You may think you have a powerful erection, but how do you know? The Erectile Quality Monitor is here to help.
Even though the latest MacBook uses the same size display as the last-gen MacBook Air, the displays are not quite the same. The Air, being a more premium product, uses a display that’s more similar to the MacBook Pro than the MacBook. You’ll remember in our review that despite being both made out of glass and visually very similar, the MacBook’s 13-inch screen was of a “lower” quality than the 15-inch MacBook Pro screen. You can see that blacks are much blacker and the colour representation is much better on the Air.
If you purchased Metallica’s new album Death Magnetic, you may have noticed that it sounds like complete shit. But don’t blame Metallica, producer Rick Rubin or mastering engineer Ted Jensen—the real culprit here is Apple and their damned iPod. While the “loudness wars” have been going on since the late 80′s, the development of digital music and the iPod have heated things up.
Currently showing at the 2nd Skin Exhibition at San Francisco’s Exploratorium is this piece of smart clothing by designer Stephanie Sandstrom. Inside it hide a bunch of sensors that measure the nearby air quality, along with drivers that can adjust the fabric. The idea is that on bad air days the dress detects the problem, and adjusts itself to look all rumpled and messy, and raising environmental awareness. Does that wrinkling mean it raises the hemline? I’m not sure… but if it did, that might work to take your mind off the damage being done to your health by all those airborne pollutants. [Inhabitat]
Trusted Reviews has a big investigation on inkjet printers and inkjet ink, and their year-long study comparing fading between more expensive manufacturer brand vs. the cheaper crappy brand shows that you get what you pay for. Over three months, the differences between the two were negligible, with pages only fading slightly (but noticeably) in quality.
Yamaha’s CD-S2000 and A-S2000 audiophile CD combo has been announced for the discerning Australian. It’s a masterpiece of retro design and pristine, two channel sound.
I’ve listened to it, and it sounds pretty damned good. There’s a full range of sound that you don’t often get from a setup without a subwoofer. It looks fantastic, and smells pretty awesome too. If it weren’t so heavy, it could almost be considered pantsworthy.
But part of me wonders exactly how much of a market there is for this type of product in the day and age of the iPod. Considering that the A-S2000 has an RRP of $2,999 and the CD-S2000 costs $2,599, would you be happy to spend more than five grand on a CD setup?
Sure, it does play back SACDs too, and you can opt to go for one or the other and not the combo, but in today’s market of declining CD sales and digital downloads, is a high-end CD player obsolete? When a 160GB iPod sets you back $479 and lets you store a large music collection in lossless, I know where my money would be headed (if I had money to spend, that is).
[Yamaha]
Turns out, I’m not going deaf. Phones are just still delivering really shitty sound quality, according to a worldwide audit. Analysing data from 630 million live calls from 16 carriers in 12 countries, Ditech Networks’ voice-quality team determined that nearly 40% of all calls failed to meet set industry standards, and even in developed markets like the US and Western Europe, the proportion was close to a quarter. “Objectionable” faults included ambient noise, acoustic echo, and voice-level mismatch, where either the caller or speaker is too damn quiet—or deafeningly loud.
