SoftHeat Plush Triple Rib Review

Owning an electric blanket and using them during the winter season can save you hundreds worth of dollars on electric bills. By using an electric blanket at night, you unsecured loans are no longer going to be needing to turn the centralized heat on at home. It’s cheaper and much more convenient.

An electric blanket is also considerably lighter compared to conventional blankets. These types of blankets make it really hard for you to move around confortably on your bed because of the weight. An electric blanket is so much lighter.

Now that we have taken a look at the advantages of an electric blanket we are now going to take a look at the SoftHeat Plush Triple Rib Electric Heated bad credit loans Warming Blanket. Will it easily break? Will it give enough warmth? What about the cords? Is that going to be a problem?

SoftHeat Plush Triple Rib at a Glance

Check out what the SoftHeat Plush Triple Rib blanket has to offer.

• This blanket uses a patented Safe & warm technology that is low in voltage and is safer compared to most blankets
• An energy saver
• The wires inside the blanket are not at all bulky and are very thin that it’s almost impossible for you to feel anything
• Heats evenly, no cold or hot spots
• Has a pre-heat feature and a temperature hold feature
• Dual controls (on both sides) would let you set it to automatically shut itself off after ten hours
• Fabric is soft and luxurious to the touch
• Can be washed and dried by machine without stretching or shrinking the fabric

We recommend the SoftHeat Plush Triple Rib for staying effectively warm during the cold season.

Honda Asimo Robot

I'm Going Where? Wikimedia Commons

[Updated 2:25 p.m.] Honda sent us an e-mail saying the Asahi Shimbun report is "speculative." "Although Honda hopes that ASIMO will someday be a helper to people, at this point the robot is unsecured loans solely a research and design project," a Honda spokeswoman said.

A couple camera-toting robots have been tooling around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where radiation levels are still making it unsafe for human workers. Now Japanese media are reporting the crews are getting their first humanoid counterpart.

Honda is aiming to redesign Asimo, its 4-foot-tall humanoid robot, so it can join workers at Fukushima Daiichi, according to Japanese media. Asimo would  need tires or caterpillar tracks instead of its delicate legs, and the robot would also need updates to its arms so they can move as smoothly as a human’s, according to the newspaper Asahi Shimbun (reported by AFP).

Since it was introduced a little more than 10 years ago, Asimo has been a robot ambassador of sorts, used mostly to spur robotics research and development. The robot greets children at science museums and has even met heads of state. But it has not been tapped for such difficult labor before.

Asimo can easily shake hands, carry a tray and push small objects, but it would need motorized shoulders, elbows and wrists to get more human-like moves, the paper says. It’s not clear what Asimo would be doing inside the Fukushima plant, but it would likely go into radiation bad credit loans hotspots where it remains dangerous for humans to enter.

Fukushima Daiichi’s reactors have been leaking radiation since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out its cooling systems. Workers are being exposed to high levels of radiation while trying to make repairs. Japanese elderly have even offered to do the job, to spare the younger workers from harmful radiation. But a human-like robot would clearly be a better 

YouTube - Updates

As I was updating my post on the iPad Experience unsecured loans by adding a video from YouTube, I noticed that YouTube updated the UI of its video player. Here’s how it looks like:

YouTube video player - new UI

It seems that after the new video and profile pages that YouTube rolled out over the past few months, it was time to bring the flash player up to speed with the rest of the site’s interface (note: the new UI is not available in all videos yet).

As you can see, the controls have been re-arranged and they have a updated look and feel. In comparison, these are the old vs new designs:

YouTube video player - old vs new design

As a first impression, I like the improved aesthetics of the player and the less cluttered interface. The right-hand side of the old player was starting to look like a full loaded toolbar from Word (just to watch a video!).

The most obvious change is the progress bar, which has been moved above the other buttons and changes in size as you interact with the video. In its normal state it takes only a few pixels, but when you move your mouse cursor on top of the video player, it expands (having a minor transparency) bad credit loans and lets you interact with it. The rest of the buttons become ‘active’ as well, by a small change in color tone.

