Recently in Misc Category

Carbon nanotubes are often hailed as the best thing since sliced bread and a technological innovation that will change our lives in a myriad of ways, but unfortunately a study just published expresses concerns about their safety and compares them to asbestos due to their potential ability to cause inflammation and lesions when inhaled.

"Researchers with British institutes and the U.S.-based Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies injected mice with asbestos and with commercial samples of carbon nanotubes of varying sizes. When they examined the lining of the rodents' abdominal cavities, the researchers observed that longer nanotubes behaved like asbestos, provoking inflammation and lesions."

This is very much just a preliminary study and it seems a lot more testing is needed to determine if carbon nanotubes are a health hazard.

Associated Press via Yahoo

The UK Government disgusts me.

I feel I can get away with saying that as I was born there, lived the first 25 years of my life there, and unfortunately I now try to avoid going back as much as possible.

Yes the scenery is still beautiful: green fields, old buildings etc but the society itself has fallen so far in the past few decades it is unbelievable. Violent binge drinking, surveillance cameras on many street corners, anti-social behavior fines, public vomiting and urination are commonplace, and the friendly English bobby is friendly no more.

Maybe the people still living there are too close to see the constant erosion of their rights and freedoms, maybe the bans on guns and knives make then feel unable to protect themselves and unwilling to stand up and speak out against criminals or unfair Government policies, or maybe they just feel there is nothing they can do so they will keep their heads down until they can retire to Spain or Florida.

The latest intrusive Government insanity is a proposal to create a database of every phone call and email, no-one cares about privacy or individual rights, they trample all over those in the name of "homeland security" and "crime prevention".

Will someone please tell the UK Government that George Orwell's 1984 is meant as a warning of the horrors of an authoritarian society, not as a training manual.

via BBC

Kevin over at jkontherun has been helping his father get over loosing his job. Out of that he has come up with 8 good mobile technology tips and tools to help people deal with an economic downturn.

His tips are:

1. Never, never, never rely solely on a work e-mail address.
2. Set up a personal e-mail account with a professional-looking address.
3. Own a personal computer, preferably a notebook.
4. Get connected.
5. Find free hotspots.
6. Store information online.
7. Set up job agents.
8. Manage your money online.

I would add do your social networking and build business contacts ahead of time as it is often a personal recommendation thats get you a new job, especially in hard economic times when many job vacancies get filled without getting as far as being advertised.

Visit jkontherun for the full article

For when you really really want to make sure your mail arrives at it's destination.... find something else, but if you just want to see how it got there after the fact then here is a gadget for you.

You put the half-inch thick envelope shaped Micro GPS Mail Tracker in an envelope or package then when it is delivered a micro SD card can be taken out of the gadget and used to track where the package was every 2 minutes of it's journey on Google Maps.

So basically it is only useful for mailing stuff to yourself or to people you really really trust with a $700 gadget.

Video after the jump.

(via coolest-gadgets)

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that US Customs and Border Patrol agents can search laptops without needing to show reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

"quick, lets search all the confidential business files on that guy's laptop, Osama Bin Laden may be hiding in one of them"

Whatever happened to the Fourth Amendment?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

(more at dailybreeze)

Ok, we are now at CES bumping into the guys who run all the other cool gadget sites.

Last night's party was the CES Unvelied official press event: lots of companies and tons of journalists packed into a too small room. Food and drinks were good, nice sushi, crab cakes were cold, and my martini was just ok.

My pick for breakout technologies at the show: large LCDs and easier home automation/media center stuff.

Lots of posts to come today with all the new announcements, then off to tonights party which is the Digial Experiance press event at the Bellagio. Oh, and I'm up over $300 on the slots so far.... gotta love Vegas!

I hope you are all enjoying the week between Christmas and New Year.

This is a very quiet week for gadgets so no new posts, we are getting ready for the CES Consumer Electronics show in Vegas next week; we will be reporting from the show and attending all the fun launch parties that companies have planned.

Happy New Year!

Forgive me, but I feel a rant coming on.

I visit a lot of web sites every day looking for interesting news to post to ShinyPlastic and our other sites, I am pretty well protected against adware downloads and viruses etc, I don't block banner ads as they don't bother me, and I tolerate flash ads that popover a page I am looking at (as long as they have an obvious close or skip button) but you know what really bugs me?

Web sites that automatically resize your browser window.

I hate them.

I have my browser windows set to a size I like, it is just the right size to see a lot but not to take up my whole screen, so I can still see other windows underneath such as email, RSS feeds etc.

Who do these control freak site designers think they are when they tell me they know better than I do what size to make my browser window.

There are two extremes, the sites that automatically resize your browser to 800x600 because that is "optimal" for viewing their site, and those that resize the browser to the max size possible for your screen.

Excuse me, I have two screen and they are both 1600x1200 pixels, I don't want your crappy little site taking up my whole screen, especially when two-thirds of the broser is now blank space.

And what is the end result of these people messing up my browser window? I leave their site immediately and never return.

Cnet is reporting the biggest monthly drop in consumer electronic prices in 5 months.

Leading the way were 42 inch plasma screens which dropped almost 10% in price last month (to an average of $2500) and big drops were also seen in LCD prices (as we predicted months ago).

