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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-09b
News that alas doesn't include health care for paychecks
Under her skin-tight WET suit: tech Whatever side you take on the coming controversy over whether WET ($50 for Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, in stores 9/15, rated M) is too violent, too sexy & too gory, there's a major tech angle to the way the extremely acrobatic action & extreme camera angles came together. The core of that part of the story is with Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) in Quebec, where they were able to meld physics with athletics, a little wire-fighter suspension of disbelief & a lovely retro-cinematic look & feel. Tracey can plug you into A2M, or video snippets or the game itself. Contact: Tracey Thompson, Bethesda Softworks (Rockville, MD) 301-354-4216 tthompson@bethsoft.com http://BethSoft.com
Intel at retail - a new "sleeper" CPU It's almost counterintuitive: in many applications, a new Intel Core-i5/750 processor ($200-ish) will deliver performance comparable to the Core-i7/860 ($300-ish) or 870 ($600-ish). Those beefier engines do make a big difference in heavily compute-intensive environments, but for the things many power users (even gamers) really do, the new Core-i5/750 does respectably well on speed & very well indeed on heat & power consumption. Even if you don't get geeky enough to want to get into the details, it's still kind of interesting that we live in a world where these are choices you can make off the shelf when shopping at a local store. Feel free to ask Todd where there's a store near you with Intel inside. Contact: Todd Garrigues, Intel Americas Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) 301-497-8997 todd.c.garrigues@intel.com http://Intel.com
Photo fx 2 A/V tutorial online Hit http://www.tiffen.com/photofx_homepage.html for an audio/video online tutorial that showcases the flash, the glam, the pizzazz, the finesse, the élan & the fun that new Photo fx version 2 can do to snapshots in an iPhone or iPod Touch. Hilary has offered to send review copies, get you info, run your own photos through it & show you the results & more, all trying to make it easier for you to cover; maybe a few minutes with the tutorial can help that happen. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216 haraujo@tiffen.com http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: Ex-post - oh, fax, oh Message delivery improvements have historically tended to involve improvements in speed or in cost or both, from the runner-messengers of ancient times to postal systems, telegrams, phone calls, faxes, e-mail, instant messaging & so on. Do you still have a way to send & receive faxes? We get very few faxes that aren't uninvited sales pitches. The times we're asked to send a fax almost always involve adding a signature to an agreement. If you have a fax machine, does it share a voice line or do you lay for a separate line for it? Like many products at the end of their useful era, fax machines are increasingly not replaced when they fail; we should not ignore that the recent economic era favors casting away things that may have outlived their usefulness. The fax machine is not yet a relic of some primitive past; new models are still sold in the office stores & fax features are still present in some of the newest multifunction printers. You & we can think of a great many ways to accomplish what a fax machine gets done using other resources that we already have on hand; if that's so, why isn't the category in the obits? The answer is people: we're more accustomed than most of the world to finding effective ways to communicate, so we keep scanned signatures on file that we can electronically embed in a Word or PDF document & send as an e-mail attachment. It hasn't yet become important that the others catch up to us because, ironically, there's such an ebb in the flow of faxes that they don't perceive any urgent need to learn these new skill sets. Any office's constituency (clients, customers, members, etc.) will govern when it abandons fax machines altogether; the less sophisticated their circle of correspondents, the longer fax machines will still be around. We have no doubt that some marketer will find an opportunity in that to use something in the cloud to virtualize fax service at little or no cost to consumers; imagine, for example, if there were to be a Google Fax service. It will take a vending-machine-simple alternative to finally make those fax machines go away; without that, they may yet be on those store shelves in another 10 or more years.
Special Report Bonus Review: Honeywell Energy Smart Heater We took them up on their offer to try the Honeywell Model HZ7200 Energy Smart Cool Touch Heater as we consider products that help us gadgetize for winter. There really are some smarts in the approach this little heater takes to warming the air around it. An arc of LEDs around the control knob glows green to show the current room temperature as close to 65, 70, 75 or 80 (degrees Fahrenheit). You can set the control knob for your target temperature in that range & the heater will automatically switch to a lower heat output (ergo lower energy consumption) as it approaches its target temperature. You can also set the control for "frost watch" which will automatically turn it on if the temperature drops below 55, or for "high" which just runs it at full blast. The power on/off switch is separate, so once you find a setting you like, you won't have to hunt for it again every time you need the heater. The plastic housing won't burn your fingers if you need to pick it up & move it; there's even a molded-in carry handle & the power cord can wind around a spool hidden in its base. The insides are pretty simple, with 4 concentric hexagons of coiled heating wire & a sizable fan in a cowl. There's also a separately switched oscillation motor just above the base to help create a more evenly dispersed bubble of heat across a slightly larger volume. Honeywell also offers online advice that suggests saving money by lowering the thermostat for the house overall while using these small room heaters for the places you actually spend time; your mileage may vary. Bottom line: We like the Honeywell Model HZ7200 Energy Smart Cool Touch Heater a lot for the intelligent way in which it handles itself while keeping our living & working spaces comfortable.