other hand, if you’re just using the Apple TV as a media extender, that processor is just sitting there wasting spare cycles when you’re not using the device, so this little hack to run Apple’s Xgrid distributed-computing client on an Apple TV seems pretty slick. The hack is pretty simple if you’ve already poked around inside your AppleTV — it mostly involves copying over the Xgrid Agent and configuring a few preference files. After that, your Apple TV’s spare horsepower will be available to your network’s Xgrid Controller, but you won’t have disturbed the functionality of the device at all. Just the thing to speed up those VisualHub video transcoding sessions, eh? Now, if only someone would wedge the Folding@home client into this thing (hint, hint).

8-core NextDimension PC stretches the definition of portable

from Engadget by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

No, the laptop industry hasn’t bypassed the idea of quad-core laptops in favour of octo-core machines, since NextComputing’s 8-core flextops are machines you wouldn’t want anywhere near your lap. Based as they are around the Intel Xeon 5300 processor, the NextDimension Pro and Evo can take advantage of the relatively low power requirements of 100W for two quad-core CPUs (down from 160 Watts for its power hungrier desktop equivalent). For a sense of just how expandable the NextDimension machines are, consider that they can hold up to twelve 160GB 2.5-inch 7200RPM hard disk drives. They also manage to pack in four PCI / PCI-e slots in the Evo model, and Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for 24GB of memory through four DMA channels on both models. These 20-pound desktop machines with a handle will be shown off at Interop Las Vegas later this month, but beyond that we’re not sure when or for how much you’ll be able to lug one away.

Toshiba’s NC-MR technology could boost HDD capacity ‘tenfold’

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Just days after Fujitsu tooted its own horn and suggested that it could increase hard drive capacity by 500-percent in a mere two years comes word that Toshiba coincidentally has a similarly grandiose claim. Aside from the obvious leapfrog game that’s being played here, Tosh has apparently been working hand-in-hand with Tohoku University to develop “a phenomenon” dubbed Nanocontact Magnetic Resistance, or NC-MR, in which an “enormous difference in magnetoresistance is achieved when two magnetic materials are situated close together and connected by a contact point that narrows to around 1-nanometer.” Put simply, the prototype NC-MR structure is twice as large as today’s read heads, and elements based on the NC-MR structure would have a “lower resistance than existing TMR elements, enabling the read heads to be miniaturized and still operate quickly.” Of course, these sensational claims have yet to make it beyond the drawing board, and while you may be anxious to get one of these in your rig, you’ll be waiting about five years or so if things continue as planned. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]

FlickrSLiDR.com – Embed Flickr Slideshows in Your Site

from KillerStartups.com – published startups by rakohn

Have a bunch of photos that you’d like to post on your site in crisp slideshow form? If you use flickr, this is now very easy to do using the flickrSLiDR. It’s a one page site meant to make embedding flickr slideshows into your site or blog as easy as possible. All that’s needed is the flickr URL address of the user, photo set, or group you want to use. If you want to specify certain photos within a group, type in the specific tags from the group or user. You can also choose the size of your slideshow, as well as a couple other options. So if you have pictures from flickr you’d like to post to your site, it couldn’t get easier than using flickrSLiDR.

In their own words:
“The next time you want to post a flickr slideshow on your website, just head over to flickrSLiDR and provide it with the URL of the flickr photostream, photoset or group that contains the pictures to put in a slideshow. For photostreams and groups, you can specify tags or a full text query to fine tune the type of pictures to be displayed in the slideshow. You can also specify the dimensions of the slideshow.”

Why it might be a killer:
He had posted some info on how to make a slideshow from flickr before and it received over 200 comments and a lot of traffic, so obviously there is a desire by flickr users for this tool. It’s really easy to use so that anyone can set up a slideshow within seconds.

Some questions:
Will there be more customization possibilities added for the slideshows? Will people use this site to make their slideshows, or turn to one of the many other slideshow specific sites out there that have a bit more flare?

Apple’s $1099 2GHz MacBook gets benchmarked

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Filed under: Laptops

If you’d been pinching your pennies waiting for Apple to unleash an update to the MacBook side of things, your wait was ended last week, but if you’ve been wondering just how much difference the increase from 2MB to 4MB of L2 cache (and the 0.17MHz bump, too) made, here’s your sign. MacLife was able to get its hands around a $1,099 base unit, and rather than carefully coaxing into the world, it broke out the whipping stick and put this bad boy to work. The new machine was pit against the old base MacBook (at 1.83GHz) and the previous 2GHz BlackBook, and while increases in efficiency weren’t exactly considerable, reviewers found them at least noticeable. The latest machine shaved seconds off here and there from iMovie exporting and Photoshopping, and while most tests showed just single digit improvements, the iPhoto test did display a 22-percent gain compared to the previous 1.83GHz MacBook. Of course, these preliminary tests aren’t anything out of the ordinary, but keep an eye on the read link for more fleshed out testing (including the refreshed BlackBook) in the coming days.

Panasonic’s 12 megapixel Lumix DMC-FX100: a wide-angle, "HD video" shooter

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Oh boy, lookie lookie. Panasonic just announced their new Lumix FX top-ender, the DMC-FX100. Packing a 1/1.72-inch, 12.2 megapixel CCD, this compact shooter manages to squeeze in a 28mm wide-angle Leica DC lens with 3.6x optical zoom. The cam features VE III processing along with Panny’s Mega Optical Image Stabilizer and Intelligent ISO control (up to a 6400 sensitivity) to reduce blurring. Shutter release is measured at 0.009 seconds while bursting 8 shots per second at full resolution. It even records WVGA (848 x 480) video at 30fps or 1280 x 720 at 15fps direct to SDHC/SD cards. Nice, should be a winner by the time the reviews roll around.