Saturday, February 13, 2010

Now Available [Now Available]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/WZquNe38CKM/now-available

Beauty, love, ingenuity, forgiveness, and duct tape. This week's Now Available showcases some colorful cameras, a brilliant and simple home networking solution, a redeemed 27" display, and a tripod that turns your iPod Touch into bizarro Spiderman.

Panasonic GF1 (Colors!)


In the micro-four-thirds class of cameras this sucker is hard to beat. While these new colors definitely take away from the subtle Leica charm of the black model they're still solidly built and reliable devices. Coupled with a nice list of compatible lenses and you have a pretty competitive system. For the time being these guys are your best bet in the nascent digital four-thirds camera genre. Oh, and look forward to more color options stateside since Japan just got these offerings. Check em' out here.

Joby Gorillapod for iPod Touch


This malleable tripod comes from a purebred pedigree of handy and easy to use ultra-mobile camera accessories. Granted, those are designed for taking steady photos in awkward areas, while this guy is mainly used to provide convenient screen viewing on whatever you can perch it on. We're big fans of Gorillapods here at Gizmodo, so the introduction of a model specific to the iPod touch is a nice addition to the product line—though not a must have day-to-day accessory. If you've been getting by rigging up a kickstand out of duct tape and your retainer it's probably best not to mess with what works. For non-MacGuyver's you can snare it here.

Belkin Home Base


With your ever growing list of tech peripherals it's great to see a device that can help manage some of the chaos. The Belkin Home Base is rather remarkable in that it can adapt to whatever you wish to plug into one of its four USB ports. Your clunky printer under the desk can finally be moved and accessed remotely, freeing up some much needed foot room. That pile of external hard drives can be somewhat less of a pile if you take the largest and bulkiest and tether them into the Home Base. Really, at around $65 this thing should be a welcomed addition to clutter management. Save yourself here.

Dell 27" UltraSharp U2711


Yes. This is the same monitor involved in our ongoing iMac saga. But as we've pointed out Dell's version uses a conventional CCFL backlight as opposed to the iMac's LEDs. Since the LEDs are the likely culprits in jaundiced iMacs it's safe to go ahead and embrace these beautiful monsters. The $1099 price tag seems a tad high considering you can get a base 27" iMac for $1700, but if a matte finish and beautiful 2560 x 1440 resolutions are your thing then grab it, here.



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Addonics Bite-Sized NAS 2.0 Reviewed: Lightweight Contender [Nas]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/x3K1bJtd4t0/addonics-bite+sized-nas-20-reviewed-lightweight-contender

The good people at MobileMag got a chance to review the new Addonics pocket NAS 2.0 NAS2XU2, and they report that for the price and the size, it's worthy of your attention.

You guys showed some interest when we got our first look at the NAS2XU2 back in November, and MobileMag reports that by and large it lives up to its promise. The pocketable device sports 2 USB ports and now has gigabit ethernet, improving the slow transfer speeds that plagued the first model.

MobileMag had some trouble getting the built-in media sharing system to work, but the unit supports SMB and Samba so with some tinkering it will likely do fine as a media server. As a mini FTP server, a hub for USB devices, and Bit Torrent server, however, it worked like a charm.

The NAS 2.0 NAS2XU2 is available for $59.99 from Addonics. [MobileMag



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Radeon HD 5870 Gloriously Abused By Asus, Made Super Overclocking-Friendly [Guts]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/DzlsNCb3OEU/radeon-hd-5870-gloriously-abused-by-asus-made-super-overclocking+friendly

The Radeon HD 5870, as shipped, is a very powerful graphics card—more than most people need, even, and at the very least, enough for anyone. Except, apparently, Asus.

Asus' plans for their newest Republic of Gamers (ROG) Radeon HD 5870-based card cater to a specific breed—the overclock-everything-for-the-sake-of-it PC tweakers, who are dwindling along with their gaming platform—but really, anyone can appreciate them: by default, the card's GPU is cranked from 850 to 900MHz, and doubles the RAM to RAM to 2GB of DDR5 memory.

If that's not enough, you can dial your frequencies up using included overclocking software, which saves new settings directly to the card. And if you start to notice that delicious, telltale smell of melting silicon, you don't even have to navigate software to fix things: mashing a physical button on the back of the card reverts it to stock settings. Brilliant.

The ROG 5870 doesn't have a price or North America release date yet, but word is it's already hitting the streets in China, so full release details shouldn't be far off. [Zol via Techreport via SlashGear]



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Ricoh CX3 reviewed, just marginally better than CX2

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/13/ricoh-cx3-reviewed-just-marginally-better-than-cx2/

Ricoh's CX2 seemed to impress a-many reviewer when it launched last autumn, so it's sort of odd to see the camera's successor hitting the market so soon after. The appropriately named CX3 recent sat down on the test bench over at Photography BLOG, and while critics were quick to point out how appreciative they were of the extras (a 720p movie mode, namely), they couldn't help but notice what a small step forward this was from the prior model. In fact, they found little to no good reason for existing CX2 owners to upgrade, though they did deem the image quality to be "excellent" and noted that newcomers shouldn't hesitate to give this one a whirl. Still, we were disappointed to hear that the low-light performance was underwhelming despite promises that it had been improved, and for $400, you've got a lot of other options in the point-and-shoot realm.

Ricoh CX3 reviewed, just marginally better than CX2 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Craft a Temporary Light Tent Out of Paper and Binder Clips [DIY]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/5nlnSEVb7Mc/craft-a-temporary-light-tent-out-of-paper-and-binder-clips

If you need a quick and dirty light tent but you don't want to shell out for a commercial model or spend time building a DIY version, this light tent can be built in a matter of minutes from office supplies.

Over at the blog Mostly Color—a blog focused on color theory, design, and photography—they have instructions for a simple-to-make light tent. The components are nothing more than folded paper and binder clips. It doesn't have the same versatile diffusing qualities as a commercial model made out of ripstop nylon and paired with a set of studio flashes but for simple product-style photography with natural light or a diffused overhead flash (the paper walls of the light tent are a bit thick for traditional through-the-side diffusion) you can't beat it for price and ease of construction.

Check out the link below for instructions or if you're in the mood to take a bigger DIY project make sure to check out how to make a light tent out of cardboard and tissue paper or K'Nex building toys. Have a favorite photography-related DIY hack? Let's hear about it in the comments.



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