By: Staff
February 24, 2008

Microvision is working with business partners to enable better viewing experiences for mobile device consumers. Sharing photos, watching movies, and giving presentations using the small screens of today’s devices limits our ability to imagine, entertain, and share. PicoP is an ultra miniature projection module capable of producing full color, high-resolution images but small enough and low power enough to be embedded directly into an accessory pico projector that connects to mobile devices.

The PicoP projector looks like a pack of cigarettes and is about the size of your mobile phone itself. Upon connection, you can show your mobile phone’s or PDA’s image content to friends and family --right on the wall.

→ Read the story In Topic: Personal

By: Staff
February 23, 2008

The ROV scanner from MicroVision is a barcode scanner using innovative MEMS mirror technology. It’s a small laser barcode scanner with a mirror not much bigger than the thickness of a human hair. The scanner is available in both tethered and Bluetooth versions.

What makes the ROV barcode scanner special is not only the MEMS technology, but the Bluetooth option. You can buy a tethered ROV scanner and upgrade later to Bluetooth capabilities simply by ordering a new battery door. It’s the battery door that holds the Bluetooth module and antenna.

→ Read the story In Topic: Personal

By: Staff
February 23, 2008

Infrasound is sound with a frequency too low to be heard by the human ear. Sounds beneath the lowest limits of human hearing (about 16 or 17 hertz) down to 0.001 hertz are called infrasound. The fact that we don’t hear it as humans, doesn’t rule out our bodies to react to it --often without knowing what caused the physical reaction. Elephants have been known to hear infrasound from two and a half miles away. Infrasound created by predators such as the tiger (in their grunts) ‘freezes’ their prey in its tracks.

Infrasound can arouse feelings of anxiety, nausea, and severe bodily spasms --in extreme cases, leading to death. Ventilators can cause infrasound, and some of them can be found in your (Power) Mac or PC. Tests with an older Power Mac G5 --the Power Mac G5 carries the IBM PowerPC, which requires a lot of cooling down-- revealed that the ventilators inside are capable of infrasound, causing all kinds of discomfort.

→ Read the story In Topic: Tips and Tricks

By: Staff
February 23, 2008

Logitech seems determined to rule out Mac OS X users and to irritate them until steam comes out of their ears. The Logitech MX Air is a great “mid-air” mouse, i.e. you can move it through 3D space and the cursor will follow your movements. But to make the most of the mouse, you need drivers. On Windows PCs, Logitech’s drivers are OK. They work fine and are continuously updated.

Mac users are not so lucky: the latest Logitech drivers I downloaded made several other applications --totally unrelated to mouse drivers-- unstable.

→ Read the story In Topic: Mac Gadgets

By: Staff
February 20, 2008

With more than 2,000 new PANTONE Colors, the PANTONE Goe System has been designed to inspire creativity and fulfil the requirements of the printing industry as well as web designers. PANTONE Goe is more than a single product with exciting new colors; the System includes modern tools and interactive software to drive collaboration and improve versatility in an increasingly global, multimedia environment.

That’s what Pantone says. Some others who know what they’re talking about, say Pantone has it all wrong with this new Goe System. For example, the colour chips read “RGB”, but should read “sRGB”. The expert Eddy Hagen of Flanders measured the chips and found a huge difference in colour rendition between the chip’s colour and the same colour in the Adobe RGB colour space.

→ Read the story In Topic: Designers

By: Staff
February 19, 2008

It has been two years now that LightScribe promised its user base the possibility to print --silkscreen-- onto coloured disc media. A couple of weeks ago Verbatim released the first coloured LightScribe 1.2.x discs. Besides the gold coloured discs, you can now “Lightscribe” onto red, orange, green, yellow and blue-green media.

LightScribe allows you to burn a CD or DVD, and have a label printed onto its label side using a by laser to engrave whatever design you created in the label layer. The LightScribe technology requires a specially designed LightScribe DVD-writer with a laser that is capable of both burning DVDs and engraving at lower power.

→ Read the story In Topic: News