Reality Bites
How do you tell a guy is into you when he’s, uh, into you? No less authority than The Onion shows us in this decidedly NSFW faux-morning show segment. Full video, with lots of sexy sex sex words, lies directly ahead: More »
We don’t know too much about the next version of Office, let alone Outlook, but a user over on The Hot Fix has discovered something interesting. A user by the name of “fivestar” posted pictures of what is supposedly Outlook.Next, and it appears the interface has had an entire Metro…
When it comes to computing, our general philosophy at Maximum PC is that bigger is better. More, speed, more memory, more power—as far as hardware goes, there's no such things as excess. Software, though… Software's a little different. Big, feature-packed utilities and applications are great, but we prefer apps that show a little restraint. More »
We’re sure there are still scores of lifelong book lovers whose paper tomes we can pry from their cold, dead fingers, but the evidence strongly suggests that plenty of others are rapidly warming to their shiny new e-readers. US sales of e-books generated about $90.3 million in revenue in February — roughly triple the sales reported in the same month last year. To boot, they were the dominant format for trade titles, a category that includes adult and children’s works. Meanwhile, printed books declined 34 percent and 16 percent in those respective areas, with gentler, single-digit drops for education and religious titles. That follows strong January sales and echoes what Amazon said about e-books outselling print versions two to one. To be fair, of course, February is a time of year when people who received e-readers during the holidays load ’em up with bestsellers — you know, to keep them entertained during spring break.
Continue reading E-book sales triple year-over-year, paper books decline in every category
E-book sales triple year-over-year, paper books decline in every category originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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You may not have ever thought about it, but the far-too-often-used keyboard combination of Control + Alt + Delete had to have been brought into existence by some random coder at some point in technological history. But wait, it wasn’t just a random coder. The keystroke combo is attributed to [David Bradley]. He was one of the original designers of the IBM Personal Computer. You can even hear his own recount of the story in the video after the break.
He came up with the idea after growing weary of waiting for the Power-On Self Test (POST) routine to finish during each reboot of his software testing regiment. We remember the old days of slow hardware and can understand his frustration at the lost time. He decided to throw in a shortcut that allowed the software to reboot without power cycling the hardware. The original implementation used CTRL-ALT-ESC, but was later changed so that one frustrated keyboard mash couldn’t accidentally reboot the system.
[via Gizmodo]
[Image Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Filed under: pcs hacks 
Yesterday HP Canada put up their registration page for their new “TouchPad” tablet. This runs webOS, has a 10.1-inch display, 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The only hint of it being available was sometime this Summer and no price points. We received a tip from a retail outlet presentation slide that points to the TouchPad […]
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Time-traveling dinosaur drama Terra Nova just can’t seem to get off the ground. It’s already been delayed twice, supposedly due to laborious special effects work. But digitizing dinosaurs isn’t the real reason this series is stuck in production purgatory. More »
There are endless flavors of “Linux on a stick,” tasty downloadable versions of that OS which run from removable storage and let you take Linus’ progeny for a spin without dedicating any of your partitions to the cause. There have been ways of making this work with Windows, too, but now Microsoft is getting into the game properly. That leaked version of Windows 8 we looked at recently contains a feature called Portable Workspaces, which enables you to take a 16GB (or greater) external storage device and dump a bootable, runnable copy of Win 8 on there. It remains to be seen just how many copies one could create, and whether they ever expire or, indeed, whether they can themselves be copied onto an HDD like a ghost image, but it’s easy to see this as a boon for support personnel. Well, support personnel of the future, anyway.
[Thanks, Peter]
Windows 8 to feature USB-runnable Portable Workspaces, sales of 16GB thumb drives set to soar originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Lately, anything goes when a RIM CEO gets in front of the media. Fortunately, it was the other CEO, Jim Balsillie, talking to Bloomberg this time delivering a calm, cool rebuttal to all the lukewarm PlayBook reviews. His consumer defense is largely based upon the PlayBook’s ability to receive software updates (we received three in the brief time we had our review unit) throughout its lifetime. Jim, as you can imagine, preferred keeping the conversation focused on how the PlayBook is fully functional today when used in combination with a BlackBerry handset in business environments. Balsillie did seem to hint that the consumer experience could improve relatively quickly, saying, “We’ll have an over the air email client to announce very very soon. We have BlackBerry World — our user conference — in a couple weeks. Stay tuned for all capabilities we have coming out on this stuff.” See the man dance on the hotseat right after the break.