One thing I find silly though is that they track 128MB memory cards.... does anyone still buy 128MB memory cards when you can get a 1GB compactflash for under $50?

(if you do you can get a 128MB compachflash card from buy.com for a massive $3).

More from Cnet

Sometimes size is everything. Google has just announced it has doubled the size of it's index of web pages from 4 billion to 8 billion.

What this means is that for queries that only returned a few results before you should see a lot more relevant results now.

Here is a search box, try it out and see if you get better results:

So last night I headed over to the Digital Focus press event in New York. Digital Focus is basically a room with about 20 major consumer technology companies showing off their latest toys to a bunch of journalists ranging from ABC to PC Magazine to Consumer Reports to Playboy to me.

There was nothing there I hadn't heard of or seen (or posted here for you) before but it was a great opportunity to get my hands on some of the latest gadgets and try them out.

It was also a great opportunity to meet some of the people who help run other sites you may visit daily - Joel from Gizmodo, Ryan from Engadget, and Janak and Suhit from PocketPCThoughts and DigitalMediaThoughts.

Stay tuned to see what we found from iRiver, Archos, Gateway, HP, Tivo, Netgear, Belkin, and others.

ShinyPlastic.com and VGAPocketPC.com Newsletter

In this Issue:

• VGAPocketPC.com launched
• This week's reviews
• Recent new gadgets
• At the TechXNY show
• Competitions
• What's coming next from ShinyPlastic?

We have just launched a new sister site to ShinyPlastic, and it's called VGAPocketPC.com.

With 6 VGA resolution Pocket PCs either launched or coming in the next 3 months, and with lots of new details on the Dell Axim X50 showing up every day, we thought it was time for a web site that focuses solely on the VGA resolution pocket pcs.

Highlights of the new site include links to lots of reviews, a detailed profile of each VGA Pocket PC, and a great comparison of all 6 VGA Pocket PCs.

Want to know which VGA Pocket PC is built like a brick?, which one syncs via the faster USB 2.0 instead of the usual USB 1.1?, which one doesn't have 802.11b Wi-Fi?, and which one has the 4mbps IrDA 1.3 infrared compared to the almost 40 times slower IrDA 1.2 of other pocket pcs?..... then read the comparison and check out the rest of VGAPocketPC.com to find out.

In the UK the main (formerly only) phone company British Telecom (BT) just doesn't get it.

According to BT's Graham Whitehead "The internet is dead, or dying; it's full of viruses, worms and porn, you have to wear a kevlar suit before you go online," he said. "BT is creating a private network, which will be joined to other private networks, to which we will add voice over IP."

He also thinks the low uptake of broadband in the UK is due to people not seeing a need for broadband in their daily lives.

I disagree: the low uptake of broadband in the UK is directly related to a certain company (BT) trying to control and overcharge for broadband connectivity, limiting competition and stifling innovation.

I am so glad I moved from the UK to the US and got away from that kind of attitude and inward thinking. The US is a lot bigger and therefore a lot more difficult to wire for broadband connectivity but over half of US internet users have broadband and personally I would never live in a house of apartment without it.

Apologies for no posts yesterday or today.... I am away at an internet conference and get this: the high speed internet in the conference hotel isn't working!

Daily postings will resume Friday, until then check out Gizmodo or Engadget for you daily fix of new cool gadgets.

I'm back a day late from vacation thanks to Hurricane Ivan clipping Cancun where we were staying.

All my gadgets survived the strong winds and 25+ foot waves (they all got some good wind survival tests on our 11th floor hotel balcony at the height of the storm) and we survived a day stuck in our hotel with not much food and no alcohol! (alcohol sales were banned by the local government during the hurricane warning period).

One casulty of the vacation was my iPod mini, the difference in humidity between the hotel and the beach killed it.

There will be a gadget review every day for the next few days as well as all the regular gadget news.

There will be no posts to ShinyPlastic.com from September 3rd to 13th as my wife and I are away on vacation putting lots of great gadgets to the test. (This is our first long vacation with no work in 2 years, so no computers, no cell phones, just portable gadgets, sun, and margaritas.)

Continue reading to see photos of what we will be reviewing the week we return......

Also don't forget to join our free mailing list and be entered for a chance to win a Smart Watch, an FM Transmitter, or one of six Google Gmail accounts.

The mobile version of ShinyPlastic.com has been updated:

The mobile home page now shows just the last 10 items with details and 50 more with just the date and title.

Individual pages have been created for every item.

A seperate style sheet is being used.

Take a look at http://shinyplastic.com/mobile/ on you pocket pc or other mobile device and let me know what you think.

The commenting system is now fixed (we hope).

To leave comments on this site you must be registered with typepad.com. Typepad.com is run by the same company that makes the software we use to manage this site and a typepad.com registration will allow you to comment at this and many other blogs.

Feel free to sign up at typepad.com and test out the comments system.

The commenting feature of this site is temporarily broken. We were getting too many junk comments from spammers so we are working to implement the Typekey solution for user registration. Unfortunately there is a bug with Typekey and this site that we are working to resolve.