If you’ve ever wondered about the effectiveness of side impact airbags in automobiles, you can stop wondering now. According to an article in Consumer Reports which references a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the use of head-and-torso airbags reduces the risk of death by more than one third, and even more for [...]

Well, it’s Tuesday November 14, 2006 and the new Zune MP3 player from Microsoft was supposed to go on sale today. Let’s just check the newspapers to see if it did. Uh…let’s see…oh yeah…there it is. The Seattle Times has a spread on the official launch event at Westlake Park in Seattle, featuring Bill Gates [...]

Toshiba has a new line of MP3 players seemingly intended to go up against the iPod nano line from Apple, namely the gigabeat P Series. The new series from Toshiba is comprised of 2 models, the P10K and the P20K, which has 2GB of flash memory. Both weigh in at 83×31.9×12.9mm and 50 grams. [...]

CNN has distilled a number of their articles into a brief guide on making the right financial decisions and called it 25 Rules to Grow Rich By. While most of those rules are investment-related - eg how big of a retirement fund to aim for (see Rule 10) - , there are however, 2 [...]

The Sony PlayStation 3 next-generation game console finally hit the shelves in Japan a few days ago. It’s been a long haul for the PS3 and its Cell processor - we first made note of the thing back in November of 2004. The delay in getting the PS3 to market seems to have been due [...]

Well, CNet finally got around to reviewing the 2nd gen iPod shuffle MP3 player, and the result is not a pretty picture. While the original shuffle got a rating of 6.7 and a rank of ‘good’, the newer smaller shuffle shuffles in with a paltry 6.3.
Seems that while CNet liked the low price and [...]

The received wisdom re global warming as espoused by Al Gore et al may well turn out to be accurate - we’re incompetent to decide. While the preponderance of the evidence does seem to be in their favor, the 4 main reasons holding us back from warmly endorsing the initiative against global warming are:
-The Holocene [...]

Well the gadget big boys finally got their paws, uh hands, on the soon-to-be-available (11.14.06) Microsoft Zune digital music player. Seems that MSFT fedexed all three models over to both Engadget and Gizmodo a couple of days ago, for their review and approval.
In a shocker, both sites liked the Zune, thought highly of its [...]

On the Edge of Blade Runner is a not-bad 52:16 documentary on some of the challenges of making the sci-fi classic Blade Runner eg the experience of working with troubled author Philip K. Dick.
…via Live Journal

Ambient Devices is the maker of some very nice, info-at-a-glance, minimalistic gadgets that provide useful data in an unobtrusive manner. We’ve made note of the Ambient Umbrella that flashes at you when rain is forecast, and the Ambient Orb that glows red when your investments are under-performing. Both of these gadgets, and the Ambient Weather [...]