.::REALITYRECALL::.

Rumor has it that HP is preparing to enter the cloud-based music storage fray. A reader at PreCentral sent in what purports to be a confidential PowerPoint presentation indicating the TouchPad will launch with an HP-branded music and movie store, as well as a smart syncing service that caches frequently accessed media for local playback. This may very well be the “Music Synergy” that SVP Steven McArthur mentioned to us. Amazon has already launched such an app and it’s all but official that Google is planning the same thing, so it only makes sense that the company would want to imbue webOS with similar powers. We can’t verify these claims ourselves and the slide above is clearly a wonky Photoshop job, but it’s would hardly be surprising after snatching up Melodeo and the streaming music service Nutsie. And, while webOS and Android are working to banish the quaint ritual of plugging your cellphone into a computer, we can only imagine what the Lala team is up to — maybe Jobs has them washing his turtlenecks.

HP may bless webOS with cloud-syncing music store originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 18:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Unlike lasers, HPM beams don’t need a lot of accuracy. With a fan [of HPM energy] you can target 10-30 small boats. If you can knock out 50-75% of the engines in a swarm, you can then concentrate on the remainder with lasers or kinetic [cannons].”

To develop better defenses against such attacks, the contractor received $150,000 from the Air Force to test-fire microwaves at military computers. No word on whether said defenses involve generous use of tin foil.

US government contractor developing ‘microwave gun,’ Hot Pockets tremble originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android: SwipePad for Android is a simple way to get to your often used apps quickly no matter what your doing. More »

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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 […]

Related posts:

1. HP Canada puts TouchPad notification page live with “Planned availability this summer”
2. HP officially annouces Veer, Pre 3 & TouchPad
3. TELUS HTC Desire to be priced at $79.99 on 3-year

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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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 »

Faeborit Coment: “Story of my life.” – L4a

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 »