Is it time to move on from Erector Sets and Legos? BUG kits from Bug Labs give tech-loving hobbyists something new to tinker with.
Bug Labs sells a base unit and a number of modules that snap together to create webcams and GPS locators, and even to show photos and video. The main unit, the Hiro P BUGbase, costs $299. It is essentially a 4-inch-wide Linux computer with four inputs and a small LCD readout. It runs on AC power or batteries. The other Bug units include a color screen for $99, a GPS unit for $79 and a camera for $69. With each BUGbase, buyers receive a free input module and the opportunity to buy a Wi-Fi version of the BUGbase at factory cost. A complete bundle is $549. All of the devices can be ordered at and will ship in mid- March.
PC melds home entertainment, Web
As the fusion of the Internet and television continues to evolve, new hardware has been popping up in the living room. With its circular design, Sony’s Vaio TP Home Theater PC stands out on a home-entertainment shelf full of typical black and silver boxes — and brings a Blu-ray disc player, HDTV recorder and a full Windows Vista Home Premium system into the mix. Available next month for about $3,000, this Vaio comes with 4 gigabytes of memory, a 500-gigabyte hard drive and an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor. The round, black PC connects to a widescreen TV with a high- definition multimedia interface, or HDMI, cable and includes a wireless keyboard for using the Web from across the room. The PC comes with a pair of CableCARD-compatible tuners that let you record two high- definition programs at once, and its hard drive holds up to 50 hours of high-definition recordings. There’s also a white model with a single TV tuner for $1,600.
Gamers’ parents get inside scoop
It often seems that being clueless about video games goes hand in hand with being a parent. But a new website called aims to give parents an inside scoop by going beyond the ratings and offering evaluations written by knowledgeable gamers — many of them parents.
The site’s database lists 16,000 games. You can search by the type of game (“puzzles,” “sports,” “shooter”), the child’s age, the console and the rating given by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Each entry offers space for parents to write about what they found troubling or exciting about the game and how their children reacted to it.
About 700 games have descriptions written by staff members who play for hours to put the ratings in context, said Ira Becker, one of the site’s founders. Ratings for a “Final Fantasy Tactics” game, for example, cite a drug reference. “It took 20 hours of game play to find that drug reference,” Becker said. It comes when a character talks about “the vile pursuit” of opium smuggling.
The Photo Marketing Association convention, which was held last weekend in Las Vegas, is the arena where camera-gear companies do battle for market share and mind share. Some combatants have faded in the move from film to digital, but Nikon and Canon continue to duke it out with hardware that sets the tone for the show and the industry.
Both companies unveiled digital single-lens- reflex cameras aimed squarely at the mass market — in particular, people moving up from compact point-and-shoot models in search of better pictures.
Nikon expands on the small and unthreatening D40x with the D60, a 10.2-megapixel handful with a 2.5-inch screen and the standard CCD-style (charge-coupled device) image sensor, but with some new features.
Dust, the bane of digital SLR owners, can sneak in during lens changes and cling to the charged sensor. The resultant blobs can force the retouching of a whole trip’s worth of shots. With the D60, Nikon joins its competitors in having the sensor shake off offending motes, and it goes one better with a puffer strategy. Each time the shutter clicks and the mirror pops up and down, air blows to clean the sensor.
The D60 will cost $749 when it hits the market this spring; that will include a new 18-55 millimeter lens with a vibration reduction mechanism to reduce blurriness.
Canon’s newest Rebel, the XSi, is scheduled to ship in April for $899 with an 18-55 zoom lens that has also been updated with image stabilization. The body alone will be $799. The 12.2-megapixel sensor is of the CMOS type (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor), allowing very high light-sensitivity settings without the usual grainy noise. This model uses 14-bit analog-to-digital conversion instead of the earlier 12-bit, packing more image data into each file, as in Canon’s professional digital SLRs.
With the XSi’s “live view,” what the sensor sees and will record is shown continuously on the LCD screen, which in this model has grown to 3 inches. This can be useful for focusing and framing of subjects like flowers. As in earlier models, the sensor shakes dust onto an adhesive strip. This Rebel, trying to dress like its upmarket siblings, also steals their rubberized texture — to make itself feel important, too.
