As you may have read, this year we’re offering bewildered gift recipients our sage advice about whether or not they should return the gadgets they received, but may or may not want. We call it keep it or toss it, and we hope you’ll share your device dilemmas with us.
Anyone who has traveled by air in the past seven years knows the drill well: long lines, multiple boarding pass checks, putting your laptop, liquids, metal and shoes in separate bins, more boarding pass and ID checks, and maybe a personal search that turns up nothing. Security technologist Bruce Schneier calls this Security Theater — an act put on by the TSA to make people feel safe that doesn’t necessarily ensure actual safety. “The whole system is designed to catch stupid terrorists,” he recently told The Atlantic.
It’s getting to the point where they might as well close the mid-tower factories and throw all the ATX power supplies into a giant landfill, where they’ll rest on a layer just above the floppy drives, 56K modems, and AOL CDs. Today, research firm iSuppli announced that, in Q3 of this year, notebooks outsold desktops for the first time ever, with shipments for portable PCs rising 40 percent year-over-year while their stationary siblings were down by 1.3 percent.
With the holidays in full swing it’s a prime time for family snapshots with the trusty point-and-shoot digital camera. I used to think that I could only take truly great pictures if I invested in a digital SLR, but photographer friends always tell me that it’s less about the camera and more about who’s behind it. There are several simple things anyone can do to improve their digital pictures.
This morning Sprint announced a new mobile broadband solution that supports both its 3G EV-DO network and 4G WiMAX networks. The U300 is the first USB dongle of its type, and it costs $149 with a two-year contract at local Sprint stores in Baltimore and surrounding areas. What makes this device attractive is that, typically, you wouldn’t want to purchase a WiMax broadband card unless you lived in a coverage area like Baltimore where Clearwire (formerly XOHM) exists.
Looking to put the latest Ubuntu on your Eee PC? You’re in luck — Eeebuntu 8.10 is out! The OSs Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface is designed for, you guessed it: netbooks. In particular screens with low-res displays.
Thanks to Nvidia, netbooks just got a whole lot more powerful and threatening to the budget notebook market. Today, the company announced its Ion platform, which will bring Nvidia’s GeForce 9400M (which was introduced earlier this year in Apple’s Macbook) to Intel Atom based-netbooks and nettops.
Nvidia announced today that laptop users can now directly download upgradeable graphics drivers for their Nvidia graphics processing unit-equipped notebooks directly from Nvidia.com. The drivers will add new features, optimize performance, and better application compatibility. The Beta drivers for GeForce® 8 and 9-series GPUs or Quadro NVS-equipped notebooks are available today, with WHQL-certified version supporting all GeForce 7, 8, and 9 series and Quadro NVS series notebook GPUs coming early next year.
Hackintosh lovers, this post is for you.
BoingBoing Gadgets helpfully put together a table showing netbooks that have been tested with OS X. Of the ten listed, only the MSI Wind and and the Dell Mini 9 retain all of their functionality without the need for hardware swaps (the acquisition of drivers and other tweaking may be required).
