First Look: New Lowepro Bags Massive Enough To Carry A Baby
The postman, who at my apartment always rings twice because he comes while I’m still asleep, dropped off a package this morning. After reading the piece about bags last week, the Lowepro people felt left out and resolved to send…

The postman, who at my apartment always rings twice because he comes while I’m still asleep, dropped off a package this morning. After reading the piece about bags last week, the Lowepro people felt left out and resolved to send a couple of yet-to-be released gadget bags for the Gadget Lab to check out. They are the Inverse AW 200 and the Nova AW 200.

The smaller Inverse is a belt pack style bag. A padded strap holds it to your waist and an optional shoulder strap balances things out. It will fit a small camera kit inside. You can see from the picture that it easily swallows a Nikon D60, a 50mm lens and a flashgun. There are a few outside mesh pockets for sundries (lens caps and cigarettes) and a couple of tiny, memory card sized compartments inside the lid. It would be superior if the waist strap was removable, but it can be kind of tucked in at the back.

Round the front there’s a rather confusing arrangement: kind of a half pocket which wraps around the face of the bag. I wondered about it for a while, but it turns out to be a neat place to stow the waist strap. I’m not sure if that is its intended use, but it works.

I could have done with this bag last weekend on a camping trip. The waist strap takes the pressure off you poor backpack-laden shoulders and offers nice swift access. It has a built in rain cover, too.

The other bag is a behemoth. My superior half stated that it would fit a baby or a small dog. You’d have to remove the internal padded sections, but otherwise she’s dead right. The Nova will fit everything. There’s no way I could fill it to test, but you can see in the photos that there’s space for a couple of huge DSLRs with lenses attached, plus room for at leas five more lenses and a couple of strobes. Sundry pockets inside and out should take care of the other necessary widgets.

While the Nova doesn’t look so big on the floor, lift it up fully loaded and you’ll be visiting a chiropractor before the day is done. The front to back depth of the bag makes it stick out a lot when you cross the strap to the opposite shoulder. Uncomfortably so, in fact. Letting it hang from the shoulder on the same side as the bag is much better, and the padded, grippy strap should keep you free of blisters even as your spine is crushed. Massive, boxy and well protected, this is a plain bag. So plain in fact that it’s nearly impossible to have an opinion about it. Impossible unless you hate the almost-navy-blue color, which I do. The Nova, too, has a rain cover, which is thankfully gray, and therefor perfect for covering up the ugly blue. Prices and launch dates are both undecided.

I’ll be thrashing these bags over the next couple of weeks to see if I can break them. And if anybody in Berlin has a baby or small dog that needs carrying, get in touch.

Company page [Lowepro]

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If all goes well—or very wrong—Earth may receive a message from aliens from the Altair solar system as early as 2015. Japanese astronomers Hisashi Hirabayashi and Masaki Morimoto sent an email there back in 1983, which was lost and has just been re-discovered by the latter at the Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory. Hirabayashi states they were drunk at the time, which explains why some of the 13 71 x 71 pixel images are the molecular formula for ethanol, the kanji characters for “kanpai!” (cheers!), and the English word “toast.” Check out some of the pictures and play drunk alien yourself after the jump.

According to Hirabayahsi, he “came up with that idea while drinking. The aliens probably won’t comprehend that (kanpai and toast) part.” We have the ability to only hope that whoever is looking for life at their radio telescope up there won’t be drunk as well, if only to ensure good inter-planetary relations from the start. Example:

Obviously, this means: “Dear People of Altair, We are organisms who reproduce sexually to form families. Life on Earth started in the water.” Kind of scary, but superior than the alternative—after five whiskies: “Hey alien dudes, here on Earth we are all nudist. Some of us are giants with massive tits. Others are giants with little penises. Fishes like to suntan on the beach. Turn the page to see us drunk. Kanpai!”

Whatever happens with the decoding of this binary message, at least it gives a tiny hope to Mulder-wannabes and tinfoil hatters all over the world, who might see alien contact in just seven years. Otherwise, the prospect was quite bad: US scientists sent another message to M13—the Hercules globular cluster—thinking that having a massive concentration of stars, it might give us a larger possibility of getting an answer back, instead of Elvis singing back “Return to Sender.” Unfortunately, they didn’t think that the waiting time to get a message back from a planet in M13 would be a bit too long: a mere 46,000 years.

While Hirabayashi is hopeful that his message was received in 1999 and now a reply is getting back to be received by any Jodie Foster listening out there, he knows that it’s highly improbable that it would work. “I believe in aliens, but they are very difficult to find,” he says.

If you add the fact that Altair might not have any planets at all, the chances are extremely slim. Still, he says that they did it because “it was good enough,” and he’s glad about it, especially after all the messages he got from schoolchildren everywhere: “children’s response is the ideal thing.”

What he doesn’t realize is that children are small, speak in strange gibberish and get green sometimes, so his aliens might have contacted him already. [Sankei via Pink Tentacle]

Via [gizmodo]

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Axiom Audiobyte Desktop Speaker System Do you ever get the urge to blow the roof off your office with some AC/DC or Metallica? Yeah, me neither. Most offices just don’t roll like that. But if you do like to crank…

Axiom Audiobyte Desktop Speaker System

Do you ever get the urge to blow the roof off your office with some AC/DC or Metallica? Yeah, me neither. Most offices just don’t roll like that.

