Best New Technology

Transporting your pooch around can be quite a challenge, and if the back seats of your truck are already full, where else can you put Fido without having him melt under the sweltering hot sun? The PupHut is an innovative truck-bed shade and safety product specially created for dogs, helping you restrain your beloved four-legged friend for added safety, especially if you’re heading out on a long road trip. The PupHut also offers a protective barrier that prevents road debris and other unwanted particles from entering your pooch’s eyes, ears, nose and throat. The PupHut is constructed from a powder-coated steel frame and a UV protective coating helps shield it properly against outdoor elements.

The London Fashion Week was attended by models from LG, although not of the human variety. Instead, a cutting edge TV collection was unveiled with the LG6000 leading the way. This TV boasts a slim slhouette with a special red-colored back, while a round LED light aperture provides a red pulsating glow. This LCD HDTV is available in 32″, 37″, 42″ and 47″ sizes and comes with the following specifications :-

• 15:000:1 dynamic contrast ratio
• TruMotion 100Hz technology (42- and 47-inchers)
• Invisible speaker system
• Intelligent Sensor for automatic optimisation of brightness and colour
• 24p TruCinema
• Four HDMI 1.3 with Deep Colour
• USB 2.0 jack for viewing JPEG photos or listening to MP3 music files
• Clear Voice technology to enhance dialogue when background noise swells
• LG SimpLink connectivity to control other LG SimpLink-compatible equipment
• AV Mode allowing choice of movie, game and sport mode

No idea on how much it costs, but it should feature a premium over a standard LCD HDTV.

You’ve heard the rumors about the product - here it is in the flesh. Just like the MacBook Air, it is extremely slim in nature thanks to the inclusion of a 64GB solid-state drive along with a 13.3″ LED backlit display. While it is a wee bit thicker and heavier than the macbook air, at least it fits into the manila envelope effortlessly as well. I think we’re going to see more broken notebooks in the future if they get any thinner.

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I like Valentine’s Day, especially in Japan.  You see, in Japan men are not expected to give any chocolates at all.  Women give chocolates to men.  We are inclined to reciprocate in March for White Day, but that is another story.  What I love is actually the post Valentine’s Day chocolate glut.  You can get some high quality chocolates for a fraction of the price that you would normally pay.  This weekend I am going to try to rustle me up this Carmania Chocolate V2 set.

The  set is made from high quality Belgian chocolate by Kobe chocolatier Frantz, and shaped liked tools to make them manly, they have nuts, bolts, wrenches and pliers, all beautifully crafted.  I am a man, and I love chocolate, so the way I see it I win both ways.  If I get them cheaper than the approximately $30 retail price then I really take home the chocolate trifecta.

Source: DVICE

Buffalo has also thrown its weight behind the Blu-ray camp by releasing a new range of internal and external Blu-ray recorders that feature a 4x recording speed. There is no fixed price on these recorders as at press time, although the internal SATA version ought to be in the 310 Euros neighborhood while the external USB 2.0 model should be a wee bit more expensive at 340 Euros.

Japanese company, Green House, has just released two new versions of SSDs, the 16GB and the 32GB one. Both versions will have a reading speed of 35MB/s and a writing speed of 30MB/s. As far as prices are concerned, you’ll be paying pretty high for both starting at $641 for the 16GB version and $1,202 for the 32GB one.
[Source]

For the latest info on the coolest gadgets, emerging technology and wired madness, subscribe to our full news feed or have it delivered to your inbox. Always free. Always unique. Thanks for visiting!

The Lego Machine Gun featured in the video below can shoot a dozen 10 mm steel balls in less than 2 seconds. It still needs some fine tuning before it can be taken seriously but it’s still a great display of Lego geek power. I’m sure in version 2.0 the egg will have no chance at a second life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpXifKbkQB4

Instructions on how to built the Lego machine gun are here

Posted Feb 13th 2008 2:27PM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: cellphones, Gaming, Peripherals

Just in case you missed it, we though we’d point you in the direction of Engadget Mobile’s hands-on with Zeemote’s nunchuck-like JS1 mobile joystick, which promises to make playing games on your cellphone a slightly more enjoyable experience. As our own Sean Cooper reports, the controller works surprisingly well, with it boasting a size that’s comfortable to use but still small enough to slip it into your pocket. Hit up the read link below for plenty more pics of the controller, as well as a video of it in action courtesy of the folks at Mobile Game Developer.

Photo: Kuni Takahashi/Chicago Tribune

According to a member of the House of Representatives, the use of Social Security Cards to forge one’s identity is going up and this crime costs the National economy close to 50 billion a year. As a result, new legislation is being introduced to update the paper-only version of today to one with a photograph, fingerprint info, a bar code and a magnetic strip. This new development comes in the heels of many other types of proposals that have failed to come up with any new form of a national-card security ID.

Currently, members of the Department of Defense are issued an identification card with similar specs to the proposed new SSN card, but issuing this technology to the masses, while adding even more of an individual’s information on it, could pose huge problems. The most basic one is that if a card were to be stolen, even more of your personal information would be out there to be abused by tech-savvy criminals.

The other that comes to mind is that a great number of ID theft cases start with the mishandling of information in the centers where they are supposed to be the most secure. In the last few years, many banks, tech companies (like Monster), Universities, and other institutions have had a lot of problems keeping private information private. Laptops with thousands of personal emails have been lost, servers have been hacked, and incompetent employees have ‘misplaced’ info for personal loans and yes, they included people’s social security numbers.

Maybe we should keep the focus at the top, before we’re  asked to give up our prints.

Posted Feb 13th 2008 8:36PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Misc. gadgets

Well that was fast — just nine days after announcing plans to acquire PhysX maker Ageia, NVIDIA said today that the deal is done. Still no word on when we might see NVIDIA cards with Ageia tech in them, but we’ll let these two enjoy their first Valentine’s day as a happy couple merged corporate entity before we start asking the hard questions.

[Thanks, Ryan]