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We normally don’t give budget desktop computers less than a three-star rating, mostly because the majority of them contain similar components, so it comes down to a question of pricing and overall value. Unfortunately, the eMachines EL1200-05w just doesn’t make the grade and successfully garners one of the …

The ultimate ultracompact MP3 player.

(Credit: SanDisk)

Awhile back, SanDisk released some fairly major firmware for both the Sansa Clip and the Sansa Fuze. Well, technically, the update for each is a different piece of software, but most of the fixes and enhancements are similar, so I’m treating the …

Originally posted at MP3 Insider

As you may have read, we are impressed by Intel’s Core i7 965 Extreme Edition desktop processor. It’s fast not only because of the chip itself, but also because of the changes Intel made to the way it interacts with your system memory. Such chip-specific information is great for the DIY crowd, but what about those of you less inclined to build your own PC?

Dell’s Core i7-based Studio XPS.

(Credit: CNET)

We’ve spent the better part of November reviewing Core i7-equipped desktops, five to be exact. The highest-end model, the $8,000 Falcon Northwest Mach V, set records on every desktop benchmark in our arsenal. The surprisingly affordable Dell Studio XPS and Gateway FX6800-01e also impressed us, not only with their relative speed, but by allowing up to six system memory sticks, in the case of the Dell, or by allowing you to add two 3D cards in an sub-$1,500 desktop with the Gateway. Both of those upgrade options speak well of the flexibility afforded by Intel’s new Core i7-supporting X58 chipset. We also loved the Gateway’s tricked-out chassis.

Gateway’s FX6800-01e has a slick removable hard drive array.

(Credit: CNET)

In between, we saw a Core i7-based Alienware Area-51 X58 with 2TB of traditional hard drive storage, as well as a pair of Samsung solid-state hard drives. That’s a truly impressive amount of hardware, even for its $6,500 price tag. We just wish there was an overclocking option with that system. And finally, Velocity Micro’s upper-midrange Edge Z55 impressed us as PCs from that company often do, with its workman-like design and superior performance for the dollar.

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Sweet Nelly Furtado album, bro.

(Credit: Luxist)

Did you know that Louis Vuitton, French manufacturer of leather “luxury” goods, will make you a special one-off case for anything you ask for if you can throw down the cash to pay for the work? Apparently this isn’t a new service, …

It’s been about a year since the debut of dual-band routers, those that support both the ever-popularly used 2.4Ghz and the newer, less busy 5Ghz frequencies. This was very exciting news at first, but after having worked with a few of them, I wonder if they are really …

Here’s the thing about this review: If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t get a deep satisfaction out of holding and using a perfectly crafted object, no matter how humble, you’re probably going to think I’m crazy.

But if you know the joy I do when you encounter an elegant, well-balanced knife, or a pen that fits your hand just right, or an operating system that just makes sense — well, you’ll understand it when I say that this torque wrench from the Italian firm Effetto Mariposa is just a sheer joy.

Bikes these days, constructed as they are out of carbon fiber and other exotic materials, practically require the dedicated home mechanic to invest in a torque wrench. There’s are few sounds in the world more depressing than the sickening crack of your new $300 handlebars being broken by over-enthusiastic tightening. A torque wrench insures that every fastener on your bike is as tight as it should be, and no more.

The Guistaforza is simple and elegant — a knurled handle with a receptacle for quarter-inch bits at one end, and a knob for torque adjustment at the other. The torque scale is metric, so it’s newton-meters all around, which isn’t an issue for bike folks, as that’s how most specs are published. The adjustment range is from 2 to 16 Nm, which is perfect for most of the small bolts on a bike, although it won’t handle things like bottom brackets that require much more torque.

Use couldn’t be easier. Find the right bit from the included set (which should cover most cycling needs), stick it in the holder, use the knob to set the desired torque, and start to tighten. When you reach the specified level, there’s an audible and tactile “break” that signals it’s time to stop. Clean and easy.

We got the red pro model for testing, which the company says is good for 5,000 clicks before it needs to be recalibrated — which is free for the pro model. Most home mechanics won’t tighten that many bolts in a lifetime. Just remember to dial the torque setting to its lowest level after you use it to keep things calibrated.