In regards to the new progress bar, although they moved it in order to free space for the other buttons, there is a small delay now before you can use it (move the cursor over the player > wait for the bar to appear > locate the progress indicator > click). So, this might have a negative usability effect when you just want to skim through a video quickly.

YouTube video player - new progress bar

Another interesting change is the volume control, which now expands horizontally as your mouse cursor hovers the button and doesn’t float over the video (how many times I had to click the volume button after I had adjusted the volume, just for the indicator to go away and let me watch the video). I still find the size of the volume bar small. They could increase its width and let us have a finer control over the volume.

YouTube video player - new volume control

YouTube found a simple way to reduce the clutter in the right-hand side of the player, by separating the buttons into two groups:

• buttons that appear in every video (player size, full screen)
• buttons that appear only under specific conditions (captions, subtitles, quality)

and giving them a distinct design:

YouTube video player - new misc buttons

Overall, the new UI design is less cluttered, straightforward to use and looks sleek (while providing the same functionality). I’m sure we are going to see further updates as the YouTube team starts getting feedback from the users. Well done YouTube!

last.fm.com a visual guide to your music tastes

I have been a member of last.fm.com for well over three years. It’s a site dedicated to the scrobbling of your music being played on your computer and mp3 player. You can collect the stats concerning the your fav artists and songs. You also get suggestions for other bands and genres that might interest you based upon your current stats. In other words its Facebook unsecured loans for music lovers.

They incorporate a layout approach like flickr has, with thumbnails and photostreams of images of the artist. To to me this site adds a visual experience to baD CREDIT loans my music that I didn’t really have before while listen to music on my computer. It organizes your top favorites and provides you with rotating photos of your favorite bands and artists. You even get a choice of switching between a red or black layout.

last.fm has experienced a refresh on their design this past summer which has improved the usability of the interface.

Blu-Ray vs HD DVD

Shuji Nakamura’s blue laser diode exactly fit requirements for next generation DVDs: accurate, reliable, small and affordable both for manufacturing and running costs. It was a brilliant invention, and it offered the opportunity for a single, industry wide high-definition optical storage standard to be agreed upon by the turn of the new millennium.

Of course, that is not what happened. Instead, chasing a supposed multi-billion dollar prize, two opposing factions backed mutually incompatible blue laser optical storage solutions: Blu-ray and HD-DVD. There followed years of deadlock which, though Blu-ray finally bad credit loans came out on top, arguably nobody really won, least of all the consumer.

At the time specifications for the technologies were first disclosed, a comparison with the current DVD format looked as follows:

Format	Current generation	Next generation
DVD playback	4.7GB (single-layer disc); 650nm red laser; MPEG-2 video compression.	Blu-ray disc; 27GB (single-layer disc); up to 50GB (dual-layer disc); 405nm blue-violet laser; MPEG-2 video; incompatible with DVD format.
DVD recordable	4.7GB (single-layer disc); DVD-R (write-once); DVD-RAM (rewritable); DVD-RW (rewritable); DVD+RW (rewritable); 650nm red laser; MPEG-2 video compression.	HD-DVD disc; 9GB (dual layer disc); 405nm blue-violet laser; MPEG-4 or improved MPEG-2 with extensive pre- and post-processing; compatible with DVD format.

Initial indications were that DVD Forum member Warner Bros. and other movie content production companies were firmly in the HD-DVD camp, since it would allow Hollywood studios to repurpose their content one more time without having first to incur high investment costs in transitioning to brand-new replication equipment. In effect, the similarity between HD-DVD and the then current DVD manufacturing processes made it much less expensive to adapt production lines for producing HD-DVDs than it would be to adapt for BD production.

This initial support from Hollywood, likely the quickest to market vendors of the new technology, gave considerable weight to the HD-DVD argument, and quite possibly proved the single most significant factor in precipitating the debacle that followed. Despite most technology manufacturers support for Blu-ray from the off, the DVD Forum could easily justify its decision to support HD-DVD technology on the grounds of production costs alone.

