NanoSapiens » Gadgets

P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor

vladowsky — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:07:02 +0000

P3 International P4460 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor

Shows the operating costs of your household appliances
Accurate within 0.2%
Calculates cost and forecasts by week, month, and year
Displays eight critical units of measure on the large LCD display
Built-in battery backup

Now you can cut your energy costs and find out what appliances are actually worth keeping plugged in. Simply connect these appliances to the Kill A Watt EZ, and it will assess how efficient they really are. The large LCD display will count consumption by the Kilowatt-hour, same as your local utility, letting you calculate your cumulative electrical expenses and forecast by the day, week, month, even an entire year. Also check the quality of your power by monitoring voltage, line frequency, and p

List Price: $ 59.95

Price: $ 59.95

Scientific Study of Dinosaurs

Image by ShellyS

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AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to A-Female Extension Cable (9.8 Feet/3.0 Meters)

vladowsky — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:07:06 +0000

AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to A-Female Extension Cable (9.8 Feet/3.0 Meters)

One 9.8-foot-long (3.0 meters) USB 2.0 A-Male to A-Female high-speed extension cable
Extends your USB connection to your computer by 9.8 feet; for use with printers, cameras, mice, keyboards and other USB computer peripherals
Constructed with corrosion-resistant, gold-plated connectors for optimal signal clarity and shielding to minimize interference
Distributed by Amazon; backed by one-year AmazonBasics warranty
Ships in Certified Frustration-Free Packaging

AmazonBasics products are quality electronics accessories offered at a great value.The AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to A-Female Extension Cable with Gold-Plated Connectors lets you extend your USB connection by 9.8 feet and offers full performance for all your USB devices. If you need a longer USB 2.0 cable to connect a peripheral that’s out of reach of your computer, this extension cable is just what you’re looking for.
High-quality, gold-plated connectors help resist corrosion for a l

Price: $ 4.49

High-Speed Flexible USB 4-Port Hub with Splitter Cable for Sony Playstation 3 PS3 Slim Xbox 360 Nintendo Wii

Brand New generic 4 Port High Speed USB 2.0 Hub
Supports Windows Vista, Windows XP, 2000, 98, and Mac OS 8.6 and higher
Slim High Speed USB 2.0 4 Port Hub
no Battery Required just Plug and Play
Color: Black

High-Speed Flexible USB 4-Port Hub with Splitter Cable for Sony Playstation 3 PS3 Slim Xbox 360 Nintendo Wii

List Price: $ 9.99

Price: $ 0.66

The Great Eastern Street wall in London’s East End received a facelift last week, a brand new paint job for 2012, celebrating the release of SOULCALIBUR V. The visual masterpiece in the heart of Shoreditch took three long days and was painted by the East End’s infamous painter decorator extraordinaire, JIM ROCKWELL: Graffiti artist & Creative Director of ENDoftheLINE. A time-lapsed video, filmed and painted on location shows the entire process from beginning to end, capturing the mural in all its glory. Leading video game publisher NAMCO BANDAI teamed up with the cutting-edge aerosol mural artists ENDoftheLINE to celebrate the release of the game on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The huge 16 metre wall features legendary character Nightmare and new additions to the roster Patroklos and Ezio Auditore from Assassin’s Creed®. The Great Eastern Wall is an ongoing project from ENDoftheLINE, a permanant Public Art Gallery that, in the last two years has featured some of London’s most notorious graffiti artists, and has hosted international artists from around the globe. *Soundtrack ‘The Bulletin’ is from Lazy Habits upcoming self titled album. www.lazyhabits.co.uk Soulcalibur V is now available on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. For more information, check out the official website of Soulcalibur V: soulcalibur.com or your local Namco Bandai games website www.namcobandaigames.eu Talk about this game, share tips & win goodies at http
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Playstation 3

Image by Christine Krizsa
Earlier today my department had lunch at a local Thai restaurant. I’ve never seen a PS3 game console prominently displayed in a restaurant before. What’s even more odd is that the staff/mgmt does not use a computer.

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Tech Gadgets for Better Sleep

vladowsky — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:03:18 +0000

Calling all insomniacs: Dick DeBartolo shares the gadgets that help you sleep… and wake up! *Subscribe: bit.ly

gadget heaven

Image by The Shifted Librarian
I’ve been in gadget heaven for the last week. I finally finished "Professor Layton and the Curious Village" after playing it for 15 hours in 20-minute spurts on the train to and from work. I also gave in and finally upgraded my Treo 650 to a Centro, which I am really loving. I am once again productive with a smartphone, and the speed of Sprint’s 3G network has been great so far.

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Dropping the F-BOMB, A Disposable Spy Computer Funded by DARPA

Peter Murray — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:25:01 +0000

Witha PogoPlug NAS box, a few antennae, flash memory and some batteries, and you've got a cheap, disposable F-BOMB with which to collect data on adversaries.

Attach a camera to a drone, fly the drone around the back of the house, locate the bad guys. Robotic UAVs are being used for surveillance by everyone from the military to local law enforcement to emergency personnel. But if you think about it, drones are kind of big and really noisy, not the ideal tool for spying on someone. Their data gathering capabilities are limited too and they’re really expensive. What about a computer, small and durable enough for you to toss over a fence or inconspicuously attach to a car? Equipped with Wi-Fi cracking software or GPS, it could infiltrate someone’s computer or track someone’s location without them knowing.

Allow me to drop the F-BOMB. The Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors, that is. Invented by Brandon O’Connor as an alternative to high-tech and costly spy devices, the F-BOMB is made so cheaply with off-the-shelf parts that you’ll feel perfectly okay with losing one or two. Very convenient when it’s sitting in the backyard of a drug lord hideout.

