Computer Gadgets New

Every major city has to deal with the troubles of neighborhood graffiti. On the one side it’s a way for some of today’s youth to express themselves and on the other it is costly to remove and lowers property values in neighborhoods. Well, graffiti art has now crossed into the 21st century as one clever graffiti artist recently hijacked several digital billboards in Southern California.

According to reports, 18 year old graffiti artist Skullphone hacked into 10 digitial billboards owned by Clear Channel around Hollywood and LA and placed his signature logo between the normal cycle of billboard ads running on the giant screen. While it may be a giant leap for graffiti art, obviously Clear Channel is going to be busy upgrading the security on their billboard systems.

No matter how you feel about graffiti though, this is one kind of graffiti art I can actually get behind. It wasn’t offensive, it wasn’t vulgar, and probably only took minutes of reprogramming to remove it instead of hours wasted repainting and scrubbing.

Read more at Textually.

Posted Mar 26th 2008 4:48PM by Ryan Block
Filed under: Transportation

Sometimes even the plugged-in Engadget reader needs to pick up and head out for more relaxing climes. Well, for our fourth birthday this month we’re treating six lucky people to two round trip tickets destined for anywhere Virgin America flies. We wouldn’t want you traveling in something that doesn’t have power, network, and a seatback terminal, though, so you don’t have to sweat about completely unplugging to get from point A to point B. Check out the rules below, and good luck!

• Leave a comment below. It is in honor of our fourth birthday, after all, so we wouldn’t mind a bit of adulation — but it’s up to you.
• You may only enter this specific giveaway once. Although you can enter up to six times through the course of this six part giveaway, if you enter this specific giveaway more than once you’ll be automatically disqualified, etc. (Yes, we have robots that thoroughly check to ensure fairness.)
• If you enter more than once, only activate one comment. This is pretty self explanatory. Just be careful and you’ll be fine.
  
• Contest is open to anyone in the 50 States, 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so be mad at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. That winner will get two round trip tickets anywhere Virgin America flies. Tickets are valid through May 31st, 2008, and are blacked out May 22-26. Approximate value is $599 per pair. You can only win once.
• Entries can be submitted until Friday, March 28th, 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
• Full rules can be found here.

Oh, and be sure to enter part 1, part 2, or part 3 for another chance!

Posted Mar 26th 2008 3:29PM by Donald Melanson
Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

You may still not be able to get an iphone in Canada (at least officially), but you can now at least grab a spiffy new 16GB Samsung YP-P2, which is a whole 8GB bigger than the model currently available in the US. From the looks of it, Best Buy Canada is the among the first to offer the beefed-up, Bluetooth-packin’ PMP, with it currently demanding $330 Canadian (a $40 discount off the $370 list price) on the retailer’s website. Apart from the bump in storage, however, there doesn’t look to be any other changes to the player, with it boasting the same 3-inch touchscreen, Bluetooth 2.0 support, and H.264, OGG, and WMV playback as before. Of course, it’s not very likely this’ll be a Canadian exclusive for long, though we’ve still yet to hear anything official on that from Samsung.

Toshiba T400PK 4GB mp3 player

Hold out the palm of your hand and accept the freedom to experience your music, your photos, and your video everywhere you go. Toshibas T400 Gigabeat#174 portable media player delivers 4GB of storage space#32#151#32a 1,000 song or 4,000 photo capacity#32#151#32in a sophisticated brushed black metal alloy body. The 2.4 LCD screen gives you an ideal viewing area for both navigating your audio and video collection#32#151#32with the aid of the PlusPadtrade#32#151#32and viewing your favorite photos and video. Sixteen hours of audio and 5 hours of video playback battery life mean that your new T400 will keep up with your demand for the ultimate in audio and video experience.

Technorati Tags: Toshiba

PowerPage reviews the LG Voyager and writes, “The camera quality is decent. Having the ability to capture video is very cool. The camera application also offers plenty of options that the iphone lacks. However, the quality still doesn’t come close to my super-old Canon S200 (2 megapixel) camera.”

Read more about the LG Voyager.

Merium Home Theater PC creator Christoffer Nøkleby has boldly and proudly proclaimed that his creation comes with a “sky high wife approval factor.” I won’t take him at his word, since looking good isn’t the only criteria for the de facto home minister - one will still need to tiptoe around potential landmines like its cost and usefulness at time of purchase. This Windows Home Premium-powered PC is bundled with the following for every $1,561 purchase.

