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Those who missed the boat for Mother’s Day this year, fret not, as your little one ought to pop out sometime in the near future, making you eligible for next year’s edition so to speak. As if trying to get pregnant isn’t hard enough (in fact, it can be pretty stressful especially for those who have been trying for months and even years on end without any success), keeping your growing baby safe and sound from all sorts of threats is even more challenging. There are tons of worries which are sure to abound, including whether you will be able to fit into that black little number that caught hubby’s eye way back at the high school prom, but the more important concern would be the baby’s safety especially during a car ride. Any mom-to-be can tell you how uncomfortable it is to wear a seatbelt across the abdomen, but aren’t seatbelts supposed to be for their safety? Enter the Tummy Shield, a new seat belt that was specially designed for pregnant women.

The Tummy Shield does not fit across the abdomen, but is instead worn around the thighs in order to protect the abdomen from trauma resulting from a car collision. The idea came about when an Australian engineer believed his first child suffered brain damage as a result of a car accident. It took quite a fair number of years working with mechanical engineers to come up with the Tummy Shield, and needless to say there was a quite an amount of prototypes which rolled out along the way as well.

If you’re concerned with the safety rating of the Tummy Shield, fret not. It has been safety-tested in a number of Australian testing facilities and consists of a flame retardant cushion and a buckle made of high tensile stainless steel. All you need to do is place the cushion on the car seat, secure with the buckle, sit down and then pull the seatbelt away from your abdomen and attach it to the hook. The seatbelt will then be pulled tight at the shoulder, allowing your hubby to drive you wherever you want to go. The Tummy Shield will retails for AUD$199.99.

Product Page via Gizmag

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I have several computers in my house, most of which run Windows XP. With the release of the third and final service pack for the OS, I did what I always do, which was absolutely nothing. I did not download the new data, but merely sat back, content with the way my computers were running; waiting to see what damage would be caused by the update. Apparently there has been plenty of damage done.

There have been a large amount of users indicating issues with SP3. Anything from driver issues, software problems to even system crashes. My advice to those experiencing these issues is to uninstall the service pack and be content with the way your computer was before. There’s really no rush to install something like this right away, as there are generally issues that need to be worked out.

Ironically, Service Pack 3 was delayed because of incompatibility issues. Glad to see that Microsoft got all of those out before releasing the update to the public.

Source: Pocket-Lint

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RIM has officially announced the new BlackBerry Bold (previously the BlackBerry 9000. True to its name, RIM is announcing it in a bold manner, complete with a product site of its own. And since it bears the BlackBerry brand, we don’t have to tell you how sleek and cool looking this new BlackBerry model is, right? But just in case you have no idea how uber cool this BlackBerry Bold is, it has a lustrous black exterior, satin chrome finished frame and stylish leather-like blackplate.

Feature wise, here’s what’s in store for all of you BlackBerry users - 624MHz mobile processor running on tri-band HSDPA or Wi-Fi network (AT&T 3G), 128 MB flash memory plus 1 GB on-board storage memory, microSD/SDHC memory card slot, half-VGA (480×320 resolution) color LCD, the 8800 style keyboard, integrated GPS, and of course access to BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server.

On the softer side of things the Bold runs blackberry OS 4.6, has a 2-megapixel camera with flash, 5 hours talk time and 13 days standby, has a 3.5mm headphone jack, and supports MP3, WMA, AAC, DivX4 and WMV3 codec support.

So, with that, we leave you to discover how powerful and bold the new BlackBerry Bold smarthphone is. Just check out the links after this post and see for yourself why the whole mobile industry is excited about the new BlackBerry Bold.

Product [BlackBerry] Read [Blackberry]

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by Paul Miller, posted May 12th 2008 at 9:52AM
Oooh, now we get it. HandTalk converts hand gestures like sign language into spoken words. Well, don’t we feel silly. The device was developed by a group of nerds at Carnegie Mellon, and can track finger and hand gestures with a vocabulary of 32 words in its existing v0.1 model. The signals are transmitted from the glove to a phone over Bluetooth, where the words are converted with text to speech software. Not bad for a bunch of off-the-shelf components, but they could’ve scored double the nerd points by repurposing a Power Glove for this — gotta think big picture, people.

[Via talk2myShirt]

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Filed under: Wearables

The Nokia 6600 Fold is a clamshell phone offering a 2 megapixel camera with flash doubles as a video recorder as well as the following features:

* 16m color OLED, 240×320 pixel resolution main display
* Hidden OLED, 128×160 pixel resolution secondary display
* second VGA-resolution camera fir video calling
* electromagnetic opening mechanism and smooth motion hinge
* quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz)
* dual-band WCDMA (850/2100MHz) support
* Bluetooth
* 18MB memory
* microSD card slot
* Speakerphone
* Electromagnetic opening mechanism

Via MobileBurn.

by Paul Miller, posted May 12th 2008 at 8:01AM
If destroying your roof just to get some sun-sucking solar panels installed isn’t your thing, Lumeta’s PowerPly could be the solution. The panels use traditional roofing adhesives, that’ll be familiar to regular ol’ roofers, and save the process from drilling holes and bolts associated with the regular rack systems required to mount solar panels. Right now this process is targeted at commercial projects — you can watch a pair of guys install 2.25 kilowatts of solar modules onto a California roof after the break — but hopefully residential applications won’t be far behind.

[Via Digg]

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Filed under: Household

The latest, but still rumored information is now putting the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry 9000 with an official name, the BOLD. According to the folks over at CrackBerry this “appears with *reasonable* certainty that this is in fact the case” however without an official announcement we are still not 100% convinced. Either way it should not be long now before we see the 9000 BOLD officially announced and its fair to say we will also learn the name at that time. More important though is that the BOLD, whether or not that is the true name, is going to be a very nice addition to the current blackberry lineup. Here’s hoping that announcement comes as expected on Monday.

Via [CrackBerry]

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