FT Chronicle

Skype has made an update to its Mac application to 2.8 that adds a number of new features which have recently been added to the Windows editions.

The update brings Skype Access functionality, allowing you to connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots on a pay-as-you-go system. It has Screen Sharing capabilities, letting you show the person you’re calling exactly what’s going on on your monitor in those “it’s gone funny” situations. Lastly, there’s the usual round of call quality upgrades and bug fixes.

Newly introduced, and at the exact same price as Olympus’  E-600 Four Thirds digital SLR with 14-42mm kit lens, is the manufacturer’s latest Micro Four Thirds system hybrid in the E-PL1 Digital Pen.

Like that DSLR “proper” it also comes in kit form with a zoom of the exact same focal range, equivalent to 28-84mm in 35mm film terms. The E-PL1 is however the baby of its particular family that includes its predecessors in the E-P1 and E-P2, the former reportedly due to be phased out by the middle of this year. The close price match with the E-600 is of interest as what you’re getting in the E-PL1 is, as with its forebears, basically a foreshortened E-series DSLR with the mirror mechanism removed to bring lens and sensor closer together.

UK company Pendle Products has introduced a new Laptop Stand, said to be the first of many product releases. This stand lets users raise their laptop up whilst using a full size external mouse and keyboard and is said to be ideal for use alongside an external monitor, thereby increasing your workspace when you are at your desk.

With what’s said to be a unique laser cut design, the stand boasts super thin legs meaning that you can free up the space underneath for accessories such as external hard drives while slim rubber feet protect your desk surface. Plastic stops hold the laptop in place and the stand has holes cut into the sides for cables.

The Pendle range of laptop stands come in a choice of sizes, regular and large, and colours, black or white and can be used with or without an external monitor.

The Pendle regular laptop stand is suitable for 13-inch and 15-inch MacBooks, while the large is best suited for the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

According to the makers, the stands have been designed to be as solid and stable as possible. Wide legs promises great strength and stiffness and create a space for storing accessories such as external drives and mice. Large holes cut into the sides enable you to pass cables through to help keep your desk tidy.

Rubber feet prevent scratching of your desk, while plastic spheres prevent slippage when your MacBook is in use.

Manufactured in the UK from quality materials using precise laser cutting processes, the regular Pendle stand costs £42, the large is £48.

Australian engineers from Invetech, a company with headquarters in Melbourne, and Organovo, a firm based in San Diego, California, developed a 3D bio-printer that can prove to be very useful in creating organs for those who need them.

At this time, one of their most useful inventions can grow blood vessels. It is expected that in 5 years the arteries printed by the device could be used by surgeons when they perform open heart surgeries. The companies believe that more sophisticated organs could be developed by 2020.

To be able to print organs researchers need to place specific cells into a preferred 3D shape. There are two print heads in the bio-printer. One pin heads is where human cells are placed, while the other is used for placing a hydrogel, scaffold or support matrix.

from infoniac.com

Denon has announced the launch of a new Blu-ray beast, informally dropping the S-5BD model number for a more manageable name – the Cara.

On the technical side, the device incorporates technology from its big brother models. Cara Blu-ray beast, offers 5.1 channel surround sound, two-source, two-room distribution capabilities which allows you to listen to music from two different sources. Besides, it supports BD-Live and HDMI 1.4.

Almost all the popular formats are supported by this device. Facilities like SD card slots as well as iPod/iPhone digital direct playback via the USB port needs special mentioning.

The name might be the only manageable thing about the device – its 7.8 kilogram heft certainly isn’t and it comes with a spec sheet (and no doubt manual) that will give you a headache, while its £1999 price tag will certainly make your wallet hurt.

Once upon a time, Acer gussied up some of its mid-range workhorse computers with hot-red paint jobs and affixed them with the vibrant equine sporting logo from Ferrari.

Now the name has been slapped on to a $600 notebook.

The Acer Ferrari One is essentially a tarted-up notbook*, an 11.6-inch model (with a 1366 x 768-pixel screen) that subs in a 1.2-GHz Athlon X2 for the usual Intel Atom and juices the specs with 4 gigs of RAM and a real (if low-end) video card (ATI’s Radeon 3200).