But beyond the function is just the sheer beauty of this thing. It’s extremely solid, and a little smaller than many torque wrenches. There’s just a feeling of pleasure that comes from picking this little guy up and using it, and a piece of mind that comes from knowing you’re not about to ruin your ride.

It’s not cheap: $250 for the pro model. But bikes aren’t cheap either, and this will pay for itself the first time it keeps you from totally screwing up. I’d also prefer if it ratcheted, which can speed up your work.

But overall, the Giustaforza wrench is a tool that’s earned a permanent place in my toolbox, and one that I’ll love to pick up each time I need it.

It’s not available for the United States…yet. But over at Game l Life, the crafty Chris Kohler has gained access to Nintendo’s newest, Japan-only portable. Here’s a nugget of what he had to say about it:

How many Nintendo DSes are cluttering up your house? Need another? Yes,
you do: If you’re a fan of the company’s products, get ready to part
with another two Benjamins and upgrade to the Nintendo DSi. While it
might look roughly like the current DS Lite model — a little trimmer,
slightly longer — it’s a whole different story under the matte-white
exterior. Here, let’s take a look inside.

$190, nintendo.com

You can read the rest of Kohler’s review of the Nintendo DSi right here. Oh yeah. there’s video of it too, starring yours truly and one Mr. Kohler.

(Photo by Jim Merithew for Wired.com)

ComicZeal is another application for reading comic books on the iPhone and, despite being a little rough around the edges gets things pretty much right. Back in August we took a look at two other comic readers for the iPhone but they both failed on one essential point: They split the pages into individual frames, leaving the reader unable to enjoy more complex, dramatic page designs.

Comic Zeal lets you read whole pages in the same way as Mobile Safari lets you read whole web pages: You just pinch to zoom in. And although the iPhone’s screen is a little small for the medium, reading comics with Comic Zeal works surprisingly well.

We had a quick chat with the author of the application, Emiliano Molina.

First, the features. Comic Zeal comes pre-loaded with some public domain titles — Out of This World, Racket Squad and Romantic Adventures. You can also download a lot of free “Golden Age” comics direct to the iPhone for some retro reading. This last lets you browse the cover art on a wooden bookshelf.

Far more useful is the ability to add your own comics. Or it would be, if it worked. First you need to install Python (a programming language) on your computer and use the free ComicZeal Creator application to convert your comics (in either cbr or cbz formats) into a form that the iPhone app can use. Then you need to fire up the open source application SyncDocs, which will do the work of transferring the new, smaller comics to your iPhone.

Assuming you do manage to get through this meandering journey (I didn’t), the actual process of reading comics is pretty slick. Pinch to zoom, swipe to turn pages, and press once to bring up a navigation menu. That’s it, and it works well, although the page-turn animation is a little unsettling the first time you see it — new pages slide in from the right, but at the same time your finger-swipe moves the existing page around. The app even remembers where you left off in the comic, so you can come back later.

If you’re happy rolling up your sleeves to get things working, then the $2 app is cheap enough to play around with. If you want to read your own comics on the go, and you want it to be iPhone-easy, we’d suggest you wait a little while for the computer end of things to mature.

We asked Emiliano a few questions about the birth of Comic Zeal, the problems of synching files between iPhone and computer, and whether comic books have an electronic future.

Gadget Lab: Syncdocs is a little janky. Is it Java? Any plans for a native OS X app?

Emiliano Molina: SyncDocs is Java, we originally had a web-based process for getting the comics into the iPhone but it had a couple of shortcomings. First it only allowed for transfers of one comic at a time, and second, it could be difficult to set up the networking. Even worse for us it made it look as though the networking problems people were having were due to ComicZeal or ComicZeal Creator.

As I was wondering what to do a post went up on the Apple developer forums about SyncDocs. It’s an open source software project which is used by a number of apps.

I gave it a go and found it easy to install and very functional, it’s very reliable and the configuration is a breeze. Since we started using it our support emails have gone down dramatically.

