It’s a digital world, but most of us are still holding on to a lot of analog media. There are the vinyl records we couldn’t bear to part with; the home movies shot with an analog camcorder; the lovingly-created mixtapes on cassette; and, of course, the photographic prints and 35mm slides from holidays, vacations and family gatherings of yesteryear. Service bureaus are getting rich charging exorbitant fees to bring these analog memories into the digital realm, but there are plenty of good tools available for anyone who’s interested in taking the do-it-yourself approach. Here are some the best.
Tag Archive: Air
Satellite Radio Basics
Somewhere up in the sky, beyond the birds, the planes and even Superman, there are satellites whose sole purpose is to make sure you can rock out to Blue Oyster Cult, Bette Midler and Baha Men all in the same hour, all commercial-free, and across state lines.
Typical radio signals come from local radio towers. They are free for all, but once you move away from the tower (as little as 20 miles away) the signal can become fuzzy or even get lost. Conversely, satellite signals are beamed down from the heavens, giving them a wider broadcasting range. That’s why satellite users can drive from one end of the U.S. to the other and enjoy near-CD-quality sound without losing reception.
Computer Glitch Hits UK Flights
Flights in and out of some UK airports, including the international hubs of Heathrow and Gatwick near London, were delayed or canceled yesterday when a computer glitch caused problems at the main air control center in Swanwick.
The problem hit about 4 pm yesterday, and British Airways alone had to cancel 35 domestic and European flights. There will also be a knock-on effect today with planes not where they should be, according to the BBC, and the size of the problem caused a spillover of the problem to airports all over Britain.
Air Canada Adds In-Flight Wi-Fi
Last month, both Delta and American Airlines announced they would be offering in-flight Wi-Fi services on domestic flights via AirCell’s GoGo mobile broadband service. This month, in-flight Wi-Fi hops to the Great White North, with Air Canada announcing a deal to offer GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi on Airbus A319 planes that fly cross-border routes to the United States. The service should come online in spring 2009.
“Adding Air Canada as Aircell’s newest airline partner and first international customer will mark yet another milestone for our company,” said Aircell CEO and president Jack Blumenstein, in a statement. “As we continue to grow our U.S. network and explore our international expansion plans, Air Canada will have the distinction of being the first.”
JBL WEM-1 Unwires Any Pair of Speakers
Plenty of manufacturers offer wireless speakers, but what happens when you want to save the sweet-sounding setup you already have in your living room, and take it wireless? JBL launched a simple solution for unwiring ordinary speakers on Thursday with its On Air WEM-1 wireless expansion module, which allows users to snip the cord on any pair of speakers.
The On Air comes in two pieces: a transmitter to connect at source material, and a combined receiver/amplifier to hook up at the speakers. It provides 50 watts per channel, as well as a subwoofer output. According to JBL, maximum range should be about 70 feet, and the receiver can also adopt five different equalization curves for different JBL speakers, or a completely unequalized one.
Lenovo Makes X300 Official
Although rumors about Lenovo’s X300 ultra-light notebook began circulating only days after the announcement of Apple’s MacBook Air, the machine has remained in the ethereal realm of blogs and sneak previews without an official nod from Lenovo. On Tuesday, the Chinese manufacturer broke that silence by simultaneously announcing and launching the notebook officially through its online direct-order site.
Adobe Rolls Out Air 1.0
Delivering on its promise to merge online and offline content with the project once code-named “Apollo,” Adobe released the first version of the newly renamed Air on Monday, a technology designed to bring both worlds together. Adobe Air effectively allows previously online-only services to offer dedicated applications that can work with or without an Internet connection.
Rumored Portégés to Challenge MacBook Air?
It hasn’t taken long, following Apple’s MacBook Air announcement, for other competitors to wheel out their own ultra-thin offerings – or at least for news of them to leak to Web outlets. Yesterday it was Lenovo’s rumored X300 ultra-light notebook that cropped up on Gizmodo, and more recently, the upcoming Toshiba Portégé R500 models leaked on Akihabara News.
MacBook Air Not Really the World’s Thinnest
After all the buzz surrounding Tuesday’s MacBook Air announcement and the fanboy drooling that came in its wake, someone has already gone and cut down Apple’s claim that the Air is the “world’s thinnest notebook.” Cnet’s Michael Kanellos dug up evidence of it on Tuesday, and then again by a bigger margin on Wednesday with the help of an outside party.
While no one argues that the Air is the thinnest notebook on the market today, Kanellos took on a historical perspective and found some even thinner notebooks from years past. On Tuesday, Kanellos was ready to hand the crown to the Mitsubishi Pedion, which is 0.7244 inches thick at its thickest point, to the Air’s 0.76 inches.
CES 2008 Sneak Peak
We are in the final countdown to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest trade shows in the world. Here are a few products that look to be hot at the show. We will be writing more about them as they are announced next week.
Automotive Electronics
This is where you go to see really crazy stuff. Traditionally in this part of the show they have cars that are rolling showcases of audio and video technology. In past years I’ve seen 4×4s with flat panel displays on the axils and in the wheels, cars where the engines have been removed and replaced with amplifiers, and things that looked like they once were cars but now look like some sort of mutated Transformer. While there are some truly hot cars in this part of the show, 0-60 performance isn’t what they are showcasing.
