Alan Brandon

I wish they’d had this competition when I was in college: The SAE Clean Snowmobile Challenge has teams of college engineering students competing to produce greener sleds without sacrificing performance or handling. I had a great time researching and writing this piece for Gizmag.com

I’ve been doing some work for nPulse Technologies, including this datasheet for their Dragonfly FlowMeter sensor. nPulse designs and builds high-performance network monitoring systems that can capture, record, and process traffic up to 10 Gbps. The FlowMeter is available now, and I’ve done some more collateral that will be released soon.

I wrote an article in Gizmag about Quest Visual’s Word Lens app, an augmented-reality translator that uses your phone’s camera to view printed words and translate them into another language as you watch in real time.

According to reviews the app is not fully baked yet, but it seems to be off to a great start.

Over at Gadget Review I have a hands-on review of the Toshiba Satellite A665 laptop. The A665 is spacious 16-incher with an Intel Core i7 CPU, 4 GB of DDR3 memory, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics. I liked the A665, and i think it would make a nice high-end entertainment computer for home use. It’s not that rugged, so I wouldn’t get one for business, school, or chronic Starbucks use. Also, I hate the off-centered keyboard.

The last Toshiba I spent any time using was probably a T4600 or thereabouts. It had the side-mounted tiny trackball that you worked with your thumb. Ah, the memories….

Toshiba T4600Cs with thumb-ball (image: CRN)

The apple meets the shield-and-bars in the DashLink iPhone cradle for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. In this piece for Gizmag I cover a slick accessory from Hell’s Foundry.

With my fat fingers, I’d hate to try using an iPhone or iPod Touch while riding. But safely stopped, this would be a good way to keep the tunes rolling (or use a GPS app).