It’s also cross-platform, which is great, but it also means that it just doesn’t look like a Mac app.

GL: Viewing full sized comics works surprisingly well. Any thoughts on the iPhone as an official delivery platform for comics — ie. Marvel and DC actually selling comics through the iTunes Store?

EM: I’d love to see that happen (hey, lets ALL use ComicZeal), but the problems here are not really technological any more.

I KNOW ComicZeal doesn’t match the experience of reading a real paper comic, but it does give the user options that paper comics don’t. You can read one-handed on a train, you can take your whole collection on holiday, you can read a comic as many times as you want and it won’t be damaged.

The roadblock is the required change in business models for comic publishers. They are not experts in digital distribution, it must scare the heck out of them to think that their wares can be replicated time and time again with no cost, and there is no copyright protection methods that truly work. What are they going to do?

They can’t sell digital comics at the same price as paper ones, they can’t reach the same audience with them, the iPhone and iPod touch are great sellers but the overlap of people who own them and people who buy comics may not be great.

Something else worth considering is this, what’s in it for them? Can publishers make more money by selling digital comics? If you buy a paper comic, will you pay more to get a digital version? If you don’t buy a paper comic, are you likely to buy a digital version?

GL: There are a lot of slick iPhone apps with terrible Mac and PC back ends. Why?

EM: That’s because every developer is being forced to do it from scratch, by themselves. It’s huge time sink and very difficult to get it right. Assuming that all the software works perfectly on both ends, the user would still need to set up a wireless network between their PC and their iPhone. It’s the only way to move data between them that doesn’t require a web-server. Of course, for a lot of types of data the user won’t trust a web server they don’t own anyway so you’re back to a wireless network.

What we need is for Apple to come up with a way for us to use the iTunes sync framework.

GL: Anything else?

EM: Next up on the to-do list is a way to sort comics on the iPhone. When we came up with the requirements for ComicZeal we thought users would have around ten comics on the device. Delete them as they read them, put new ones on as needed. It turns out that users want to keep most of their collection in ComicZeal, so we had to add support for batch downloads - thanks SyncDocs - and now we need to provide a way to sort hundreds of comics.

Product page [ComicZeal]

The G1's request to update its Android software. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Google has begun releasing some details about the vulnerabilities it patched in two updates to Google’s Android operating system software in the T-Mobile G1 smartphone.

The company had acknowledged some of the work earlier, but it hasn’t posted an official comment about the vulnerabilities. But Rich Cannings of the Android security team shared details about the RC29 and RC30 updates that T-Mobile began distributing to G1 customers at least as early as November 1 and November 9, respectively.

Google had acknowledged the RC29 patch for the G1 fixed a browser vulnerability that could have let an attacker use malicious code on a Web site to take over the browser. The severity of such issues is limited by Android’s security design, which walls off applications into separate compartments to limit an attacker’s power. But Cannings said the patch also fixed two other issues.

The Android browser is based on the open-source WebKit engine for converting HTML instructions into an actual Web page, and RC29 brought Android up to date with two patches that had been released but that Google had missed. One of them is a universal cross-site scripting problem that could give an attacker control of the browser, Canning said.

RC29 also fixed a problem that could let someone bypass Android’s locking mechanism by booting the phone into safe mode.

Google plans to publish fuller details on its Android Security Announcements group soon, Cannings said, but the company waits until the patches have been offered to all users before disclosing full details.

RC30 and the root console bug
RC30, which came about a week later, fixed an unusual “root-console” problem in Android in which text that people typed–while composing e-mail messages or searching contacts, for example–could be executed as Linux commands with the highest-level privileges. One user found it by typing the word “reboot” in a text message.

The problem was that Google left in a feature that let programmers execute commands with a remote device attached over a serial port, but when there was no such device attached, the phone just used input from the keyboard.

Linux and Unix users are advised to use their systems with “root” privileges reserved only for administrators, but Android was actually giving anybody that privilege. The problem was lessened because many characters used in Linux commands, such as hyphens, tildes, and slashes, weren’t available, but it was still a big problem, Cannings said.

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Originally posted at News - Security