Green Gadget: Logitech solar keyboard for Mac

I literally just put a new wireless keyboard on my shopping list as I shuffle around some of the equipment in my home office and get ready to donate the old stuff (no e-waste here!). Lo and behold, Logitech has come out with the Macintosh edition of the wireless solar keyboard that I wrote about a few weeks back and coveted.

Like its PC-focused sibling, the Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 for Mac uses onboard solar cells to self-power using either sunlight or ambient light. No more batteries. On a full charge, it can work up to three months in total darkness. It connects via a 2.4 gigahertz wireless Unifying receiver.

The keyboard is shipping in the United States and Europe. It carries a suggested retail price of $59.99 and it comes in five colors: black (pictured), white, blue, green and pink.

Source: zdnet

New Facebook layout starts rolling out: What's new

Further to initial testing of the new Facebook layout, it seems the new layout is appearing on more and more screens.

Facebook has not seen a redesign to its News Feed area in over 16 months, it is understood and clear to see that advertising space — through sponsored stories and adverts — will regain prominent focus for Facebook users, in a bid to boost overall revenue.

Though the basic layout has changed slightly, Facebook keeps much of the same content. However, many will discover duplicates for now — one can presume until further tweaks are made to boost reported click-through rates for ‘unfiltered content’.

There are two key changes you need to be aware of — before you see the new layout, panic, and take to the groups to complain:

Highlighting: Facebook’s new highlighting feature is not yet clear, but shows some interesting functionality.

In short, you can hover over a status or an update and select the: “This is a highlight” option. While I suspect this is for a later feature, yet to be fully developed or rolled out, it temporarily ’sticks’ that status or update to your news feed.

It could be used to highlight favourite statuses, updates and ‘likes’ later on, in a retrospective look back at your time on the site — similar to that of Facebook Memories, which has yet to see the light of day.

Ticker: The fixed ticker on the right hand side of the screen displays all of your social networks’ updates, from friends’ statuses, along with updates from your pages and applications. This, in effect, is your unfiltered news feed.

Unlimited in length, it constantly updates you on the going’s on of your friends — taking on the permissions you set when you decide to hide a friend or a particular update still.

It is, in effect, an expanded view of the newly released Facebook game ticker, which was rolled out to counter the Google+ offensive.

Logitech's G300 9-button gaming mouse is for the win, $40

Getting tired of hitting the wrong keystroke bindings when you play World of Warcraft? Logitech’s G300 9-button ambidextrous gaming mouse could help you slay Deathwing.

The G300 comes with software where you can map your key combos to each of the nine buttons, so you can focus on upping your kill/death ratio rather than just playing your keyboard like a piano. Its on-board memory even lets you save the button configurations for up to three different games or players, and assign a different color to each profile so you can see right away which profile is active (see below). So you can plug this USB mouse into any machine and game with your configurations right away.

With a speedy one-millisecond report rate, and 2500 DPI optical sensor, this wired mouse “tracks slow or fast movements on a wide variety of surfaces, so you get exactly the action you want from every incremental hand movement,” according to its press release. The central DPI shift button will also let you switch up the mouse’s sensitivity for when you need to line up that perfect head-shot. Its sculpted shape for either hand should make your MMO and FPS marathon more comfortable.

This Logitech G300 will be hitting stores in Europe and North America in September, for $39.99.


Source: zdnet

WebOS goes down in quiet death

In the end, Hewlett-Packard had as much luck with webOS as Palm did. Maybe even less.

So long, TouchPad, we hardly knew you.

H-P said today it would discontinue operations for devices running on the webOS, including its recently launched TouchPad and smartphones.

The sudden death of webOS, which won critical acclaim but little commercial success, underscored the brutally competitive nature of the smartphone operating system. With a much smaller scale relative to the likes of Apple's iOS or Google's Android, it had a high initial obstacle to clear. The slick software may not have ever had a chance to begin with.

Palm bungled the debut of the software, choosing to go with a then-weak No. 3 carrier Sprint Nextel as its sole partner. It compounded the error with a wave of head-scratching advertisements that did little to sell the benefits of the phone. The software also never got the corresponding quality hardware from Palm, resulting in cheap-feeling devices.

H-P hardly did better. Its first H-P-branded device was the tiny Veer, which looked more like a toy than a genuine smartphone. It still never found a carrier partner for the Pre 3, which was supposed to be the revamped flagship phone. The TouchPad tablet, meanwhile, suffered from an underwhelming launch, with reports of Best Buy sitting on piles of unsold inventory.

"H-P has had Palm for more than a year and has failed to demonstrate any traction," said Maribel Lopez, an analyst at Lopez Research.

For now, the smartphone market is largely a two-horse race dominated by Apple and Google. With Research in Motion reeling with its software transition and Microsoft still trying to gain awareness for its Windows Phone software, it's easy to see how webOS could have struggled with only a single supporter in H-P.

Source: cnet

Datacenter power outage and DDoS attack cripples VoIP vendor

Ooma, a VoIP provider had the dual inconveniences of what they described as a “rare” partial power failure at their unnamed datacenter provider and what appeared to be asimultaneous DDoS attack on their corporate website, which left their customers unable to use their service, or even check on the status of their accounts while Ooma rushed to recover from the problems.

The service was only down for three hours, starting at 5:40 AM Pacific Time, which means that the issue was resolved by the time West Coast customers got to their offices, but anyone further east would have found their business impacted by the outage. Given that Ooma’s primary marketing approach is for their free home phone service it is likely that their customers, who are home users, would have been somewhat in the dark about what was going on and tried to connect to the company website.  According to the Ooma corporate blog, it was the sudden rush of customers, that no longer had phone services, trying to access the corporate home page that caused what appeared to be a DDoS attack.

Of course, the explanation is of little value to customers who found themselves without service. This is true of any cloud-based outage; customers won’t care why it happened, they just don’t want it to happen again.  And it is the primary Achilles Heel of cloud based services; anything that can cause a service interruption eventually will, and it is next to impossible to prevent every potential failure.

In a short span of time where we have seen major cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft have significant problems keeping their services up and running, most people are taking careful looks at the SLAs that are coming along with their cloud based service providers. The more professionally paranoid are reminded of the old adage “Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times is enemy action.”