What's New In Gadgets, March 15, 2010

Photo Source: Stock.xching

Moore's law states that the number of integrated circuits on a computer chip doubles about every 18 months. Scientists began to get very worried about this a few years ago. They thought that they were getting near the limits on how small you could create something. What I am talking about here is etching circuits on a chip. They have been made smaller and smaller and that is how they get more of them on the computer chip. There is a new wrinkle in making things smaller. Research is ongoing and nuclear engineers are doing it. The same type of energy research used in fusion research is being applied to the production of chips. A super thin beam is being created that will allow chip makers to keep up with Moore's law by etching even smaller circuits. The beams that will be used are plasma beams and who knows what other applications might be thought up for them?

Nvidia now claims to have developed the world's first personal supercomputer. The computer is appropriately called the Tesla personal supercomputer. It is said to be about 250 times faster than the fastest personal computer out today. It runs on 4 GPU that each contain 240 processing cores. This gives the computer a total of 960 cores, putting that old quad core of yours to shame. The machine delivers a 4 teraflop performance. Guess what? This monster supports Windows XP 64 bit and 32 bit operating systems, but 64 bit is recommended. It will also run with Linux 64 bit and 32 bit. It is expensive, but really cheap when you consider that it only costs about 5 times more than one of today's better desktops. The price is $10,000.

Samsung has really been feeling their oats lately. Their televisions have really come a long way and are now top of the line. They are coming out with a couple of nice media players. The players are named R1 and R0. I don't know if that will be their permanent names or not. They both feature technology that will optimize your files to save space. The R1 is credit card sized and yet can play a lot of video that need not be converted. The R0 is cheaper and is said to have excellent sound and video capabilities.

A new device is out called the Magic Wand Remote. The reason for the name is that it looks like a magician's wand. The way it works is that you teach it up to 13 commands from your old television remote control and then you can get your tv to do what you want by making the appropriate gesture that you taught it for that function. There will be no more use for you old remote. The next thing you do is invite company over and wow them with your new wand. There is an added bonus, unless someone knows the appropriate move to control the ole telly, they won't be able to know how to use it. This would stop my brother-in-law dead in his tracks.

This year's electronics show featured an unbreakable cell phone. The maker stated that you could drop it from a ten story building, or submerge it in water down to 25 feet for about a half hour. The company representative told a reporter that if he could break the phone that they would give him one. First he put it into a fish tank and it still worked perfectly. Unfortunately for the company when he repeatedly hit the phone on the corner of the tank the screen broke. Oh well, maybe next year.

There are cool new sunglasses on the market. So what you say that is nothing new! Well these sunglasses have another function built in, but I guess that you suspected that, or I wouldn't be writing about them. They have Bluetooth incorporated into them. This will come in very handy for those phone calls that you make while driving in the car. I don't think that this will work out too good around the home as I do not believe that wearing sunglasses at home is the ideal condition.

One company has created a paper calendar with each page representing a day of the year. What makes this calendar so different from any others that you have ever seen is the fact that the calendar peels off the days automatically. Hey can anyone really be so lazy that they need this thing?

More uses are being found every day for GPS. A new device known as the Travelogue has just entered the scene. No it doesn't give you directions, but there are plenty of other devices that will do that. The Travelogue just keeps track of everywhere you go and allows you to enter that on a Google map. Actually for those that plan to take exotic vacations and visit many different places this is kind of cool. It has enough memory to hold up to 260,000 waypoints, that include altitude, speed, time and distance. It works with Windows 7, Windows XP, or Windows Vista operating systems. The price of the device is about $150.00.

Have you ever needed a flashlight in an emergency, only to find that the battery was dead? You had it sitting on a shelf for years just for that emergency, but the battery didn't have a long enough shelf life. That problem has been solved by the Porsche sports car people. Enter mPower. It contains two 3 volt lithium batteries and a reserve lithium battery with a shelf life of at least 20 years. This thing is not even called a flashlight, but an illuminator and if you think that a Maglight is expensive this baby sells for about $289, but does come in two colors.

There are all sorts of watches out there. There are the prestige watches such as Rolex, the odd watches such as the ones that you can see all the gears working and the ordinary watches like Timex. Now there is a new watch hitting the scene. Oh it doesn't do anything that another watch can't do, but it does have a unique feature. The face of the watch contains dinosaur bones. It doesn't do much for me, but I guess that someone out there might like it.