Joke upon your friends with High-Tech USB prank device

While most of the gadgets are interesting and convenient helpers, there are some of them that exist only for pranks. Looking like usual devices, they have strange or annoying functions hidden inside. Their main purpose is to prank on a friend's or foe's computer, to annoy them and to laugh on it afterward. They often are not hazardous, and do some simple but annoying actions. Like this one - it is camouflaged to look just like a simple and harmless USB thumb drive, however it carries a big amount of hidden functions that no one is aware of.

Named Phantom Keystroker, it uses one USB port to connect to the target's PC. When it's connected, it will be recognized by PC as a USB keyboard and mouse, and will stay hidden until time comes. Then it will anger the user by typing the odd and random text, moving the mouse cursor randomly and toggling caps lock - all of these combined would ensure user that his PC is infected by virus, or it was hacked. But no antivirus software will locate the source of this mess, because Phantom Keystroker operates on a hardware side, not software. With a set of special buttons on its side it is possible to adjust its behavior and set a time delay, which will be useful to provide an alibi or to prolong the joke. Imagine the fury of the user, when after hours of intensive system clean-up he will discover a strange USB thumb drive, connected to his PC!

While it is meant to be a harmless joke, it is not recommended to use this at work. Of course, it is very tempting to joke like that on your colleagues, but it is wise to keep in mind that such things may not go unpunished. Victim also can become very angry after all these actions, so choose wisely place and time to joke. This device can be purchased for 15 dollars.

Source here.


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Sound Chair + iMac touchscreen

Listing to the music is a great way to spend your free time. If you are not fond of heavy beat party sounds, then you might have though that listing to the music of any genre of it shouldn't be a trail for your body. And that is what the Sound Chair's developers must have considered. The Sound Chair is widely known as a multi functional gadget – a stylish piece of furniture and a hi-fi stereo system carrier. Such kind of two-in-one combination is a rear thing to happen. However, The Sound Chair has just made it to its upgraded version, which means it is quite popular, and the new model will probably be even more popular because of 20 inch touchscreen built in.
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But for the touchscreen, former Sound Chair is now called the Sound Chair Touch. From the first glance only the 20 inch iMac touchscreen is seen as new thing in it. Actually, there is not much more of news about it. It is still a chair that judging by design came down from a UFO, or from another place like it, and is still offered only with leather and suede inside. All the materials, by the way, are of a very high quality, so they will not call to any censure. In rest, the Sound Chair Touch has a standard pack for multimedia amusement. The bendable iMac display connector wires it to a PC with ATI Radeon 2400 XT GPU, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz processor, 250 GB on internal HDD and 1 GB of RAM. Good enough for a home PC, but we are not dealing with one. That is the price I am getting at. Rumors are speaking of five figures on the price tag. That's more then ten grand for a smart and fashionable piece of furniture. One must really like the Sound Chair Touch to buy one.

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New TRRAM chips for a transparent phones

Usually, concepts, while looking curious and interesting, rarely make their way from the paper to the real device. Not so long ago, when Nokia Morph pictures hit the net, it was clearly obvious that it is just an original idea, nothing more. How an electronic device would be fully transparent? However, due to recent technological developments, we possibly have a chance to see it implemented in real life, or even buy it!

Scientists from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology made a revolutionary discovery that can be used to bring all these concepts of transparent devices to life. It is called TRRAM (Transparent Resistive Random Access Memory), and is almost fully transparent, while operating just like normal non-transparent chips. It is similar to usual CMOS chips in functionality, so it can be easily used in manufacturing various devices, cell phones included.

As stated by Jung Won Seo, one of the Korean researchers: “It is a new milestone of transparent electronic systems. By integrating TRRAM device with other transparent electronic components, we can create a total see-through embedded electronic system.”

This development can truly revolutionize the world of modern devices and gadgets. With transparent chips it will be possible to implement electronic hardware into the windshield of a car; it can be used in sunglasses or highly-fashioned transparent cell phones. It really widens the area in which electronic devices can be implemented, making many concepts look much closer to the real life. Bendable screens, transparent chips - all these improvements are making electronics more flexible and easy to use.

Transparent chips have some disadvantages though: transparent phones would be much easier to hide or lose, and how do you solder a chip if it is fully transparent? Of course, these are not serious, hope that technology doesn't have any major disadvantages that will prevent it from being widely used. First devices on these chips would appear no sooner than after 3 - 4 years, so let's wait until TRRAM will be used in a working prototype.

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Neuros OSD Media Recorder – storage of all your media

Probably all of us have a collection of movies that we prefer the most and that we keep hoping that nothing will ever happen to them. The problem in some cases is that many of our favorite movies come in different formats. Neuros OSD Media Recorder is a useful gadget for all those that keep movies in a mix of DVDs, online, video cameras and probably on VHS tapes as well, since this gadget allows archiving the collection of all your movies.

The benefit of archiving all your movies is a measure of precaution of your DVD set being stolen or lost and the other outstanding benefit is the possibility of watching one movie on a variety of different mediums. This gadget automatically encodes video and audio for such devices as laptops, iPods, iPhone, and Smartphones. Another noticeable feature of Neuros OSD Media Recorder is the option of transforming the Gallic SECAM format into MPEG4.

It is possible to store and play files by using media cards or by using a USB external hard drive plugged into the OSD. The most prominent feature of Neuros OSD is the richness of ports and the open-source firmware. Purchasing the device, it gives you analog video and audio input and output, Ethernet, USB, infrared, two card slots to accommodate CF and SD/MS/MMC cards, and also including is a universal full-function remote control.

Other features that need to be taken into consideration are the timed recording feature permitting one to schedule recordings in advance, the network attached storage functionality, and the option of searching for and watching YouTube videos on the TV.

This gadget will allow you to convert digital pictures into mobile-friendly sizes for a better photo album portability. Some other characteristics that may be of good use are the customizable slide shows and the IR Blaster in order to control your set-top box.

The use of this gadget seems to be quite easy, so there is no such requirement to be technology savvy. Neuros OSD Media Recorder may be a valuable Christmas gift, as Christmas is one of those times of the year when we search throughout our collection of movies to pick a good one to watch with the entire family.

Source here.

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