DVD – NerdBeach

Ice Cube Jewels For The (Excessively) Discriminating Taste

So, you are throwing a high end black tie party (maybe to celebrate the release of the new Star Trek movie on DVD?) and you want to impress a few folks. Well, consider throwing a little bling in the drinks to get their attention. The 3D ice cube gems allow you to create your own kind of icing for the drinks.

I would imagine that clear cubes would work best – After all, it would resemble diamonds, and it would avoid leaching coloring out to the drink itself. It would also not last long thanks to their diminutive size, but a scoop of diamonds would look pretty cool going into a drink.

Of course, ice cubes shaped like the Enterprise (along with a large ice sculpture of the same design) would impress me the most at such a party, but to each their own.

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Rubber ice Trays?

The first rubber ice cube tray was invented by Lloyd Groff Copeman. One day in 1928, while walking through some woods collecting sap for maple syrup, Copeman noticed that slush and ice flaked off his rubber boots easily, rather than adhering to them. Having recalled this incident over lunch with his patent attorney, he conducted experiments using rubber cups, and later set about designing and then patenting different types of tray: a metal tray with rubber separators, a metal tray with individual rubber cups, and a tray made completely of rubber

source: wikipedia

Nokia N97 looks to be a solid mobile contender

Greg Chaffins

There is no doubt that the iPhone's meteoric rise in the mobile market has other phone manufacturers scrambling to incorporate similar features in their new models, and the latest offering from Nokia goes one step beyond emulation.

The Nokia N97 is a 3G phone that offers a single point touch resistive screen along with a slide out QWERTY keyboard. The device's home screen features a widget customizable layout, with drag and drop ease of configuration. The programs offer the finger friendliness of flicking, allowing the user to quickly slide through lists of songs or photos.

The N97 comes standard with an impressive 32GB of memory, and there is a MicroSD slot for additional storage. The display comes in with a 640×360 pixel resolution, giving the phone more memory and a better display than the current iPhone or G1. Another nice addition is that the phone supports flash. This allows it to browse flash enabled web sites, something that the iPhone, with its purposeful exclusion of the web standard plugin, cannot do. That is you can watch Hulu videos, among others, on this phone.

The phone snaps a 5 megapixel picture, and captures video at 640 x 480, good enough for a DVD. But taking a picture is not much good when you are lost, and navigation is a breeze with the N97. The phone offers assisted GPS, but a really cool feature is a built in compass that will automatically orientate a map based on your position. And since you now know where you are, you can automatically send your position to friends with its social location app. The phone features Maps 3.0, which includes topo and 3D maps. This could be one of the first navigation phones that could be handy on the trail as well as the road. The software supports PC route syncing and sharing routes with others.

The phone has the memory and the hardware, but that comes with a price. The unsubsidized price is reaching about $700, but that should fall as it is picked up by major carriers. While the phone does have Wi-Fi support, this is probably one phone that works best while connected to a solid data stream.

Lenovo introduces digitizer packing professional grade laptop workstation

Greg Chaffins

Desktop replacement laptops definitely have a market sector, and the soon to be released Lenovo's Thinkpad W700 is an excellent example. The W700 is an eight pound beast of a notebook that features a nice 17 inch screen. What's more, the laptop even incorporates its own Wacom digitizer. This should make machine a strong favorite with professional graphic designers and CAD users.

OF course, being classified as a professional workstation quality machine would mean that it needs a professional quality display to meet up to expectations, and the W700 meets that requirement, The display is a professional grade (notice the use of the word "professional" a lot here?) WUXGA screen with 400 nit brightness and an auto color calibration sensor that allows adjustments on the fly.

Other features in the workstation class laptop include:

3.0 Ghz Extreme Quad Core Processor
up to 8GB DDR3 RAM
1GB NVidia Quadro FX 3700M graphics
Dual HDD Bays supporting RAID
Dual Link DVI, VGA, and Display Port
Full number pad
7 in 1 card reader
5 USB ports

The Lenovo W700 is scheduled to be available in September. Now, remember how that word "professional" was used a lot earlier? The price reflects this, and the base model starts around $3000. But by the time the machine is decked out with both drive bays full and 8GB of memory (along with other options, such as a BD-RE drive), it could be considerably more.

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Lenovo Press Release Follows:

Lenovo Unleashes PC Beast on Mobile Workstation Market with ThinkPad W700
Delivers Industry's First Built-in Digitizer and Color Calibrator Along with Ultimate Power, Multimedia and Display Technologies

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – August 12, 2008: Lenovo today introduced the ThinkPad W700, a 17-inch widescreen mobile workstation engineered with game-changing technologies and innovations to exceed the demands of the most data and graphics-intensive users. Lenovo brings the industry's first built-in digitizer and color calibrator to a mobile workstation and combines these innovations with first-in-market technologies such as new NVIDIA® Quadro FX mobile graphics and supporting the upcoming Intel® mobile quad core processor. Other features such as optional dual hard drives with RAID configurations, up to 8 GB of high speed DDR3 memory, a range of wireless connectivity options and excellent multimedia capabilities including an optional Blu-ray™ DVD burner/player make the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation the standard-bearer for power and performance in a mobile workstation.

