The base model of the 1340 includes a P8400 processor, Vista Home Premium, a 13.3-inch WXGA LCD, 2 megapixel webcam, 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM, 320GB 7200rpm SATA drive, slot-loading DVD burner and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M G graphics. The 1640 is similar, but with ATI Mobility RADEON M86XT graphics.

They seem pretty dangerously overpriced if you ask me. Sure, they look sweet, but I can think of several happy alternatives for less.

[Notebookreview]

Gallery: Eyes on with LG's 15-inch OLED TV shipping this summer

Filed under: Displays

Eyes on with LG's near-production 15-inch OLED TV: come on summer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tokyo Times has a small collection of photos of Japanese bikes that are used to deliver soups and other sloshy/spillable food items. On the back of the bikes there’s a counterweighted tray contraption that ensures the food containers always remain perfectly horizontal no matter how haphazardly the driver is navigating the streets. Seems like a simple but clever hack, as long as you like your food shaken, but not stirred.

[ Tokyo Times - Dangerously delivered dinner ] VIA [ Wired Gadget Lab ]

The vehicle works on hydrogen powered fuel cells and looks futuristic in every way possible. The body is encased between two giant wheels controlled by separate motors which are powered by fuel cells, though this two seater looks more like a design picked straight out of fantasy due to its semi transparent glass casing and controlled by joystick.

This extraordinary bike-hack allows a takeaway driver to speed helter-skelter through the mean Japanese streets without spilling a drop of miso. The rather precarious looking appendage on the rear is a counter-weighted, hanging shelf onto which the bento boxes and bowls can be placed.

As the bike tips upon cornering, the platform stays level and keeps the food where it's supposed to be and not on the tarmac. Of course, if you drive like the typical pizza delivery boy you'll still end up with sloshing soup, but keep it steady and this swinging shelf should work fine. An elegant and simple hack.

Dangerously delivered dinner [Tokyo Times]

Filed under: Storage

A-DATA launches XPG Dual SSD RAID enclosure originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 02 Jan 2009 04:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

12 o’clock Star Destroyer

1 o’clock TIE Interceptor

2 o’clock Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter

3 o’clock Jabba’s Barge

4 o’clock Bespin Twin-Pod Cloud Car

5 o’clock Y-Wing Fighter

6 o’clock Super Star Destroyer

7 o’clock Rebel Blockade Runner

8 o’clock TIE Bomber

9 o’clock X-Wing Fighter

10 o’clock Rebel Snowspeeder

11 o’clock A-Wing Starfigher

Price: $90 on Etsy [Etsy via Pop Therapy, Slippery Brick]

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Her piece in the latest (December 22/29, 2008) issue of the New Yorker, entitled "Dead Man Laughing," about her late father, opens, "My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy."

It would appear blood is as thick as laughter because she does too.

An excerpt from her poignant New Yorker mini-memoir follows.
....................

At the extreme end of this sensibility lies the anti-comedian. An anti-comedian not only allows death onstage; he invites death up. Andy Kaufman was an anti-comedian. So was Lenny Bruce. Tommy Cooper is the great British example. His comedy persona was “inept magician.” He did intentionally bad magic tricks and told surreal jokes that played like Zen koans. He actually died onstage, collapsing from a heart attack during a 1984 live TV broadcast. I was nine, watching it on telly with Harvey. When Cooper fell over, we laughed and laughed, along with the rest of Britain, realizing only when the show cut to the commercial break that he wasn’t kidding.

There was an anti-comedian at Edinburgh this year. His name was Edward Aczel. You will not have heard of him — neither had I, neither has practically anyone. This was only his second Edinburgh appearance. Maybe it was the fortuitous meeting of my mournful mood and his morbid material, but I thought his show, “Do I Really Have to Communicate with You?” [top] was one of the strangest, and finest, hours of live comedy I’d ever seen. It started with neither a bang nor a whimper. It didn’t really start. We, the audience, sat in nervous silence in a tiny dark room, and waited. Some fumbling with a cassette recorder was heard, faint music, someone mumbling backstage: “Welcome to the stage . . . Edward Aczel.” Said without enthusiasm. A man wandered out. Going bald, early forties, schlubby, entirely nondescript. He said, “All right?” in a hopeless sort of way, and then decided that he wanted to do the introduction again. He went offstage and came on again. He did this several times. Despair settled over the room. Finally, he fixed himself in front of the microphone. “I think you’ll all recall,” he muttered, barely audible, “the words of Wittgenstein, the great twentieth-century philosopher, who said, ‘If indeed mankind came to earth for a specific reason, it certainly wasn’t to enjoy ourselves.’ ” A long, almost unbearable pause. “If you could bear that in mind while I’m on, I’d certainly appreciate it.” Then, on a large flip chart, the kind of thing an account manager in an Aylesbury marketing agency might swipe from his office (Aczel is, in real life, an account manager for an Aylesbury marketing agency), he began to write with a Magic Marker. It was a list of what not to expect from his show. He went through it with us. There was to be:

