Christmas will soon be upon us and for most of is it’s time to hit the shops and bag those choice gifts for your loved ones. It can be tough to know what to choose from the plethora of equally exciting (or not) trinkets, so I’ve put together a range of gifts to suit your that Tech obsessed person in your life.

$5-$10 range

The panic button, the only key that’s missing from modern keyboards and you can add that special key to any keyboard, phone, TV, controller, Boss or Mother-in-Law you like with the cheap and cheerful Panic Button! OK, the button doesn’t actually do anything but it’s comedic value is enough to bring a smile to any keyboard jockey’s face, so if you know of someone who’s just a little glued to their keyboard, bring a little hilarity to the holiday season for the bargain price of $5 (£2.99) from IWOOT.com.

Continue reading…

It’s that time again, time to review some of my cherry picked smaller stories of the week for those that might have missed them. This time round we’ve got an Adobe Flash update that doesn’t suck. OK, sucks a little less. Flash 10.1 beta was unleashed to the willing public with GPU video acceleration for certain Nvidia cards on Windows, but perhaps more importantly reduced CPU usage across all platforms. What does this mean? YouTube that doesn’t make your Mac or PC red-line that’s what. A step in the right direction Adobe, maybe Flash isn’t a lost cause after all. I’ve certainly seen some improvements on my netbook and Mac.

Continue reading…

Freddy vs Jason, King Kong vs Godzilla, The Donald vs Rosie. Some of the most recognizable names in history have also sparked some of the greatest rivalries of all time. The engineers at Apple and Microsoft are no different, going toe-to-toe many times over the past few decades. Apple creating their iPod line and Microsoft creating the Zune line. Now the two similar foes do battle in our arena; The Apple iPod touch 32GB vs. The Microsoft Zune HD 32GB.

Continue reading…

Welcome to Pixelated Geek’s Weekly Tech Wrap-up, a quick and humorous run through of some smaller stories from the world of consumer electronics and technology.

First batter up is the hideous looking OpenOffice Mouse. This beast features a full 18 buttons, 63 programmable profiles and even an analogue joystick! What more could you want from an instant carpel tunnel surgery inducing monstrosity? How about a soon to hit street price of $75 (£45)? Obviously not a fan of the Magic Mouse, a World of Warcraft-loving gamer decided his mouse didn’t have enough buttons and went ahead and set up a company to do it better. WarMouse is aiming this at the OpenOffice, MMO playing crowd and they might go potty over it, but I think I’ll stick to my trusty Logitech thanks.

Continue reading…

People that have dealt with web development already know: Internet Explorer (IE) can and has been known to cause a big deal of problems, issues, annoyances, call them what you will. Aside from the rant that I could spark in myself about padding, text, etc., this post is actually for the benefit of all the IE users out there who have been experiencing fun problems with their browser. But by “fun” I mean “not fun at all.”

IE gives us several problematic issues: The browser doesn’t open. The browser opens and closes itself instantly. Or it opens and gives us the good old “Internet Explorer is not responding” error. Before you go calling all your tech support numbers to pay oodles in getting this issue fixed (i.e. a hash shop in my local area giving you “factory reset” as the only option), try out these few techniques. I cannot guarantee this will fix IE all of the time, but as a local tech, they are a few common practices that I have found to fix the browser.

Continue reading…

Amazon, just before its press event in New York, has leased the details and pre-order onto its US website. Sporting a 9.7″ diagonal e-ink screen (1200 x 824 res at 150 ppi, 16-level gray scale), auto-rotating screen and a built-in PDF reader over the original Kindle plus boosted storage to 4Gb onboard. The rest of the details remain similar to its smaller brother with this one clearly aimed at reading news papers, magazines and text books. I don’t know about you but I think this one would be fantastic for reading journal articles. Why can’t you launch this in the UK Amazon?!

Slim and sexy

With the current Kindle selling well, especially to the over 50s age group Amazon might have a hit on their hands if they can convince users to switch their news paper subscriptions over to the digital format. If you’re in the market for one, head on over to Amazon to get your pre-order in. Just like last time, pre-orders will be filled on a first come first serve basis so if you’re keen on it even though it’s got a heafty $489.00 price tag you best get your card out.