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: ATH-A700 Art Monitor headphones Imagine you're a young Superman at the moment you first discover that you have x-ray vision; that's a feeling your ears may experience the first time you listen to music through a pair of Audio Technica ATH-A700 Art Monitor headphones. We're hearing performance & production details we had never noticed before, even through our expensive Sennheiser phones; the clarity is not at the expense of the ability of these headphones to provide exemplary audio transparency from extremely low to dangerously high volumes, without coloration. That said, the very transparency of these headphones let us easily perceive coloration at the source (like the mikes used in some early jazz recordings, the equalization in the audio boards of some of the studio-produced albums & the room acoustics in recordings made during live concerts). The headbands are also unique with curved wings that accurately & comfortably position the ear cups exactly where they need to be. The cloth-covered circumaural (surround) pads greatly reduce the amount of ambient sound you hear when wearing these (great for a listening room but lousy for jogging - an application for which they're clearly unlikely anyway); they also cause some warming of the ear, which may be more welcome in cooler months than during the summer. These are big headphones with cups that are more than 4" in diameter housing drivers that are more than 2" in diameter. Their frequency response is rated 5Hz-35 KHz (well beyond the human hearing range at both ends); we've heard the tooth-tickling highs from the top of a pipe organ's range & the almost imperceptible lows of the internal resonance of an acoustic bass. Bottom line: Audio Technica Import Series ATH-A700 Art Monitor headphones are the best of breed we've heard so far for critical listening by audio purists & by those for whom details within audio are important.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Universal Document Converter 5 Has it ever seemed curious to you that when you need a picture of a digital document that you have to print it out & take a picture of the hard copy? Have you ever wondered how to keep the spiders from snagging an e-mail address on a Web page & flooding you with spam? We've always loved the fCoder Group Universal Document Converter (a virtual printer driver) for these tasks, but until this week, it just hasn't been available for our new Core-i7 systems running 64-bit Vista. Now that UDC 5.0 is here, we have its functionality again at hand (confirmed when Marty turned his election campaign sheet into a JPG), but the story doesn't end there. It can now generate output files with up to 6000dpi resolution. You can instruct it to change page size on the fly, or to add a watermark. When you choose PDF as your target format, it can password protect that file & it can generate as big a PDF as you need, up to 10GB. You don't have to start with document files; if you can print it, UDC can handle it. Bottom line: the fCoder Group Universal Document Converter version 5.0 adds surprising new capabilities, including 64-bit Windows compatibility, to a favorite utility that we unhesitatingly recommend.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Remington Personal Groomer We have a lot of male friends who tend to grow beards in the winter then shave them clean for the summer, so we initially thought of a geeked-up razor as a gadgeting up for winter product, but it could also make sense as holiday tech. The Remington PG-360 Personal Groomer "8-in-1 grooming system" is a kit of cutters & accessories, some of which may be difficult for a bachelor to use. For example, the "neckliner" is a curved plastic guide to help trim a neckline, but it's a lot easier to get straight when a companion is involved. The "sleek charging stand" tries hard to be a good non-contact charger but it's not well designed; the material in the base is soft & weak, making it tough to simply seat the unit, so you end up picking up the whole thing & squishing it on like support hose. Curiously, they are using a NiCad battery for this, which requires recycling & is illegal to simply discard. The mini-foil shaver, not disregarding its claim of a "Titanium revolutionary trimming technology" left our test subject with a decidedly non-trivial case of razor burn. The fine trimmer (intended for beard & moustache trimming) & the wide trimmer each proved useful for sideburn touch-ups. The nose & ear hair trimmer also proved useful. (There's better news in the Remington product we review in our next issue). Bottom line: for men who have no sensitivity to razor burn, the Remington PG-360 Personal Groomer "8-in-1 grooming system" may represent a good value for its combination of useful grooming tools & accessories in a single kit.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Belkin Micro Auto Charger We were willing to ignore half of what's in the box when Belkin offered their Micro Auto Charger with Charge Sync Cable for review. You may have heard legends about us - perhaps the only place on the planet that neither has nor wants an Apple iPod product - so the USB to iPod dock cable is wasted on us. The piece we did appreciate is the piece that plugs into the lighter to provide power to a USB port because in this case, unlike everything else we've ever seen, it fits the plug snugly without a big chunk of anything sticking out. There's a minimal lip that makes it easy enough to unplug without obtruding & the flat top manages room for both the USB socket & a power pilot LED. This is the first lighter to USB adapter we've seen that can stay in place for enclosed lighter plugs behind closed ash tray cover doors or drawers. We since learned that the Micro Auto Charger is also available without the iPod cable (for $15 sted $20). Bottom line: If you can get by with just one USB charging port in the car, the Belkin Micro Auto Charger is the least obtrusive choice we've seen.
Sign here Marty made two pledges anent his township trustee election campaign: September will be paperless (no documents will be printed all month) & he will place campaign signs in no yard other than his own. There are now 2 identical signs (visible from all 3 parts of this "T" intersection), hand painted on 4'x8' corrugated plastic sheets, hung by bending paper clips into a shower curtain hook shape from a length of electrical conduit that's lashed (with twine, reinforced by a little duct tape) to 8' garden stake uprights. There was a challenge when it rained; the balance of underestimating the wet weight of the plastic sheets & overestimating the tensile strength of the paper clips ended up with the wires unbending and letting the sign drop; the clip count per sign was increased from 5 to 8 to compensate but that wasn't enough, so we upgraded again to shower curtain hangers. If it needs another upgrade that will probably involve replacing the garden stake uprights with another few pieces of conduit. No aren't you glad that you don't live & vote here? Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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