Furthermore, as late as 2005 Intel and Microsoft both announced their backing for HD-DVD, as several of their developments (including Microsoft’s HDi technology) were vested in HD-DVD’s future. Horns seemed locked immovably, despite long and vigorous negotiations.

Some hopefuls suggested that it might be possible for the HD-DVD and BD technologies to co-exist. HD-DVD, they suggested, could be positioned as a playback format for pre-recorded HD-DVD movies. BD, on the other hand, could provide a recording format for real-time interlaced TV programs, including HDTV programming. Others tried to combine the technologies. LG and Samsung released dual HD-DVD/BD drives. Some computer manufacturers, including HP and Acer, sold PCs with combination HD-DVD/BD drives.

These experiments, however, were failures. Progress on a compromise seemed so doomed to failure that sabotage rumours arose. Some said the war was being deliberately fostered by companies who would benefit from the failure of high definition optical disk technology. For instance, companies serving high definition content online, or over airwaves, with hard disk high definition content storage, would certainly benefit if there  was no alternative disk medium. Of course, all such intimations were strongly denied.

Possibly, and perhaps surprisingly, the final death blow for HD-DVD came from the gaming industry. As next-generation consoles came through, anticipation was not only focussed on graphical and processing advancements, but on the optical drive technology to be employed. For their part, Microsoft created a HD-DVD player as an add-on for the X-Box console, but Sony’s PS3 shipped Blu-ray ready.

It was a smart move by Sony. Sales of the PS3 far outstripped the X-Box in the influential Japanese market, and uptake of Microsoft’s add-on HD-DVD player, or indeed any HD-DVD player, was poor in comparison. It was clear; Blu-ray had finally outflanked its opponent.

By the end of 2005 the BD format appeared to have a lead over its rival. By then, most major movie studios had come over to the Blu-ray camp, and committed to releasing films in the format by the following year. There were a number of skirmishes still to play out. Notably, HD-DVD players were first released by Sony in January 2006, a few months ahead of Blu-ray, which they hoped was a major coup. It Unsecured loans didn’t prove to be any great advantage, though, as consumer take-up was very slow. Also, new triple layer HD-DVD specifications created ripples as late as September 2007, bring the HD-DVD’s capacity up to 51GB.

But it was too late: HD-DVD had lost. The power and influence of the DVD Forum waned, membership numbers falling. At time of writing, with considerable irony the DVD Forum’s FAQ for HD-DVD technology still reads: Coming soon!

The years 2002 to 2008 saw an ugly and damaging battle between rival formats echoing the VCR VHS/Betamax format war which raged in the decade ending in the late 1980s. However,  unlike the prevailing opinion of the VCR war’s outcome, perhaps this time the better option won through. Blu-ray’s advantages over HD-DVD included better interactivity, better Internet connectivity, and far larger storage capacity.

But it was a fight to the bitter death. Blu-ray only walked away victorious when Toshiba finally announced the discontinuation of HD-DVD technology in the autumn of 2008.

What is Augmented Reality?

You already know what augmented reality is. You just might not know it's called that, and when you've seen it as its best, you probably haven’t even noticed it at all.

Put at its simplest, augmented reailty, or AR to its friends, is the art of super-imposing of computer generated content over a live view of the world. It is quite literally the practice of enhancing what’s already around us. The most often used example is the one the world is most familiar with and that’s television sports analysis. The reality is the footage of the game of football, rugby, cricket or what have you and the augmentations are the arrows of the players' movement and the zonal areas marked out that don’t exist on the actual playing surface. For example, the first down line in American football is something that doesn't exist on the real pitch but that the viewer can see nonetheless on the picture beamed over the airwaves and to television screen thanks to the addition of a graphical overlay.