But if you do like to crank tunes on your PC, Axiom’s Audiobyte speaker system is one of the biggest desktop boomers out there. It includes two satellite speakers, a subwoofer, and a 55-watt-per-channel amplifier that connects to a PC, iPod, or any other source via the minijack port.

The satellite speakers put out a clean, neutral sound with plenty of detail and depth in the high and midrange, even at low volumes. And they look pretty sweet too: we opted for the high gloss walnut wood models. They look gorgeous, but might feel a tiny out of place if your desktop decor is littered with brushed aluminum Apple products. The front-firing subwoofer has three positions, and fills out the system sound nicely, with smooth and hearty bass.

For a desktop system, though, the sub is awfully large and boxy. I even began to wonder what was inside – an ant farm maybe, or some runaway Cabbage Patch dolls? The amp also doubles as a space heater, so you’ll probably want to stash it under the desk, and then use your feet on the volume knob.

At $350, and another $180 for the sub, this is one of the priciest desktop systems you’ll find.

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Asus Eee Computer 900 Asus’s long-awaited 9-inch (well, 8.9-inch) version of its groundbreaking Eee Computer 4G arrives with all the familiar trappings installed … only this time it’s a little bigger — in more ways than one. Not only is…

Asus Eee Computer 900

Asus’s long-awaited 9-inch (well, 8.9-inch) version of its groundbreaking Eee Computer 4G arrives with all the familiar trappings installed … only this time it’s a little larger — in more ways than one. Not only is the screen bumped up from seven inches to nine, the RAM is doubled (from 512 MB to 1 GB), the solid state storage system jumps from 4 GB to 20 GB, and, of course, the price takes a leap, too, hitting the $550 mark.

Two inches may not sound like much, but in this case, the modest increase in size makes a world of difference. The more massive screen (and larger resolution) makes web pages, documents and graphics files far more navigable and legible. The keyboard, naturally, is more massive too. Though touch-typing is still an error-prone affair, it’s at least superior than it was on the 7-inch 4 G.

Though the CPU is the same as the 4 G (a 900 MHz Intel Celeron), the extra RAM is a huge help. The 4-G boots noticeably faster, and application lag is improved. Battery life also gets a huge boost: We eked almost four hours of video playback from the device, vs. two hours, 20 minutes on the 4 G.

The 900 is not without a few hiccups: For example, the Eee didn’t remember our WEP key after a reboot, and the battery life meter was totally wrong during our testing, but those issues are probably due to some Linux drivers that can be updated. Though the price tag, now rising well past $500, might turn some buyers toward bigger notebooks at about the same price, it’s still an awfully attractive deal.

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The X800 cellphone from Philips has been seen around and about this past few weeks, but it’s finally been officially announced. Although there’s still no release date or, more importantly, a price, this e2e touchscreen (that’s edge-to-edge) that’s being mooted as, snore, Philips’ iPhone killer, is lacking in both 3G and EDGE departments. Full specs below the jump.

Philips X800 specifications:
General: 2G Network GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900
Announced: 2008, Might
Display: Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Size: 240 x 400 pixels (Wide QVGA), 2.9 inches
- Screensavers and wallpapers
Ringtones Type: Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3
Customization: Download
Vibration: Yes
Memory Phonebook: Yes
Call records: 30 received, dialed and missed calls
Card slot: microSD (TransFlash)
Data: GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps

Bluetooth: Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
USB: Yes
Features Messaging: SMS, EMS, MMS
Browser: WAP 2.0/xHTML
Games: Yes
Colors: Black

Camera: 2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels, autofocus, video
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/MPEG4/WAV/AAC player
- Office document viewer
- Organiser
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree

Battery: Standard battery, Li-Ion
Stand-by Up to 850 h
Speak time Up to 8 h

Given that Philips mobiles are not that readily available—the Dutch company is concentrating all its efforts on the chinese market—don’t anticipate to see this Stateside. [Just Another Mobile Phone Blog]

Via [gizmodo]

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IPhone and iPod Touch owners should head over to NBC.com to stream free, full episodes of 30 Rock and The Office directly to their handset. As far as we know, this is the only way to legally watch NBC content…

IPhone and iPod Touch owners should head over to NBC.com to stream free, full episodes of 30 Rock and The Office directly to their handset. As far as we know, this is the only way to legally watch NBC content on an iPhone: Hulu uses Flash, which won’t work, and NBC quit iTunes back in August of last year.

Best of all, these Quicktime streams (which play directly in the browser) are also accessible from outside the US, something that can’t be done with the browser on your computer. I tried it on an iPod Touch from here in Germany and it works fine. The quality, though, is terrible. Also, spoofing a desktop browser’s user agent gets you in the door (that’s where the screenshot came from) but won’t play the video.

Product page [NBC]

NBC: Free, Full Episodes Of ‘The Office’ And ‘30 Rock’ For iPhones [Silicon Valley Insider]

Via [wired.com]

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