Garmin Nuvi 885T adds enhanced MSN Direct services

Posted on January 7th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Garmin Nuvi 885T

(Credit: Garmin)

On Wednesday, Garmin expanded its Nuvi line of GPS devices at CES 2009 with the introduction of the Garmin Nuvi 885T. The high-end Nuvi 885T adds lane assistance with junction view and enhanced MSN Direct services.

The new MSN Direct capabilities include the ability to check the status of your flight (departures and arrivals), more advanced weather information, enhanced movie listing information and continued support for real-time traffic data, fuel prices, and more. Meanwhile, the added junction view presents you with details on upcoming turns with accompanying arrows and road sign detail.

The Garmin Nuvi 885T comes preloaded with maps of the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico and is equipped with Garmin’s HotFix technology for faster satellite acquisition. Other features include a 4.3-inch touch screen; integrated Bluetooth; text-to-speech functionality; voice commands; and multimedia capabilities.

The Nuvi 885Twill be available in Q1 2009 with a suggested retail price of $799.99. With the purchase of the GPS, you get three months of free MSN Direct service; afterwards, you will have to pay $49.95 per year or a one-time fee of $129.95.

HP offers money for old tech equipment

Posted on January 7th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Hewlett-Packard has decided to offer people in the United States money in exchange for their old tech equipment, the company announced Tuesday.

The PC maker has had a recycling program for years that lets consumers determine the value of their old tech equipment, then receive a credit for that value toward a new HP or Compaq brand product.

This new recycling program does not require people to buy anything to realize a monetary gain from giving HP their old tech equipment, though they are responsible for postage when mailing in the item. The shipping costs associated with a “Premium Service,” in which FedEx picks up the old electronics, are taken out of HP’s check to the consumer.

Some green-spring news during this gray winter: an old Dell Inspiron will garner a check of about $60 through HP’s expanded recycling program.

(Credit: Candace Lombardi)

HP calls its new program the HP Consumer Buyback and Planet Partners Recycling Program. The program offers money in exchange for any brand of PC, monitor, printer, digital camera, or smartphone that HP determines still has some sort of value. It’s part of HP’s effort to recycle 2 billion pounds of electronic junk by 2010. As of now, the company has recycled more than 1 billion pounds of e-waste.

It’s like Antiques Roadshow for techies, only you don’t have to go to the fair to find out what your attic junk is worth.

HP has a quote Web site for the buyback program that lets consumers input the specs of their old tech equipment and receive a free instant quote.

In testing out the system, I discovered that HP offers examples from a drop-down menu, but will also accept items that have been modified, and it offers a place to put in the modified configuration and evaluate it. For example, I found that an old Dell Inspiron notebook with a 20GB hard drive, 256 MB of RAM, a Pentium III M 1.0GHz processor, and loaded with Windows XP Professional is worth about $60.

If your tech junk is determined by the online tool to have no value, you’re out of luck for financial gain, but if it’s an HP or Compaq brand product, you can still opt to mail it to HP for recycling.

I took it one step further and tested out the value of the same old Dell laptop against HP’s U.S. trade-in recycling program, which is another option for consumers. On trade-in, the same old Dell Inspiron gets me an $86 credit.

Given this economy, I’d say it’s worth your time to look up the value of your electronic junk on HP’s site and make that trip to the post office.

Fake celeb LinkedIn profiles lead to malware

Posted on January 6th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

A security researcher has discovered fake profiles for celebrities on LinkedIn that have links to malicious code, according to a blog posting on Trend Micro’s site.

The celebrity profiles that are not to be trusted include ones created using the names: Beyonce Knowles, Victoria Beckham, Christina Ricci, Kirsten Dunst, Salma Hayek and Kate Hudson. They were uncovered by Trend Micro Advanced Threats Researcher Ivan Macalintal.

In its blog posting late on Monday, Trend Micro said it was continuing its investigation. The links on the professional networking site attempt to lure viewers by purporting to be nude shots of the celebrities.

McAfee’s Avert Labs Blog has more details and screenshots.

“So when an unsuspecting user gets tricked to follow the lure, he will end up on different malicious websites trying the classical social-engineering tricks of either the ‘missing video codec’ or of showing a fake AV scan and telling that the user his computer was infected with malware and offering a ‘free’ AV scanner software, which in fact is the real threat,” the McAfee blog says.

Graham Cluley of Sophos also found many other fake celeb profiles and says that as recently as Thursday the Troj/Decdec-A malicious Javascript code was being found on them.

“It’s a shame that LinkedIn aren’t keeping a closer eye on obviously bogus profiles being created on their site,” Cluley writes. “Undoubtedly spammers, malware authors and other cybercriminals may be abusing the system to link to their webpages in the hope that it will generate a higher ranking in search engines like Google.”

Representatives from LinkedIn did not immediately return a call seeking comment on Tuesday.

Fake Beyonce LinkedIn profile that contains links to malware.

(Credit: Trend Micro)

Google to release Picasa beta for Mac

Posted on January 6th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Picasa for the Mac includes the ability to make collages and other core features.

(Credit: Google)

Google plans to release on Monday a beta version of Picasa for Mac OS X, helping Apple fans catch up to Windows and Linux users already employing the free tool for editing, cataloging, and uploading photos.

The Mac version largely matches the features in Picasa 3 for Windows, said Jason Cook, Picasa’s marketing manager. Though the company has been scrambling to include some secondary features such as geotagging and the ability to get photos printed, the core abilities of Picasa are present, he said.

Picasa lets people edit and print photos, create collages and movies, and add labels, star ratings, and tags. More significantly, given Google’s cloud-computing focus, it also lets people upload their images to the company’s online Picasa Web Albums site where images can be shared. Google acquired Picasa in 2004.