Before building the F-BOMB, O’Connor challenged himself with several constraints. He wanted multiple wireless radios, USB capability for expansion (add GPS for example), battery life that lasted hours to days, a size small enough that it won’t be found by the “bad guys with guns,” as he calls them, and do all this without spending thousands or even hundreds of dollars.

The key addition was the PogoPlug. The PogoPlug is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box, a data storage device through which people can share information over the Internet. It runs on Linux which makes it pretty user-friendly, according to O’Connor. Normally the boxes cost about $150, which would have made the F-BOMB too expensive for O’Connor’s purposes, but the company is having a hard time selling the devices. PogoPlug’s misfortune becomes O’Connor’s advantage as he can now purchase them for just $25 on Amazon.com. And that’s the most expensive bit of hardware. Add the antennae, eight gigabytes worth of flash memory and a plastic casting that’s 3D-printed and you’ve got a little spying computer you can build for under $49. Four D batteries will provide power for 30-plus hours.

Aside from being cheap and reproducible, building a monitoring device with commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, components from Amazon or craigslist means when the bad guys find it in their backyard they won’t be able to trace it to you. Were the F-BOMB to require any kind of made-to-order, a determined person could find the manufacture, start asking questions.

O’Connor talked about the F-BOMB (“because one time I worked for DARPA and they love terrible acronyms”) at ShmooCon 2012. As you’ll see in the video, he’s nothing if not enthusiastic.

The F-BOMB won an award from DARPA’s Cyber Fast Track program. The title of the project is “Reticle: Leaderless Command and Control,” which kind of makes me wonder what else he’s developing. As Forbes reports, O’Connor was tight-lipped about what DARPA might do with the technology.

But we can venture a few guesses. The platform can be attached to a quadcopter and dropped onto a roof. It can be hidden inside a carbon monoxide casing, or any other imaginative cover container such as a box of stale Triscuits that you’re pretty sure no one’s going to touch. As I mentioned before, Wifi-cracking software will allow you to eavesdrop on a person’s computer, and you can track someone with a GPS module. And if you’re more in the business of science than spying, you can add temperature or humidity sensors to collect data for meteorological research.

O’Connor has a security and software consultancy called Malice Afterthought. He learned about such things teaching at cybersecurity schools for the military as well as working in the security devisions of VeriSign and Sun Microsystems. The website describes him as “dreamer and mad scientist capable of making even the most challenging tasks into reality.” Being that he kind of runs the consultancy himself, he probably wrote the description himself, which is kind of weird. Anyway, he certainly has created a little security monster in the F-BOMB. Effin’ cool.

[image credits: Forbes and Wired]
[video credit: USSJoin via YouTube]
image 1: F-BOMB
image 2: F-BOMB
video: F-BOMB

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A Look At BMW’s Semi-Autonomous Driving Car

Peter Murray — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:29:25 +0000

The upright, folded hands is a sign of confidence. So is driving a BMW. With ConnectedDrive Connect, BMW owners can do both!

While robotic cars have a ways to go yet before rolling (themselves) out onto showroom floors, BMW is incorporating driver assistance features into its cars that drivers can use – and they can sell – sooner rather than later. Their semi-autonomous driving system, ConnectedDrive Connect, was announced last year. The car maker has finished its closed track test runs and has released a video of the car out on the Autobahn for some good old fashioned hands off driving fun.

ConnectedDrive Connect includes four types of sensors – radar, camera, laser scanners and ultrasound distance sensors – that allow it to track cars in front of it up to a distance of 50 meters. It also detects cars in adjacent lanes. A driving simulator produces driving strategies on the go. For example, the car slows if it’s moving to fast into a turn, and it taps the brakes to maintain control going downhill. Like any cruise control the driver sets the speed and the maintains a safe distance behind a car in front of it. The system can be enabled between speeds of 30 and 180 km/h (81 mph). I’d be a little worried if that truck in the next lane splashes some mud on the car that it doesn’t go pell mell into the car in front of me. The sensors are “largely resistant to dirt build-up” according to BMW, but I’d wipe down regularly just to be safe. BMW owners probably don’t need to be reminded of that anyway.

But it’s really no fun to just simply maintain a safe distance, not with a Beamer. If the car in front of you is going too slow, ConnectedDrive Connect senses your impatience, changes lanes, and leaves the slowpoke in the dust.

To date the BMW 5 Series has logged 5,000 kilometers in “highly-automated” mode on freeways. When can we expect to see BMW drivers begin using both hands to apply their makeup? The company says it’s a few years yet before CDC goes into production. One of the things they’ll have to improve is the GPS tracking. Right now they only take the car out on roads that they’ve mapped to within centimeter accuracy.

It is becoming increasingly likely that your next car will have some kind of driver assistance. Last year carmakers spent over $10 billion in advanced driver assistance systems. By 2016 that number could increase to $130 billion, according to an ABI Research projection. The rapid spread will be due largely to their incorporation into more mainstream cars rather than being an option for luxury cars. As the technology is improved production costs are decreasing, making it increasingly feasible to add driver assistance to less expensive cars. Volkswagon’s Temporary Auto Pilot (TAP) is similar to ConnectDrive Connect in that it maintains a safe distance behind cars and keeps the car from veering out of the lane. And both Volkswagon and BMW get the job done without the ungainly periscope-looking sensor on Google’s Prius.

[image credits: World Car Fans]
[video credits: motorsixty via YouTube]
image: ConnectDrive Connect
video: ConnectDrive Connect

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