TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Memory specialist ATP is readying a new gadget that works with your digital camera to attach GPS location data to your images. The GPS Photo Finder essentially combines a card reader and a GPS receiver. Insert your camera’s memory card, and it automatically finds and geotags the images on the card. Images can be viewed with GPS data using applications such as Picasa and Google Earth. SLR users may want to compare and contrast functionality with Jobo’s PhotoGPS.

What is happening today? In a torrid quest to take every dollar from us (the day after receiving lots of cash-money from our relatives), sites such as Amazon.com and J & R are putting on the savings blitz. Both of these sites (as well as BeachAudio.com) are offering the Toshiba 42HL167 42" Regza LCD HDTV at under $1,100, or about $700 less than usual. The Toshiba 42HL167 received a score of 8 out of 10 in our Wired Fall Test issue and placed the second highest overall score on our processing tests.

It’s the thesaurusful of vaguely inappropriate adjectives that makes the Shiro’s ad copy stand out. All the stuff about 2.4" screens, AVI playback, 8GB yaddayadda just went in one eye and out the other: after completing my reading of the press release, this is what remained in memory:

"Slender and lustrous … seductive, sleek … performance … rendition … slender … rack … That’s not all! … slender, strong, modern-looking … feel."

Slender and lustrous will come in three forms in 2008.

Thinksecret, the website that got the scoop on the Mac Mini thanks to leaky lips somewhere in Cupertino, is to shut down. It presents the result as a "positive solution" for both sides, following Apple’s decision to sue it: Thinksecret won’t have to reveal its sources, but doesn’t get to exist anymore.

A short note at the site quotes Nick Ciarelli, Think Secret’s publisher, as follows: "I’m pleased to have reached this amicable settlement, and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits."

Other terms of Apple’s Christmas gift to journalism remain confidential.

We’ve noted several Japanese phone headsets based on bone conduction, and now comes another device aimed at the apparently endless legions of mobile workers who need to make calls in noisy slaughterhouses and engine rooms. NS-ELEX says its new e-Mimi-kun (which happily translates to "good ear boy’) works as both and earphone and microphone by detecting air vibrations inside the ear, eliminating the need for a separate microphone.

You connect the earpiece and control module to a phone or Bluetooth handset and talk normally, with outside noise reduced by a factor of six.

Photographer James Russell is the latest to be sucked in by the Cult of Leica. His review of the M8 rangefinder shows the same glass-eyed wonder these cameras seem to inspire in everyone, despite the fact that he can’t get the thing to work half the time:

50% of everything I shoot with it is not in real tack focus, 50% has too much noise, 50% has surprise framing, but no camera I have ever used has touched me so deeply. I just can’t really explain it but I know that if I keep down this path I’ll probably spend my life savings on lenses.

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There are plenty of bike computers to choose from, but Evan Solida’s Cerevellum takes a interesting modular approach and introduces a new feature: Hindsight. A camera module attaches either to the end of the handlebar or the back of the seatpost and sends pictures to the handlebar mounted display, giving an at-a-glance view of the road behind.

Other modules can be plugged in, via standard USB ports, including a power meter, a heart monitor and GPS.

Chris Baker wrote this because he writes words and stuff. Dork.

I got a package. It came in the mail. The package had stuff in it. I opened the package that came in the mail and there was a piece of paper.

The piece of paper had words. I hate words. I like TV. I like to watch the Violence Channel. I like to watch "Ow, My Balls!" on the Violence Channel.

The DRM freedom fighters at the Free Software Foundation have set their sights on the Kindle, finding Amazon guilty of hypocrisy, legal treachery and worse through the gimpy design of the curious e-book reader.  They point to a particularly torturous portion of the Kindle user agreement that essentially grants Amazon near-total oversight on how you get to use a book:

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content.

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DisplayLink and Alereon have announced a wireless USB display adapter. The dongle will packetize the video signal and transmit it through the ether, whereupon it will be reassembled into a picture which “looks to a user exactly like a wired display”. The adapter supports 32-bit color and “real-time video playback” at resolutions up to 1680 x1050.

At first, the inevitable skepticism set in. Why bother with a cable free display when you have to plug it into a power source anyway? The press release shut me up. Planned applications include “USB-connected monitors, video-capable USB laptop docking stations, Skype video phones, picture frames”. The adapter will be on show at next year’s CES, and should be available soon, at $150-$250 for the transmitter/receiver set.