Daniel A. Begun
Daniel A. Begun
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
Chances are that just about any type of USB peripheral you could possibly image--and perhaps even a few that defy description (such as a USB Ferris Wheel Phone Stand?!?)--are already being made by the wacky creative brains at Brando Workshop. Some of their products are not the most practical, while others are designed to serve useful needs....
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In today's uncertain economic climate, many are looking over their shoulders, wondering if they're next on the list to get sacked as their employers continue to downsize. So not only are workers typically on their best behavior at work these days, but they're also looking for an edge that can make them even more productive, and therefore that...
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Zer01 Communications is a new mobile phone service provider that promises to offer a nationwide unlimited voice and data plan for $69.95 per month (including taxes and fees), with no contracts and using unlocked phones. These are truly unlimited plans, without any qualifying quotation marks around the word "unlimited"--you won't find any data...
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What will you be doing on Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 8:30 P.M. local time? Will you be sitting in the dark? If the WWF-World Wide Fund For Nature meets its goal, over a billion of your global neighbors will be turning off their lights for an hour in a symbolic gesture to increase awareness about human-induced climate change--all participating...
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Synology might not be as well known in the U.S. as other network-attached storage (NAS) device manufactures such as Buffalo, Maxtor/Seagate, or QNAP; but with Synology's announcement today of a slew of new NAS devices for small businesses and home users, Synology NAS devices might be finding their way into many more U.S. companies and homes...
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It looks like Netflix isn't the only company that sees that streaming is the future of movie rental distribution. Blockbuster, which always seems to be playing catch-up with Netflix, will start making its on-demand rental and purchase content available on TiVo DVRs. While streaming video to computers is nothing new, streaming video to TVs...
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With the wide variety of network storage device offerings hitting the market, you'd think that this was the year of the NAS (network-attached storage) device. Considering how many people need or want a central location--a "hub" of sorts--to store their media and other files, share these files with other people, and access this data remotely,...
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We've all captured precious, one-of-a-kind moments on video, only to find that the recorded image didn't look that great. Perhaps the video was too shaky, dark, blurry, or grainy. Or perhaps the device used to capture the video wasn't ideally suited for capturing video, such as you might see with video captured by a digital camera or mobile...
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Many small business owners operate without any dedicated IT support, while sole proprietors often find that one of the many hats they have to wear is that of CTO. Even if you are technically minded, the time commitment often needed to keep equipment up and running can take you away from your core business goals. What small businesses need...
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Not counting tasting popcorn or soda or whatever yummy morsels you might have snuck into a movie theater, the only human senses that are typically engaged in "watching" a movie are seeing and hearing--someone sitting behind you, kicking your seat, doesn't count, as that is not part of the "film's world" (or diegesis as film scholars like to...
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No less than three different browser platforms have succumbed to zero-day exploits by the end of the first day of the three-day long, third-annual Pwn2Own contest being held at the CanSecWest 2009 digital security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Safari on Mac OS X was the first to fall, followed by Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on Windows...
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Will there come a point in the near future when physical books printed on paper will be regarded as little more than an anachronism? The growing popularity of e-book platforms, such as the new Amazon Kindle 2, as well as the recent transformation of several tech magazines from physical magazine publishers to exclusively online-only entities,...
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Googling your own name might not be such a narcissistic activity after all; in fact, it just must save you from identity theft. At least that's what Kevin Andreyo, a Wilkes University professor, discovered when he used the "deep web" search engine, Pipl, to see what information about him might be publicly available on the Internet. What he...
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What are the chances that you are reading this right now on a mobile device, such as mobile phone, nettbook, or MID? According to comScore, that likelihood is roughly twice as great as it was this same time last year. More than twice as many people used their mobile devices to access "news and information on the Internet" on a daily basis...
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You'd be hard pressed these days to find a small business or even family home that doesn't have at least a few computers being used by a number of different local users. This multi-user scenario poses at least a couple of potential complications for managing all the files and data that gets created, stored, and used by the different users:...
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Finnish-based benchmark development company, Futuremark, has just unveiled an online-based benchmarking tool for measuring the performance of Web browsers, and so far results are showing that Safari 4.0 is the speediest browser of them all. The new tool, ironically called Peacekeeper, might just be the first free, publicly-available tool for...
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Apple has just announced its new third-generation iPod shuffle, which the company claims is "the world's smallest music player." The new iPod shuffle is almost half the size of the previous generation iPod shuffle, measuring a scant 1.8x0.7x0.3-inches (HWD) and weighing only 0.38 ounces. What makes this new iPod truly unique, however, is not...
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Making contingency plans for the possibility of becoming incapacitated or for our inevitable demise is seldom a pleasant subject to discuss or even think about. Many people often postpone or even never get around to creating a living will or a last will and testament. For those that do, their concerns are usually focused on their quality of...
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With Asus's recent Blitzkrieg of inexpensive Eee PC netbooks and nettops, it might be easy forget that Asus also manufactures a full bevy of components and peripherals from motherboards to graphics cards to networking products. Asus also makes LCD displays, ranging in size from 17-inches on up to 26-inches, which cover a wide swath of feature...
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What would you do if Samsung gave you only 24-hours of hands-on time with a stack of solid-state drive (SSD) engineering samples to do some viral marketing with? For you this is surely just an academic question, but for Paul Curry of The Viral Factory in London, it was a very real challenge. And he took the challenge to the limits of where...
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For Facebook users who might have noticed that some previously-uploaded photos were mysteriously missing from their Facebook pages, Facebook wants you to know that it is aware of the problem, it is fixing the problem right now, and perhaps most importantly: "Don't worry: Your photos are safe." Apparently, while Facebook engineers were performing...
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Thermaltake has been turning more than a few heads at the CEBIT show, presently taking place in Hanover, Germany, with a new and unique desktop chassis called the Level 10. The Level 10 chassis is on display in Thermaltake's booth with a "No Photos" sign in front of it; so naturally, pictures of it have started popping up all over the Internet....
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