“We have many Mac users,” Cook said, though declining to offer any estimates, “and we think they’ll be excited about this. It makes the Picasa Web Albums experience better.”

Online photo sites are great for several reasons, but problems can arise when people manage separate and different set of images. They often upload only a selection of photos on a PC, for example. Sometimes people upload images to an online site that never make it to the PC. And sometimes people add tags, captions, and titles online but not to the versions on their computers.

Picasa takes one important step in dealing with this potential rat’s nest: when a person edits a photo on the PC, Picasa updates the version stored online. The reverse isn’t true, though, but bidirectional synchronization is “something we’re thinking about,” Cook said. “We want to make sync as useful as possible.”

Synchronization with the Mac’s bundled iPhoto software is another area where people should tread carefully, though Picasa offers cautionary alerts to try to avert any trouble, Cook said. Picasa for the Mac doesn’t interfere with iPhoto, he said, but for example when a person uses Picasa to edit a photo, iPhoto still shows the original, which Picasa preserves. And Picasa will read ratings and tags from iPhoto, but not vice-versa.

“We play nice. We take a hands-off, read-only approach with the iPhoto library,” Cook said. “You can experiment with Picasa, and it won’t screw up the images in the iPhoto library.”

Before the Picasa for Mac was released, Google offered Mac users two other options for getting photos to Picasa Web Albums: an iPhoto plug-in and standalone upload tool.

CES 2009 Preview: What’s new in Car Tech?

Posted on January 6th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

CES 2009 is finally here and with it comes a torrent of new car-related electronics, as well as updates of old favorites. From car audio to fuel savers to driver safety, the range of products at CES will cover the full gamut.

Here’s a sample of what you can expect to see over the next week.

View the full Car Tech CES 2009 preview.

Vegawatt plugs in grease-fired restaurant generator

Posted on January 5th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

In a sign that waste may be a favored energy source this year, a small company on Monday said it has successfully plugged a vegetable oil generator into the electricity grid at a Boston-area restaurant.

The Vegawatt system, developed by Owl Power Systems, burns used-up vegetable oil from restaurant fryers to make electricity.

The Vegwatt generator burns vegetable oil from restaurant fryers to make electricity on-site.

(Credit: Owl Power Systems)

The company, which has been self-funded until now, expects to close a series A venture funding round later this week, according to Owl Power Systems CEO James Peret.

A 6-kilowatt machine has been online for about a month at Finz Seafood & Grill in Dedham, Mass. It’s about half the size of the normal vegetable oil dumpster, at 6 feet high, 6 feet wide, and 2 feet deep.

The Vegawatt doesn’t produce nearly as much electricity as the restaurant consumes, but that’s by design. Built with a relatively small diesel engine, it’s sized to consume all the vegetable oil that a typical restaurant produces.

“Our philosophy is to make the maximum use of the oil available. We could go to a bigger system, but once you start talking about trucking oil to fuel this generator, the economics go out the window,” Peret said on Monday. “Why burn more dinosaurs to move oil when you can install one machine outside your back door, and burn it there?”

The test at the seafood restaurant found that the Vegawatt burned all the fryer oil it produced and cut the electricity cost by about $800 a month, or about 15 percent of its total electricity bill. The machine can also be used to make hot water.

Customers lease the product through a third-party leasing company for $435 a month, which includes two years of maintenance. That means that the unit generates thousands of dollars a year for restaurants, said Peret.

Rather than dump oil into a waste bin, restaurant workers put it into the Vegawatt machine. Normally, a restaurant needs to pay to have the oil hauled.

Since it’s burning oil, the generator creates carbon dioxide emissions and other air pollutants. But because of the smaller engine, and because it’s burning vegetable oil rather that petroleum-based oil, it pollutes less than traditional diesel generators do.

Noise has not been a big concern, Peret said. “I’ve seen people take cell phone calls next to this machine when it was running at full power,” he said.

After securing financing, the company plans to set up a manufacturing facility in Massachusetts and have about 150 units installed by next year.

Apple’s last Macworld beginning of new era

Posted on January 5th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

RIAA dumps evidence-gathering firm

Posted on January 5th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Have yourself a merry Facebook Christmas?

Posted on January 4th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Ford offers Lincoln ‘Park Assist’

Posted on January 4th, 2009 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

(Credit: Ford Motor)

A new feature from Ford Motor will allow drivers to let their car do the steering when faced with a parallel parking space, the company announced Tuesday.

This latest car gadget, which Ford calls Active Park Assist, works slightly differently than the park assist feature on Toyota’s self-parking Lexus.

On the self-parking Lexus, the driver can use an interface to adjust the space the car aims for, and only maintains control over the brake while it’s maneuvering.

In Ford’s version the driver pulls up alongside a space and pushes a button. The car then applies ultrasonic-based sensors at the four corners of the car to detect its position and that of other street obstacles near the space. It then calculates the optimal steering angles for maneuvering into the space and prompts the driver to give the OK. After the driver pushes the OK button, the EPAS (Electronic Power Assisted Steering) then uses those calculations to automatically steer the car into the spot while the driver maintains control over the shifting, gas, and brake.

The feature will be available as an option on the Lincoln MKS sedan and MKT crossover models starting in mid-2009, according to Ford.

I’m curious to know exactly how tight of a space it’s willing to maneuver a roomy Lincoln into.

We’ll probably know soon at CNET, as I’m sure the gals and guys in our car review department are already making plans to test out a Lincoln with this latest piece of tech magic.

(Anyone else think it would be funny if Linkin Park sings in the commercial for this Lincoln “Park Assist”?)

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