By Evan Ackerman

As the three or four regular readers of OhGizmo (you know who you are) may have noticed, I’ve been gone for the past few weeks. No, I wasn’t kidnapped by robots (I wish), but I was on a much deserved and entirely un-relaxing vacation in the middle of the biggest fish tank in the world, the pacific ocean. Specifically, in the Galapagos, a small group of islands some 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador. The Galapagos are most well known for their very special and in many cases absolutely bizarre terrestrial fauna, but their location smack dab in the middle of the Humboldt Current makes them a haven for all sorts of marine life. I spent a few days diving while I was there, and after the jump, I’ve posted a gallery of a few of my favorite photos. Enjoy…

Anyone who’s been diving will tell you: photos can’t express the way things look and feel underwater. But, we try. Click on any of the thumbnails to see a bigger version with a caption. Oh, and some of the better photos on this page were taken by my dive buddy who also happens to be my younger brother, a dive instructor, and the official OhGizmo marine biologist… You can check out more of his photography here.

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This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com

Back at the start of July OCZ unveiled its Core series of SSDs that addressed one of the largest complaints about SSD drives—the price. While the Core Series SSDs are still more expensive than traditional HDDs of much higher capacity, the Core SSDs are downright cheap compared to other SSDs.

The first benchmarks for the Core Series 64GB SSD from OCZ have surfaced over at Laptop Magazine. Laptop put the SSD through some synthetic tests and the Core series did well in most tests against much more expensive SSDs and traditional HDDs.

Laptop says that SiSoft Sandra shows the Core SSD had a read rate of 112.4MBps and a seek time of 1ms. Boot time improvements with the SSD or any other SSD compared to a normal HDD were slight. The Core SSD was able to write a 5GB file in 3 minutes and 59 seconds compared to 2 minutes and 19 seconds for a more expensive Samsung SSD and 4 minutes and 40 seconds for a standard WD Scorpio Blue 250GB HDD.

Via Gadgetoholic

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By Luke Anderson

Digital picture frames are nothing new, however, the guys over at RedPost are taking the idea a little bit further than most companies. Rather than selling a puny 7-inch screen with an SD card slot, they’ve got their RedPost Sign (beta) which has a lot more to offer. First, it has a nice 19-inch screen, which not only is great for viewing pictures but also makes it great as signage for business purposes. On the inside you’ll find a tiny PC with a 1.5GHz VIA C7 CPU and 1GB of RAM running a custom Linux distro. Now that’s my kind of picture frame.

I’ve actually had the opportunity to test out one of these Signs, and I must say that I never actually thought about purchasing a digital frame until I saw this. One of the first things you have to get past is the fact that it is big and heavy. The frame itself is around 3.5” thick, (4.5” if you count the Wi-Fi antenna sticking out the back) and while I didn’t have a scale handy, I would guess that it would take more than two swallows to carry one of these (even if they were African swallows). The size and weight are due to the fact that they are building them by hand out of industrial materials, and they’re packing a small computer on the inside.

If you’re the kind of person that loves Linux, you’ll love the Sign. Your storage device is actually a flash drive, which not only makes it easy to upgrade, but it makes installing a new OS quite simple. Just pop it into your desktop and install. If you’re more into Windows, you could always put on a copy of TinyXP or something similar to suit your needs. You can read my entire review after the jump.

The Sign ships with a copy of RedPost’s own custom Linux distro dubbed Wicker, which is a modified version of Ubuntu. The OS is stripped down to the bare essentials, with a simple 5-minute configuration process. Once it is booted up, you’re greeted with a page that walks you through each step, which includes selecting the source of your images (Local, Corktop or URL), configuring your network connection (comes with a built-in Wi-Fi card and ethernet jack) and deciding how long to leave each image on the screen. After that, Firefox takes over and begins displaying your images.

What is fun is that since everything is pretty much ran through FireFox, you can surf the web on your sign. What I did was hook up a mouse and set up a few favorites which I could easily browse to with a few clicks. If you happen to use this in a business, then the Sign could serve dual purposes. Simply have it display your signage material, and if you need to show a customer something on your website, simply take Firefox out of full screen mode and type in the URL. It’s really quite simple.

Corktop, which I mentioned earlier, is the actual bread and butter of RedPost. They describe it as being “like the iTunes® of the digital signage world. At it’s most basic, Corktop allows anyone with a web browser to create posters, organize them into playlists, and deliver their playlists to signs. It’s like managing a bunch of bulletin boards through your web browser.” You can read more about the Corktop service on the RedPost site here.

I have to say that the RedPost Sign (beta) is certainly a fun product to use, mostly because it’s rather out of the ordinary, and can be used for a variety of purposes other than simply displaying your pictures. Of course, with a price tag of $599, it would need to have all of these functions. While that price seems a little steep, you have to factor in the price of the tiny PC, and the fact that it has a custom-build housing. Once you add it all up, you probably wouldn’t end up saving a ton of money making one yourself, unless you already had the parts lying around. If you do have the parts, then you’re welcome to download the Wicker OS from RedPost and put it on your new creation.

I don’t think I would recommend this to someone that’s just looking for a digital picture frame. It’s too big, bulky and expensive for that. However, a business owner wanting to maximize their storefront by utilizing electronic signage might really enjoy something like this.