No nudity.
No juggling.
No impressions of any well-known people.
No reference to crop circles during the show.
No one will be conceived during the show.
No tackling head-on of any controversial issues. . . .
And finally, and I think most importantly—
No refunds.

I recognized my father’s spirit in this list: No good can come of this. He then told us that he had a box of jigsaw puzzles backstage, for anyone who became dangerously bored. Later, he drew a graph made up of an x-axis, which stood for “TIME,” and a y-axis, for “GOODWILL,” on which he tracked the show’s progress. Point one, low down: “Let’s all go and get a drink — this is pointless.” Point two, slightly higher up: “O.K., carry on, whatever.” Point three, still only halfway up: “We could all be here forever. We think this is great.” He looked at his shoes, then, with mild aggression, at the audience. “We’ll never get to that point,” he said. “It’s just . . . it’ll never happen.” By this time, everyone was laughing, but the laughter was a little crazy, disjointed. It’s a reckless thing, for a comedian, to be this honest with an audience. To say, in effect, “Whatever I do, whatever you do, we’re all going to die.” When it finally came to jokes (“Now we go into the section of the show routinely called ‘material,’ for obvious reasons”), Aczel had a dozen written on his hand, and they were very funny, but by now he had already convinced us that jokes were the least of what could be done here. It was an easy and wonderful thing to believe this show a genuine shambles, saved only by our attention and by chance. (We were mistaken, of course. Every stumble, every murmur, is identical, every night.) In the lobby afterward, calendars were on sale, each month illustrated by impossibly banal photographs of Aczel in bed, washing his face, walking into work, standing in the road. Mine sits on my desk, next to my father in his Tupperware sandwich box. On the cover, Aczel is pictured in a supermarket aisle. The subtitle reads, “Life is endless, until you die” — Edith Piaf. Each month has a message for me. November: “Winter is coming—Yes!” April: “Who cares.” June: “This is not the life I was promised.” There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us!
....................

I've mentioned this before and I'll repeat it here: Zadie Smith is more likely than not to win the Nobel Prize in Literature should she avoid a premature termination of her life line a la W. G. Sebald, another sure thing until Mr. Death came calling one day in late December of 2001 while he was out motoring.

Below,

an encore performance by Aczel.

To set the scene, December is the season where all the PR companies are throwing out 50x the normal amount of emails in order to gear up interest for their clients for January's CES (the largest consumer electronics show in US of the year). This means massive distribution lists, massive list blasts and everyone having to wade through piles of pitches that may or may not be right for their publication.

This particular event all started with a blogger (not us) asking politely to be removed from an email distribution list because they don't cover the products the firm was pitching. Then, this happened:

CES publishes a list of press. You are one of a few thousand.

Everyone has access to that list for all kinds of reasons.

It is publicly published.

As a PR agency we use that list so we can solicit press for booth appts

I hope you can appreciate that.

If you don't, let me introduce you to the "delete" button

Or in the future do not sign up as a press person for CES.

Furthermore, do not make any threats to my company.

I don't need you to tell me what is right or what is wrong.

I have been in the CE business for 42 years

I have seen nasty people like you melt away faster than a snowball going
up hill in the rain

I am waiting for an apology

Maybe we can meet at CES for a hug or a slug

P.S. I just visited your web site. I would hardly call your blog a
publication,

However, you do have very interesting content and we have lots of client
you would like to know more about to help you in your endeavors.

Call me

[redacted]
President/Owner

Yeah, the president and owner of the firm sent that email. Wow.

C'mon folks, if we can't get along, let's just be civil. Thanks for passing on the email dudes.

Update: The emailer added his original email here.

Please remove me from your list. My publication does not cover these types of products.

I did NOT sign up to receive info in this category, nor anything close. By CES guidelines, I should not have received this, making it dangerously close to spam. That reflects poorly on your company.

Thank you.

Continue reading Video: LCD retrofitted onto Nintendo GameCube

Filed under: Gaming

Video: LCD retrofitted onto Nintendo GameCube originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.