Archive for Gadgets
May 6, 2008 at 10:41 am ·
Filed under Releases, Gadgets
Time for another Outlook plug to fly out the beta-zone and into the great wide open. I’ve been on Xobni for a few months now, and I must say I really enjoy the plug. There’s a load of options this thing has, but I’ll tell you what I use it for. The rest is something you can dig out for yourself. So, the coolest part is that when I click on an email in my inbox, Xobni keeps track of all conversations I had with the sender. It also lists all the attachments that have been sent by me or to me from the selected contact, so I no longer need to search my inbox or any folders I might have dumped the email in. Other than that, it keeps track of the contact’s activity - which is the timeline of the conversations. That means that I can see when it is most likely that this contact is behind his or her computer. With a very easy ’schedule time with x’ I can book a meeting, or I can see the contact data in a glance. Sure, all of this information is already in Outlook, but Xobni just makes it accessible even faster. Less time spent looking. Yeey!
So, below is a real sized image of the little sidebar that is added in Outlook. I’ve clicked on my own name from an email I sent to someone, so this lists my activity. I peak during lunch, funny enough, and apparently there’s no time during the day that I have no email activity. Maybe I should send this to my boss :)
One of the other nice little thingies about Xobni is the fact that it also keeps track of ‘lost contacts’. It’s like ‘hey, did you know it’s been three months since you’ve had any conversations with x or y?’ - I love that.
Get Xobni for your Office Outlook edition and join the fun!
After the jump: a video of Bill Gates promoting Xobni and the Xobni demo video. Read the rest of this entry »
April 14, 2008 at 11:01 am ·
Filed under Games, Technology, Fun, Gadgets
I have a few friends who own a Wii. As much as I love XBox360 and the experience it gives me, I’ve got to admit that this Wii has something special about it. I love playing with that too. I’m planning a Wii Weekend together with my friends to have 4 of them bring their Wii to a location, probably the garden of ‘friend number 1′, and have a giant screen with a beamer there, so we can game in group. I think that’s going to be a super great and fun evening. Other than that, the reason why I write here about Wii, is the clip that’s been released from the TED talks. Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. Lee is a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Enjoy this trip :)
January 21, 2008 at 2:24 pm ·
Filed under Technology, Gadgets
Your Halo3 games will never be the same anymore if you use these super hi-tech deluxe contact lens displays. It’s in fact a virtual display, beamed directly to your eyeballs, which will most certainly improve your ‘in-game’ experience.
“The lenses, developed at the University of Washington, may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but tests have already been carried out on some unfortunate rabbits like the one in the photo.” says UK mag Tech
When perfected for human use, the lenses could bring anything from immersive video gaming to multi-purpose screens that deliver data from all our electronic devices, including phones and computers. Although that sounds truly innovative, it’s best not to be driving a car or shopping at the super market whilst playing shoot’em up games. People might be looking very weird in your general direction.
Don’t expect this thing to show up soon at your local store though, because the prototype has just been tested. The current simple lenses contain circuitry and tiny red LEDs that form a rudimentary display, although the issue of delivering the power to illuminate them has not yet been solved. That’s likely to come from radio-frequency power and solar cells on the outside of the lens, says Tech. Anyways, this sure is a pretty fresh take on the virtual things, and it opens up the doors to a splendid new experience. It certainly is a welcome change for those unsexy goggles you have to put on today.