Main specs:

Processor and chipset AMD Athlon™ X2 dual-core processor L310, supporting AMD HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology, AMD M780G Chipset

Operating system Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Basic

Memory Up to 4GB of DDR2 667/800 MHZ memory

HDD    160 GB or larger hard disk drive

Storage Multi-in-1 card reader: supporting Secure Digital™ (SD) Card, MultiMediaCard (MMC), Reduced-Size Multimedia Card (RS-MMC), Memory Stick™ (MS), Memory Stick PRO™ (MS PRO), xD-Picture Card™ (xD); supporting storage cards with adapter: miniSD™, microSD™, Memory Stick Duo™, Memory Stick PRO Duo™

Display 11.6” HD 1366 x 768 (WXGA) pixel resolution, high-brightness (200-nit) Acer CineCrystal™ LED-backlit TFT LCD

Graphics ATI Radeon™ HD 3200 Graphics with up to 2047 MB of HyperMemory™ (256+128 MB of dedicated system memory, up to 1663 MB of shared system memory), supporting Unified Video Decoder (UVD), OpenEXR High Dynamic-Range (HDR) technology, Shader Model 4.0, Microsoft® DirectX® 10, Dual independent display support, 16.7 million colors, MPEG-2/DVD decoding, WMV9 (VC-1)1 and H.264 (AVC) decoding

Audio ptimized 3rd Generation Dolby Home Theater® audio enhancement, featuring Dolby® Digital Live, Dolby® Pro Logic® IIx, Dolby® Headphone, Dolby® Natural Bass and Dolby® Sound Space Expander, Dolby® Inverse Filtering, Dolby® High Frequency Enhancer technologies, High-definition audio support, Two Built-in stereo speakers, S/PDIF support for digital speakers, MS-Sound compatible

The touchpad, flush with the palm rest, is curious. Its trapezoidal shape makes it a bit awkward in a world of rectangles, and it’s tricky to intuit where the pad ends and the palm rest begins — causing you to drag your fingertip off the edge a bit too often — but the multitouch implementation works well here. We wish we could say the same for the keyboard, which is a typically cheap affair (with Page Up/Down keys foolishly sandwiched in with the arrow buttons).

From the artists Andrew Bell and Google’s Android™ platform arrived Android mini collectibles series 01.

Series one has twelve different designs in blind-boxed cases of 16. There’s a few super-rare editions scattered in those cases too. Standing 3 inches tall, they’re perfect for sitting under your monitor.Be on the lookout for some super rare chase editions. Each vinyl figure stands 3” tall and features a rotating head and arms.

Series 1 will be available later this month right here in an online Android collectibles shop and in specialty retailers.

Do you have memory gap? Or often forget important matters so you always miss many things? Why don’t you try this Boogie Board, It can be used to jot down ideas and significant things in technological way.

The Boogie Board from Improv Electronics uses “Reflex LCD” technology which is a pressure sensitive, flexible plastic which, believe it or not, requires zero power to write on it, but does require power for the erase feature.

The erasing uses the power of a small watch battery, and it is good enough for 50,000 erasing cycles. Maybe it’s like an Etch a Sketch when you shake it, but you just push a button.

Just so you know, the Boogie Board has an included stylus, but there is nothing special about the stylus. In fact, any instrument, such as a fingernail, that can exude pressure on the board is good to make a mark on the Reflex LCD board. The user can make wide or thin marks on the board, just like writing with a pencil.

It costs only $29.97 at the Improv Electronics site.

The rumour mill for the expected Apple iTablet launch on Wednesday reaches fever pitch.

It might look like four iPhones stuck together on close inspection of the pictures, but what you are looking  is actually really believed to be Apple’s latest gadget* that promises to revolutionise how we consume media like games, magazines, newspapers, music and video in the home, while saving virtually every industry you know in the process.

The device, we understand, will come with not one but four touchscreen displays that in total measure up to around 8 inches on the diagonal. The use of four screens will allow multitasking, something not previously available on Apple’s other touchscreen device – the iPhone. The new iTablet will, you guessed it, run four applications at the same time. Based on the company’s Spaces offering in it’s operating system OS X you be able to have one screen for video, one for email, one for Twitter and one for websurfing.

Resource: pocket-lint.com

Impress your friends, co-workers, or perfect strangers on the street or subway when you bust out your rock moves on your shirt.

That’s right, the Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt is a t-shirt with a guitar built right in.

Now you may be thinking, well, it must just be pre-recored music that starts with the touch of a button. But this Guitar Shirt is the real deal. Easier to play than a real guiter, each button on the neck of the pictured guitar is a major chord. When you hook this Electronic Shirt up to the mini amp you can play almost any song anywhere you go. The amp includes a volume control along with a tone knob so you can adjust your sound to sound like a real rock star.

The Electronic Guitar Shirt functions with a magnetic pick that is used to make sound by strumming it across the body just like a real guiter. The sound of the chords is recorded from a real electric guitar making your guitar shirt sound very realistic as well.