Pros:
+ Large Screen
+ Open Source
+ Many Features
+ Built-in Wireless

Cons:
- Very Heavy
- Expensive

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By Evan Ackerman

Wow, it seems like an eternity since I’ve summed up what’s been going on over at BotJunkie… While I was gone, Luke did an excellent job keeping everything up to date. If you haven’t been checking things out for the last few weeks, it’s definitely worth a trip through the recent archives, which include robots mowing lawns, serving beer, and stripping naked. This past week, though, we began with a graphical reminder that robots can be dangerous (especially if you hack up their power supplies), realized that the human race has nothing left now that robots can kick our ass at air hockey, briefly wished we were in Philadelphia Pittsburgh for the Robot 250 festival featuring an honest-to-goodness lawn mowing electric sheep, got jealous of our goldfish since they’re the ones who will benefit from a super smart fish feeding bot, wished we could afford to buy some spectacular retro Wall-E posters, found a Flickr pool of things that look like robots but aren’t, were slightly creeped out by CrabFu’s latest swashbot creations in the forms of a turtle and a fish, were extremely creeped out by some video of a modular amphibious robot snake, chuckled over Asimov’s other 27 (yes, there are 27 more) laws of robotics, were impressed by a robotic interpretation of the evolution of dance, and decided that no matter how badass he looks, we’re probably not going to spend 7k on a 44 centimeter tall Black Ox humanoid robot. Even if we really, really want to.

[ BotJunkie ]

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By Luke Anderson

Have you ever wanted to get your hands on the real shoes from Back to the Future II? No, I’m not speaking about the Hyperdunks that Nike recently announced, but rather something a tiny more authentic. Up for auction on eBay is the prototype of the shoes used in the motion picture.

There’s only one shoe up for sale, namely because there was only every one prototype made. It has cool features like electro-luminescent panels on the Nike logo and six randomly flashing LEDs on the sides. The back of the shoe has the words “Nike Mag” molded into it, as that was to be the name of the shoe.

Unfortunately the prototype doesn’t self-lace, then again neither did the ones actually used in the movie. If you’re wanting this awesome piece of movie history, you’re going to need some deep pockets. It’s already fetching over $2,500, and there’s still nearly 3 days left on the auction.

[ eBay ] VIA [ Wired ]

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By Luke Anderson

Have you ever wondered where your kid was, and thought it would be nice if you had some way to track them down at any time? I don’t have kids yet, but I seriously hope I don’t have those thoughts. Well, if you do have those thoughts, and want to ensure that your child hates you, then you should definitely check out this device from Keruve.

There are actually two devices here. One is a somewhat ordinary-looking watch, which also happens to be a GPS transmitter (it also uses cell phone towers to help gain the correct location). The other is a handheld GPS receiver which, as you guessed it, keeps track of your kid. Don’t worry about them taking th watch off either, it only comes off with specialized tools. There’s no word on pricing or availability, but I’m sure you could get one for the whole family. I’m sure you’ve always wondered where your grandparents and spouse are at all times as well.

[ Keruve Technology ] VIA [ Medgadget ]

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By Jonathan Kimak

USB-powered coffee warmers are nothing new, but they are usually little coaster like devices that range in quality and leave your coffee either at a nice temperature or at just above frigid. But never has a device that can heat up your beverage had the possibility of branding you or a co-worker.

When I see the Heat Me coffee heater I think it is both neat and more dangerous than any other heaters whose only flaw is that they may heat up your elbow. For now the Heat Me is still in the concept stage but with billions of coffee drinkers around it’s sure to be created regardless of it’s dangers.

I don’t drink coffee myself, I choose a healthier lifestyle by only drinking a 6 pack of red bull each day.

VIA [ Engadget ]

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This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com

I have spent every day since the iTunes App Store launched fighting with iTunes tech support to get them to believe the fact that I couldn’t download anything from anywhere in the store wasn’t related to the amount of traffic the store was getting with the new iPhone. It seems that wait until later and try again was the best answer they could give me for 3 days until someone finally bothered to actually check my account and fixed it within 5 minutes.

With my account fixed I downloaded all sorts of cool apps today including the free game called Tap Tap Revenge. The game is sort of along the lines of Guitar Hero, but with tracks nowhere near as good. The game has a red, blue and green beams that have orbs of light and the occasional arrow that slide down them. The object of the game is to tap the orbs as the hit the bottom like you would do in guitar Hero.

Several different tracks are offered, all with a techno beat by DJ someone or another. The game is a lot of fun though, especially for a free game. The tracks get much harder as you move from easy to extreme difficulties and you can even play a two player game against an opponent. If you want a new game for your iPhone without having to fork over $9.99, Tap Tap Revenge is a really cool one.

Via Gadgetoholic

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I’ve noticed that security’s gotten pretty tight at my local saloon, and because of it I haven’t even been able to sneak a Derringer past the sheriff at the front door. But I swore I’d avenge my father, and I think this rare english pocket watch will finally give me the chance to take down ‘Wild Bill’ McGraw! The watch looks like something that would turn up at the Antiques Roadshow, but the clock gears inside have been replaced with a 3mm gun. Obviously because of the unique conversion the hands on the watch don’t actually move, so as long as no one asks you the time, your secret will be safe. As for the gun, I assume its a one-shot kind of deal, and given how small the projectile is I imagine you have to be pretty close to your target for it to be effective. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

[ Rare English Patent Curiosa Railroad Pocket Watch Gun ] VIA [ TechTreak.com ]

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By Luke Anderson

Am I the only one that’s a little interrupted by the concept of throwaway phones? You know, the junkie tiny phones that you find in your local gas station that come loaded with an hour or so of minutes. Well the concept is so popular that even BIC has hopped on the bandwagon.

I’m not really sure what prompted the company most well-known for their cheap pens and disposable razors to make a cell phone, but it will be available in Europe starting next month for around $80. Out of the box it has 60 minutes already loaded and a full battery, so you need do nothing more than begin dialing. Once your minutes are up you can just toss the phone (I’d suggest recycling it) or you can activate it through Orange to keep using it.

[ Orange ] VIA [ RedFerret ]

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