Today’s Wall Street Journal has reviews of some photo organizers and some printers that can produce portrait-sized prints. They compare 2 free photo editing and organizing programs: Picasa for Windows and iPhoto for the Mac. The review commends Picasa’s editing and enhancement options, but gives the over-all nod to iPhoto, largely because of its [...]

Toshiba today announced the development of a rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery that recharges in only one minute … to 80% full. A full 100% recharge takes a few minutes. The company states that this is about sixty times faster than typical li-on batteries. The improvement is due to the use of nano-particles at [...]

Hitachi released a new version of μVNC a few days ago. μVNC, for ‘Virtual Network Computer’, is desktop software which supports operation of a Personal Computer from a remote device such as a PDA or a mobile phone. On the server side μVNC can support Windows XP/2000/NT/Me/98, Linux/FreeBSD and Mac OS X. [...]

Telstra, the Australian telco, has commenced a new service that allows customers to send e-mail and text, picture and video messages via Internet-enabled public payphones. The payphones offer a color LCD touch screens and support video messaging via e-mail via a built-in Web camera.

Samsung’s new PDA slider phone, the SPH-M4300, is the first from that company to provide wireless LAN connectivity. The phone works on the Pocket PC 2003 Phone Edition and supports Outlook, Word and Excel. It also features an MP3 player with 3D surround sound, a 1.3M pixel camera and large-ish 2.8-inch LCD [...]

Samsung recently unveiled an improved transflective film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) designed for mobile devices. The display is intended for car nav systems and personal media players. Its benefits include a 160 degree viewing angle and a 400:1 contrast ratio. Product announcement.

Sony has announced the Cyber-shot DSC-T7. The digital camera is full-featured and yet very thin at 92 x 60 x 15 mm.

5 mega-pixel resolution
2.5 inch LCD screen at 230,000 pixels
stills at 2592 x 1944
movies at 640 x 480 @ 30 fps (Fine)

[...]

The latest issue of NewScientist has an article entitled “13 Things That do not Make Sense”, wherein they list some of the current mysteries in the sci-med universe .. including such staples as dark matter and dark energy. They also make note of the The Pioneer anomaly, which refers to the observation that [...]

ViewSonic says that its VX924 and VX724 LCD monitors are the fastest on the planet .. at a pixel response time of 4 milliseconds. This is a vast improvement over the typical/average figure of about 16ms for LCDs, and now compares reasonably well with the 1ms response time for average CRTs. [...]

I witnessed a happy guy take delivery of his brand new 2005 Porsche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet on Friday. Words do not suffice, so the story is in pictures … …and if a picture is worth a thousand words, [...]