"Lenovo has engineered a new breed of mobile workstation with the ThinkPad W700," said Peter Hortensius, senior vice president, Notebook Business Unit, Lenovo. "No other PC manufacturer has a mobile workstation that delivers the sheer power, performance and cutting-edge innovation that Lenovo has packed into the ThinkPad W700. The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation flat out delivers the command performance our customers demand at the desk as well as in the field."

According to IDC, the compound annual growth rate for the worldwide mobile workstation market has been more than 60 percent per year since 2002.1The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation extends Lenovo's commitment to workstation users, complementing Lenovo's W500 mobile workstation and ThinkStation S10 and D10 workstations. As workers in fields such as digital content creation, computer-aided design and manufacturing, digital photography and science fields including the oil and gas industries become increasingly mobile, they are demanding the full-featured performance of a desktop workstation in a mobile workstation.

First-in-Industry Engineered Innovation
The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation takes customer driven innovation to a new level with an optional built-in palm rest digitizer and color calibrator. Lenovo and Intel collaborated to integrate the color calibrator and digitizer into the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation. Designed for digital content creators and users, the mobile workstation's digitizer helps them easily configure an image, either mapping it to the entire screen or to an area defined by the user. High performance users, especially digital photographers, will benefit from models with the built-in color calibrator as color continues to play an important role in their work. The calibrator automatically adjusts the display's color in up to half the time of many external calibrators and with higher accuracy, resulting in the most accurate, true-to-life images in an integrated package. Together with the upcoming Intel® mobile quad core processor, multimedia designers and animators now have outstanding quad-core processor performance and true color replication that is critical for realistic digital creations and workflow efficiencies.

Super-Charged Performance Unleashed
Supporting the latest Intel processor technologies including the upcoming mobile quad core processor, the mobile workstation can be configured with up to 8 GB of memory with an additional 2 GB of Intel Turbo Memory. Lenovo also offers models with Intel® vPro™ technology for complete manageability. The mobile workstation can be equipped with dual internal hard drives, including solid state drive storage. The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation offers both the NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 2700M and 3700M Open GL graphics processors with up to 1 GB of dedicated video memory for exceptional graphics performance in a 17-inch mobile workstation. The hard drives can be configured for RAID 0 to help users access and save their data faster than traditional disk-writing methods, or users can choose RAID 1 for mirrored data redundancy.

The mobile workstation includes WiFi wireless connectivity. Additionally, users can connect to other devices wirelessly using mobile workstation models featuring Bluetooth and ultra wideband technology. Models supporting WiMAX will be available later this year.

New Heights in Display Technology and Multimedia Excellence
As the company's first product with a 17-inch display, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation delivers an unparalleled viewing experience with a combination of leading technologies. Its optional 400-nit WUXGA display provides up to twice the brightness of earlier ThinkPad mobile workstation models, and the 72 percent wide color gamut provides more than 50 percent greater color intensity. The high resolution, extreme brightness and wide color gamut coupled with the NVIDIA Quadro FX MXM graphics solution results in a user experience unequalled in a mobile workstation today. For external connectivity, the ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation provides support for Dual Link DVI, Display Port and VGA. A 7-in-1 multicard reader, and five USB ports give users flexibility in transferring and accessing digital content. Additionally, the workstation comes with an optional compact flash reader and Blu-ray™ DVD burner/player. An optional mini-dock extends the mobile workstation's capabilities with eSATA and digital audio ports as well as convenient cabling for power, external monitors and peripherals.

Packed for extreme performance, the mobile workstation also features BIOS/port disablement and an optional fingerprint reader, a smartcard reader and hard drives with full-disk encryption. It will carry more than 20 certifications from independent software vendors.

"Our engineers use Lenovo ThinkStation workstations to help them design the next-generation Williams – Toyota FW31 race cars, aiming to make them faster and more agile, with greater performance than the competition," said Chris Taylor, IT manager, AT&T Williams. "We're
thrilled to see Lenovo deliver the workstation performance we've come to rely on – now in a mobile, portable solution."

Pricing and Availability2
The ThinkPad W700 mobile workstation will be available beginning in September with models starting at $2,978. It is available through Lenovo Business Partners and www.lenovo.com.

Talented Fan Builds His Own Working Tumbler Batmobile

Greg Chaffins

This falls under the old adage, if you want something bad enough, build it yourself. Bob Dullam apparently believes in that, and from the looks of things Bob wanted a Tumbler Batmobile.

The Tumbler has been an ongoing project in his two car garage, and Bob has been posting progress updates to the SuperHeroHype Forums. The Tumbler was built using nothing more than photos and extra features from the DVD as a reference.

How much does building a working Tumbler cost? Well, it has been a one man project, so labor is not really easy to calculate, but Bob figures that he will have $50k – 70k invested in it when complete. Not to mention the DVD, of course.

What's next for an obviously gifted Batman fan? Well, Bob has been hinting that the Batpod looks interesting. We are already looking forward to seeing it in the not too distant future.

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