Sure, the Japanese press release translates to “internet book,” but there’s no mistaking that 10.1-inch screen and 1.6GHz Atom running Windows XP on 1GB of RAM: Sony’s new VAIO W is a netbook, folks. We’re not sure how or why the company decided to enter this market after six months of hawking the overpriced VAIO P and insisting that netbooks were a “race to the bottom,” but we’re itching to see what the US price tag on this guy is — with a nicer-than-usual 1366 x 768 screen, what we’re hoping is a typically-solid VAIO keyboard, and some sort of home media-streaming software called VAIO Media Plus, the W could be a big winner if it’s not crazy-expensive. Fingers crossed! Video after the break.

Update: We just watched the video — kind of an ugly little bastard, innit? ASUS and Acer are way beyond this chunky design language now, and honestly, we expect way more from Sony.

Update 2: Reuters is reporting a Japanese price of

The hot spot for online scam artists has moved again — from e-mail and Google to Twitter, according to the Better Business Bureau.

Websites, e-mails and tweets have been popping up since late spring promising to help job seekers make hundreds of dollars a day, simply by tweeting from home.

But here’s the hitch: Customers first have to sign up for a “free” trial for an informational CD or training packet and submit their credit card information to pay a minor shipping fee.

Most people don’t notice the provision, nestled deep in a mass of terms and conditions, that the trial period begins when the customer places the order and includes the time spent shipping the product. What happens next, according to the bureau, is that customers don't cancel their membership in time and end up shelling out $50, even $100 or more, every month.

July 6, 6:00 PM PST After we licked our wounds, we made sail changes all day. With just the two of us and a lot of sail area, each change is a major project.

Therefore, we think before we act, and we triple check everything. The one who’s steering watches for the one who’s on the fore-deck.



I took that picture with an iPhone tracking our progress on our GPS app, while steering, as Mark was hoisting the Code 3 sail.

We spent hours talking about the weather charts as well as our own observations from the boat. Mark and I agree that we should dive deep south to find some compressions with more wind. The weather forecast doesn’t agree with us. It rarely doe, but we don’t agree with the weather forecast and we have good reasons for that. Consider the following: we carry a highly accurate Vaisala Barometer. This barometer employs 3 different high-end pressure sensors, has the algorithmics built-in to always pick the two best sensors and average them. This is a high precision instrument and we named her Kulani. Well Kulani is telling us that we are on the 1018 isobar and all the forecasts and weather charts are telling us that we are on the 1015 isobar. It’s kind of like the weatherman telling you that it is raining, but the sun is shining out of your window. So, we’ll follow our own science and sense our way down that 1018 isobar.

We now have a lot of sail area up: full main, staysail and large, strong Cuben-Fiber code 3 tight luff headsail. We’re going fast into the night. We’re three hours from Sunset and getting ready to sail through one more wet and dark night. [After which, the wind should be at their backs more, and the sailing will be faster and easier and less splashy - BL] Turning the corner of this ridging high pressure system fast is what we want to do.

Fly Pegasus Fly through the night!
, Course 227° T, Speed 14.7 Knots, Lat 29° 42′ N, Lon 123° 23′ W

Philippe Kahn founded Borland, invented the Camphone, and decodes human motion. He’s also a fellow outdoorsman, splitting time skiing Tahoe and sailing in Santa Cruz. He’ll share his Transpac 2009 sailing race with us live from the Pegasus Open 50. He and Mark Christensen set the race record for a double handed team in 2008 with a time of 7 days, 15 hours, 17 minutes and 50 seconds, besting all boats in overall time for that year.
[Previous Pegasus Sailing posts on Gizmodo, Pegasus]

Read the original post:
Pegasus Open 50 Raceboat Log: Day Two, Heading South and Kulani the Barometer [Sun Powered Fun]

Best non-IM use of iPhone 3.0’s push notifications yet: Prowl is a $3 app that pushes Growl notifications from your Mac to your phone. Growl’s a global notifier that plugs into everything from BitTorrent apps to iTunes to Mail.

The possibilities really are endless: You can be pinged with a push notification when a torrent finishes downloading, you get a new IM or email, you’re mentioned on Twitter, or anything else Growl can notify you about.

You can customize which notifications are pushed to your phone and when they’re sent (like only if you’re not at your Mac), and Prowl stores up to 30 days of them. Way awesome, since it effectively makes iPhone push notifications infinitely extensible. [iTunes, Prowl via Daring Fireball]

More here:
Prowl Pushes Growl Notifications to Your iPhone [IPhone Apps]

The VholdR ContourHD is a helmet camera with 720p capabilities.

The Price: $300
The Verdict: This helmet cam is great for shooting mountain bike or skateboarding shenanigans, especially if you can steady the camera a bit – a snug helmet mount will work better than the handlebars. Although some sort of steadying device would help a lot, since heads tend to shake more than most areas of the body, this camera tends to shake as much as most others that also lack a fish eye type lens (Don’t get me wrong, it has a 135 degree field of view, which is wider than almost all cams on the market. And 135 degrees seems to be a good angle for chasing and filming friends with. ) Colors and detail come out really well, except on snow, which tended to be washed out and over exposed. But it shoots in HD: 1280 x 720 at 30 frames per second, which is output as a 16:9 720p picture. Or 60 frames per second in SD. And that’s a rare thing in helmet cameras these days.