If you’re unfamiliar with the eBook reader, here’s a video:

Windows 7 RC

True to form Windows 7 RC (7100) is now available from your favourite not so legitimate sources should you not be able to wait for 5th of May. For a little reassurance you’re not installing a malware loaded hacked editions check out iStarted Something.

No significant UI changes have been noted so far and it just seems like an incremental update at this stage. We’ll know more as the installs become more widespread.

Windows 7 news have a gallery of the RC installed here.

[Via DownloadSquad]

True to form, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) has been released by Canonical to the general public featuring updated stock apps (Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 3), a faster boot and efficiency improvements for suspend and resume. Also in the mix is a revamped notification system, support for the Ext4 file system and intelligent connection switching between WiFi and 3G with supported cards. 9.04 comes in 3 discrete flavours Server, Desktop and Netbook Remix, sounds like a trance tune but is a version optimised for low power chips and small screens (read better than XP on your EEE).

For those that feel the love for KDE over Gnome, Kubuntu has also been updated to 9.04 with parallel updates. Xubuntu and Edubuntu will follow suit soon should they be your poison.

Head on over to Ubuntu.com and pick your flavour.

There was a time when I didn’t think Apple listened to my prayers for the iPhone. Steadfastly sticking to it’s line of MMS is not important, who needs copy and paste and why would you want to do anything but have a headset connected to bluetooth. With iPhone 2.0 the only way to get some of these things, and more I might add, was to jailbreak your phone. Apps such as SwirlyMMS, BiteSMS, PDANet and Clippy tried their best to add what Apple wouldn’t and succeeded to a certain extent, but it’s never as good as when it’s actually part of the system. iPhone 3.0 for me, delivers on many fronts. Stereobluetooth is there, lacking controls at the moment, but it’d be a stupid omission should Apple not put it in (mind you I wouldn’t put it past them). Cut, copy and paste is also implemented in a pretty good way, system wide and in all apps that support text entry and viewing. Finally I will be able to copy and paste things into messages and posts. MMS has also been added which will be a boon when I want to send pictures to less geeky friends who aren’t with the always connected vibe. Bluetooth and cable tethering are also available at the moment, whether that makes it into the final release however is anyone’s guess. Enhanced message management has also been added to the messaging client including forwarding of messages and deletion of individual messages. Having played with iPhone 3.0 beta I can say that all these features are integrated nicely, of course what else would you expect from Apple, and seem as if they’ve been there from the off. One of my favourite features that 3.0 will bring is something that most Mac users will already be accustomed to, Spotlight. Having switched to Mac for my personal machine a year and a half ago, Spotlight really struck me as the most useful feature of OSX compared to Windows. Spotlight on iPhone is just as good, shrunk down to an intuitive and pretty rapid (for a mobile device) search tool. I jailbroke my 2.2.1 iPhone specifically so I could use search in mail, the one thing that I thought was really missing from the iPhone mail client. With searching of almost everything on the iPhone, Spotlight for me, along with copy and paste are the reason to jailbreak at the moment.

Hit the read link to continue reading

Continue reading…

The New Age Cop Car Cometh

The cop car is something that most people take for granted as being pretty crappy. Ok you have high-speed persuit cars and armoured vechicles but your day-to-day beat car is reduced to the lowest common denominator. If we are to believe the movies (and we do learn everything from TV and movies) cop cars are only good for one thing, smashing up in droves. Carbon Motors are attempting to change that with their E7, thought to be vapourware (he’re looking at you Phantom) the first showing of the gadget ladened E7 prototype has put our fears to rest. The in-developement purpose built police cruiser is equipped with all the things a modern day police officer needs. A 0-60 time of under 7 seconds thanks to a 300 BHP diesel engine, an operating specification of a good 250,000 miles, suicide (pillerless) doors to make getting perps into the thing easier, a hoseable interior for when the action gets a bit too great for your dumbass criminal passengers and integrated bull bars for when that joyrider just won’t pull over.

Hit the read link for a video of the E7 and more on the gadgets this car wields.

Continue reading…