• White front and top cover
• Remote controller
• Remote receiver
• Wireless keyboard
• USB dongle for keyboard
• USB extension cable for keyboard
• DVI extension cable
• DVI to HDMI converter
• DVI to VGA converter
• Audio cable
• WLAN antenna
• S/PDIF converter
• Power supply

NCSoft is already a customer of Epic Games and has used the Unreal Engine to great success with their MMO Lineage II. The company also have another Unreal-powered game called Exteel, which is heading to release in the near future.

With the relationship already bearing fruit, NCSoft has decided to use Unreal Engine 3 in two brand new MMO titles that have yet to be announced. Young-muk Choi, lead programmer at Development Unit, NCSoft, commented:

Unreal Engine 3 has a well structured rendering pipeline, and its graphical quality is superb thanks to advanced lighting and shadowing systems … Tools within the Unreal Editor empower us to instantly produce and optimize our outputs, and we especially love how the engine enables designers to easily prototype concepts without the need for programming.

Jay Wilbur, vice president of Epic Games, also commented, saying:

NCsoft pioneered online game development using Unreal Engine, as evidenced by Lineage II, one of the most commercially successful and enduringly popular online games in history … We are thrilled to take this next step with NCsoft, and are fully committed to supporting their projects. We expect to be completely wowed by what they do with our latest technology.

NCSoft has certainly used the Unreal Engine to its advantage, and it makes sense for the company to continue the relationship. It now has staff well-versed in the toolset and what the engine is capable of, meaning development time is sped up. Thankfully, the Unreal Engine continues to go from strength-to-strength in both performance and feature set, making the decision to continue its use a very easy one in many ways.

Read more at GameDaily.

The Nintendo Wiimote has been hacked before to function in tandem with IR-equipped safety glasses, turning your regular Wii controller into some sort of virtual 3D shooter. This time, the entire experience has been upgraded although the 3D wireframed world isn’t exactly up to par for most, if not all of us serious gamers. Still, the idea of actually moving around in real life so that your virtual representation will do the same is one experience worth having - just make sure you keep all breakable and fragile objects out of the way.

Western Digital has expanded its range of Passport portable storage devices this week, with the introduction of an Elite edition of the drives.

The portable devices are called My Passport Elite and come in 250GB and 320GB capacities, costing US$189.99 and $219.99 respectively. Unlike other Passport devices in the range, the Elite editions feature a soft-touch casing that is meant to be easier to grip and carry. Other features include:

• Compatibility with games consoles, allowing the transfer of music and video content to your PS3 and Xbox 360.
• Powered over USB, meaning no extra cable and plug to carry around
• Automatic backup, synchronization, and remote access software included as standard
• 5-year warranty
• Available in bronze, titanium, westminster, and cherry red colors

Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager of branded products and consumer electronics groups at Western Digital, commented:

Your digital content is as personal today as photos in shoeboxes and racks of CDs were yesterday … The device that securely holds your content should be just as personal. Having listened to our customers, we are expanding the options available on our WD Passport family of personal storage devices with more features, content management functions and fashionable design.

Read more at the Western Digital press release.

Matthew’s Opinion

I like the idea of a soft touch casing for a portable hard drive. The previous Passport drives are just solid plastic and become quite slippery in a warm hand. A soft casing alleviates this problem and hopefully makes the drive more comfortable when sitting in one of your pockets.

Unlike processor speeds and the amount of RAM we can have in a system, I believe hard drive sizes are ahead of what we actually desire in most cases. Having 320GB of storage space in your pocket is a nice option to have, but I really can’t see myself filling that any time soon. I’d also be a bit anxious of losing that amount of data, which on a drive this small wouldn’t be that difficult to do.

Filed in archive Photoshop , Tip by jim on March 26, 2008

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Using a bad digital photograph to make something creative and artistic is an idea that I have plenty of raw material available to work with.

Everyone takes a bad picture from time to time; in fact, some of us take more bad ones than good ones.

Now I'm not referring pictures that didn't quite capture exactly what you wanted; I'm talking about the real muffs, out of focus, badly over or under exposed, just plain bad. But before you give them the heave-ho try to think creatively, outside the box that is, and you just might be able to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

The picture above is a disaster; but check out this article and see what the photographer did to salvage a bad digital photograph using Photoshop.

I think it's pretty interesting and perhaps printing it on some rough artist's watercolor paper would render it nicely. The only other thing I would have done would be to straighten the picture out so it's level.

Then again perfection isn't the goal here.

Take a camera with you whenever possible, and look around, you'll find a picture somewhere.

Source: digital-photography-school.com