Continue reading RIM: PlayBook email client ‘very very soon,’ 3G model this summer
RIM: PlayBook email client ‘very very soon,’ 3G model this summer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 01:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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So Flip Video’s last offering wasn’t terribly amazing, but we had faith that the USB pocket camcorder would get back to its simplistic roots — you know, until Cisco axed the whole division, along with 550 souls. Well, the truth is that the company was indeed working on something rather cool, and though we’d only heard whispers until now, the New York Times‘ David Pogue says the day after Cisco brought down the guillotine is when the FlipLive was due to hit shelves. It would have been a livestreaming camera, connected with WiFi to the cloud, allowing users to share johnny-on-the-spot videos with the entire world in real time. Instead, the camera and its little red button are off to that great big server in the sky.
Cisco’s axing of Flip had an additional casualty: the unannounced FlipLive streaming camera originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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In technology that is lifted straight from Robocop, Brazilian cops will be outfitted with glasses that can scan faces in a crowd and automatically pick out criminals. The glasses use advanced facial recognition technology that can scan 400 faces a second at 50 yards away. More »
You already know the strange powers of Stephin Merritt, but today we’re talking about real magnetic fields. Powerful electromagnets, it turns out, can do remarkable things to the brain — in this case, prevent a volunteer from reciting “Humpty Dumpty.” The carefully directed magnets temporarily disrupt the brain’s speech centers; the volunteer can still sing the rhyme using different areas of the brain, but simply can’t overcome a series of stammers when trying to merely recite it. Of course, it’s not all mad scientist applications: the UK team experimenting with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) thinks it can help us understand and treat migraines (as we’ve seen before with the Migraine Zapper), depression, and ADHD, among other ailments. But improving physical well-being doesn’t make for nearly as entertaining media — see the British inflict some involuntary quiet time in the video above.
Magnetic fields shut down speech, permit love songs (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
A little less than 30 minutes before purposefully driving her minivan off a pier with her four children inside, Lashanda Armstrong updated her Facebook status from her Blackberry: “I’m sorry everyone forgive me please for what I’m gonna do… This is it!!!” More »
Can a porn “parody” of a science fiction classic have reasonably good acting, nice special effects, and a plot that you could give a crap about? That’s the real final frontier. More »
IDC Research is expecting 1.5 million tablets will be sold in Canada by the end of 2011. There is no insight into the sales from each manufacturer but everyone will be dropping at least one new tablet this year: Apple with the iPad 2, Samsung with the Galaxy Tab 8.9 & 10.1, Motorola with the […]
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Upending a theory of physics maintained for over a century, researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered that magnetic fields coming from light waves are 100 million times stronger than previously believed, creating new possibilities for harvesting solar power. More »
It was not long ago that an early build of Windows 8 leaked to the Internet. While that build was a bit dated, there now appears to be users who have build 7955 in their hands. While the build has not fully leaked, it is clear that users outside of…
After taking a breather from cranking out new tablets, Archos is at it again, this time with the Archos 7c Home Tablet, a 7-inch number that ARMdevices.net caught on camera during a visit to the company’s Chinese outpost. This slate packs a Cortex A8 processor and RK2918 chipset, which the rep quaintly says is “faster than any chipset you can find” — you know, owing to its 1.2GHz clock speed and all. Alas, it runs Android Gingerbread (2.3) and not Honeycomb (3.0), so you’ll have to do some hacking to get your Android Market fix. Although the 7c has a capacitive display, the woman leading the demo appears to jab at browser links with her finger — a throwback to some less-than-responsive resistive screens we’ve tested. On the bright side, 1080p video plays smoothly — at least in the few seconds before the camera pans away. The 7c is headed to the US and Europe in June for an unknown price, but for now you can head past the break to see it in action.
Continue reading Archos flashes 7c Android tablet, brags about its 1.2GHz clock speed
Archos flashes 7c Android tablet, brags about its 1.2GHz clock speed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted by Jiří Semecký, Software Engineer
Themes in Gmail are great — there are tons to choose from and they give your inbox a personalized look. But we’ve heard from many of you who thought it would be even better if you could give Gmail an even more personalized look and create themes completely on your own.
For a while, you’ve been able to set your own colors, and starting today you can customize your inbox with your own background image too.
Just go to the Themes tab in Settings and choose “Create your own theme.” There, you can select background images for the main area and the footer.
Faeborit Coment: “Story of my life.” – L4a
