And now, couch potatoes rejoice!

Thanks to a new technology known as WHDI, or Wireless Home Digital Interface, the world of television is changing. This comes as all televisions – or at least television channels – are going to be undergoing brand new make overs, with all of them set to change over to digital in 2009. With Wireless Home Digital Interface, you will be able to mount big screen monitors right on the wall of your living room, bed room, et cetera, as well as surround sound speakers – without a great big mess of unsightly wires. Housewives all over the world are going to be rejoicing right along with their television watching husbands and children (that is a huge bit of generalization, but I’m sure you guys know what I mean). These little boxes will work with high definition TVs and they, too, are set to be available by 2009. Amimon Ltd., a company operating out of Israel, developed these little beauties. Companies like Panasonic, LG, Toshiba, and others are now planing to follow suit and develop their own wireless systems.

Wii enhancements: Wee!

There’s good news for gamers, yet again. The Nintendo Wii is possibly the greatest gaming system ever in life (warning: the preceding was a completely biased opinion and no, the author does not care), and Nintendo has plans to make it even better. Hot on the heels of the wildly popular Wii-Fit, which is has revolutionized the lives of fat-bottomed (warning: the preceding was a Queen reference, who caught that?) gamers everywhere, Nintendo intends to enhance the standard Wii-mote with a wee, teeny box called the Wii MotionPlus. It’s supposed to enhance the Wii-mote’s response and precision, and to make playing games on the Wii an overall more intense experience – namely because it is much more motion sensitive. Nintendo’s also introducing Wii Music, which lets gamers play fifty different instruments, just the way they are really played. The balance board is going to double as part of a drum kit – it will be the bass drum. Ba-dum ching, baby.

Can your cell phone kill you?

Recently in Moscow, over a dozen people were either injured or killed outright. The cause? They were struck by lightning. The underlying cause? Well, a lot of authorities there are blaming it on cell phones. For instance, one woman was struck by lightning while she was talking on her cell phone. People are actually blaming these strikes on several different pieces of portable technology; they consider MP3 players and other music devices to be just as much to blame.

Now, I definitely do not intend to make light of this situation; I used to live in fear of being struck by lightning. However, there is no real scientific proof that the weak electromagnetic fields put off by cell phones and other hand held, metal made devices could lure a stroke of lightning, even though evidence does support the fact that people carrying metal objects when they are struck by lightning may be more fatally wounded.

Still, it bears the question – who wants to be out in the middle of an electrical storm talking on a cell phone anyway?

Gamers, geeks, and Internet fr33ks: rejoice!

Experts in Australia have apparently created a new technology that is supposed to allow people to surf the Internet one hundred times faster than they do now. For that matter, a professor working with the product says that this probably won’t cost users anything.
The new technology evidently works to increase and improve the performance of optic fibers; the professor involved likened it to a scratch on a piece of glass, wherein the circuits will use the glass as a kind of path that the information will follow.
It’ll be a while before this technology reaches the market, but right now tests have conclusively shown that, in its current stages, this new technique has made surfing the web sixty times faster. Researchers on the product believe that with some more development, it can easily be one hundred times faster.

Eco-friendly washing machines ftw!

When you stop and think about it, it’s really about time that the overall design of washing machines get a new make-over. Xenos is taking a huge step in that regard – they have created an economically friendly washing machine. It is completely water efficient – namely because it uses plastic instead of water. It has been proven that a combination of friction and the cleaning solvent used are what ultimately gets clothing and fabrics clean. Keeping that in mind, Xenos uses a mixture of those factors and only 2 percent of water to get the job done. Apparently, you’ll be able to use one cup of water, a bit of your detergent of choice, and a butt-load of plastic chips that are used over and over again, all of which will work together to basically beat the dirt out of your clothes and get rid of stains. That’s right, the plastic chips will actually absorb stains.

This machine isn’t on the market yet, but the tests done on it thus far are showing some real promise. Not only is it water efficient, for instance, but the process of actually washing clothes followed by the way the chips themselves are extracted so they can be reused (for about one hundred times) leaves the items in the washer pretty dry, so you either won’t need to use your dryer at all, or you’ll only have to use it a bit for thicker fabrics.