The ContourHD’s record/stop functioning is matter of sliding a giant tab up or down and is easy to operate, even with ski gloves on. Aiming the device is pretty simple, too, because the field of vision is determined by dual laser pointers, which remind you where your cam is pointing. It is not waterproof, but it held up fine to getting pummeled by wet snow for a run when I duct-taped it to the nose of my snowboard (probably not a recommended mounting option). Speaking of mounting, the camera comes with a goggle-strap mount and a 3M sticky-backed flat surface mount. Optional mounts are coming, including a suction mount for attaching to cars and smooth surfaces of outdoor gear.

The camera itself isn’t in a housing, which is great for the form factor, but the aluminum and plastic case will run into some issues: If you fall on this camera, there’s no layer of protection for it, and it will get hurt on big enough falls. Wind noise could also be a potential problem, as you can see in some of the videos on VHoldR’s site. And there’s no way to fully submerge this camera, so its not good for water sports.

You’ll also probably want a MicroSD card bigger than the 2GB that comes with the camera, good for an hour of HD footage. The device does charge by USB, though, and having a rechargeable lithium battery, swappable no less, in such a device kicks ass. The battery claim is 3 hours while recording SD, so less with HD.

The two significant shortcomings I saw in the pre-production demo unit they sent have apparently been addressed in the final production run. Those “bugs” they’ve addressed: the Record on/off switch now has sufficient magnetic strength to stay on when vibrating hard, and the battery will no longer shake loose under serious vibration.

HD on a sport camera.

Rechargeable lithium ion battery

Mounts only on helmet for now.

Not waterproof enough for submersion

Randy Salzman is a volunteer Ski patroller. He rides an alpine/carving board but can pretty much ride anything.
[Vholdr]

See the original post here:
VholdR ContourHD Helmet Cam Lightning Review [Review]

We’ve made no secret of our admiration of the iPhone 3GS’s video capabilities — Apple has managed to integrate a video camera that’s both easy to use and surprisingly high quality into an already-stellar device. But for all its merits, the iPhone 3GS suffers from being, well, a phone. No matter how good the phone’s video quality is, it’s still prone to shakiness as its director moves around. And while the microphone may be high quality, its position at the bottom of the phone definitely isn’t ideal recording whatever you’re pointing the camera lens at.

Fortunately, an answer is on the way for all you mobile videographers. A new startup called OWLE (Optical Widgets For Life Enhancement), is currently working on a mount that should resolve most of these issues. The mount, which you can see in the images and videos below, gives you a much more stable way to hold the phone, making it much less prone to bumps and shakes. The mount also improves your recording quality by including a 37mm camcorder lense and a front facing microphone, which plugs into the phone’s headphone/mic jack. There’s also planned support for external lighting and power. All in a package that could slip easily into a backpack or laptop case. In short, this is exactly what you need if you frequently use the iPhone for video.

Read the original: 
OWLE: A Mount That Turns Your iPhone 3GS Into A Mobile Video Workhorse

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter’s trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. This weekend’s “Moonfruit” and “GorillaPenis” trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren’t easily recognizable and aren’t current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there’s little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren’t necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem.

What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.

What The Hashtag reports that it has analyzed and tracked 2,775 hashtags since its launch in February 2009. So far the site has 800 registered users (registration needed for detailed info entry; simple definitions can be submitted without account). The site is adding the ability to Tweet from the site and opening up its API in the near future.

What The Trend, which we reviewed here, is a fairly similar service that also makes sense of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter. The two services have many of the same features but a few differences. What The Trend pulls in news stories and photos about trending topics, but doesn’t include some of the analytics and graphing that What The Hasthag offers. It appears that What The Hashtag’s details goes more in-depth with the detailed descriptions and stats, but both sites are pretty useful when trying to make sense of Twitter’s enigmatic Trending Topics.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Read the original: 
What The Hashtag: Your Guide To Enigmatic Twitter Hashtags

Resoundingly positive reviews can’t be a bad way to start a product cycle, and that’s just what the Pentax K-7 has, and now lo and behold, it’s on sale via Amazon and JR We’re not seeing any bundles at this point, just a body-only listing, but we can’t imagine those are far off if you want to be patient.

[Via Electronista]

Read – Amazon
Read – JR

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Pentax’s K-7 DSLR now shipping via online retailers originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With all the cool weapons you see in games and movies, it’s only natural that fans will attempt to replicate them. Here are three that definitely caught our eye. Continue reading to see more.

See the rest here:
3 Incredible Homemade Gaming, Movie Weapons

Gamil Design created this massive 8-foot tall Donkey Kong from Post-it notes in preparation for Raleigh’s Kerby Derby parade. Continue reading for the stop-motion video — “be sure to stay after the credits!”

[via Kotaku]

Go here to read the rest:
8-Foot Tall Donkey Kong Made from Post-it Notes