One definition of AR as laid down by Professor Ronald Azuma in his Survey of Augmented Reality paper in 1997, is that it combines the real and the virtual, it’s interactive in real-time and that it must register in 3D. Using the example of the first down line, you’ve got the combination of the computer generated line - the virtual - on top of the real American Football footage; it’s present in the real time motion of the game - whether recorded or not - and the graphical line obeys all physical rules of depth as if it existed in the real world. In other words, that it appears underneath the plays feet and behind their legs when they cross it rather than spatially out of sync. It’s as if it really is painted on the pitch.

The first down line, of course, represents a very mild level of AR. It’s a very small, simple, largely static piece of augmentation and makes up for a tiny per centage of the total view. It’s much more reality than virtuality. Nevertheless, according to a second definition by Paul Milgram and Fumio Kishino, it does still exist on a continuum of augmentation which they describe as a line existing between the real world and a totally virtual environment. At the one end would be what you see through your eyes with no device in the way and at the other a completely unsecured loans computer generated world, a virtual reality such as Second Life.

The example of the first down line lies a long way to the left of this scale - just millimetres from the end really - but it’s equally possible to have a situation of something you might call augmented virtuality at the corresponding point on the right. By today’s standards, anything that fits anywhere on this continuum that isn’t right at one of the extremes would be classed as AR.

Now that we’re fully versed on what it is we’re talking about, let’s get practical with a few examples of what AR can do for us and how it works. The key part of AR is that you need to place a layer of virtual information over your view of the real world and, in order to do that, there must be a device in between to display that information upon. There are three main ways of doing that and they all relate to the position these devices occupy.

The first instance is where that display is right up against the eyes of the beholder. These are often referred to as Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) and will take the form of a visor of some sort or a pair of connected glasses such as those manufactured for consumers by Vuzix. The holy grail of HMDs is contact lens solution and indeed there’s plenty of research and development here that will be the subject of other articles in AR Week on Pocket-lint. HMDs are generally a good solution. It leaves the user’s hands free and means that their entire visual field can be overlayed with augmentation wherever they turn.

One step away from that are the handheld devices which are most notably these days smartphones but will doubtless include camera-toting tablet computers after the flurry seen at CES and MWC 2011. Either way, there’s an advantage here in that these things already exist in quite powerful and convenient forms. The issues, though, are that the user is limited to just a frame, that your hands are tied up and, possibly most problematic of all, is that the more AR is used like this, the greater the chance that people will end up assaulting each other by accident as they spin around with their arms stretched out in front of them or just getting their expensive phones whipped from their grip.

Finally at the other end of the business, and closest to the real world itself, is the method of pasting that computer-generated overlay directly on top of your real environment instead. It’s usually done with digital projectors or other devices known in this group as Spatial Displays. The advantages are that the user is required to hold or wear no computer equipment whatsoever and the second key difference is that everyone else can see the AR as well. The downside is that it’ll only work on a very specific environment but it’s perfect for collaborations like building projects and might even be the future of construction sites. Who needs plans and blueprints when everyone can see where each timber is supposed to go?

There is another slightly different group of devices out there which can be employed for activity specific environments and, in fact, these are what’s used for some of the most developed and mature examples of AR around at the moment. These are the Heads-up Displays or HUDs. HUDs are powered and connected transparent view screens with computer graphic LED information displayed over the environment.

Essentially, we’re talking about large, fixed, transparent computer screens sat somewhere not to far out in front of the user. The military have been using them for years with screens of fighter jets made just like this and indeed it’s where the name HUD comes from. It’s a heads-up display because the pilots are able to keep their heads up and looking at the action in front of them rather than having to constantly reference controls and meters on their cockpit panels. They can monitor the speed of other aircraft, compass headings, vectors, wind speed and anything else you could possibly want to know - all by just looking straight ahead. In the next few years, we’ll begin to see consumer car windscreens as HUDs but, again, there’ll be more on that coming up in AR week.

So, by now you should be thinking that you’ve pretty much got a handle on what this AR thing is all about and there’s even an excellent chance that knew all along anyway. Well done you. But just before we go, spare a little thought for this teaser - does AR have to be all about your eyes?

What about putting a layer of information between your other four senses and the rest of the world? For touch, you could have information sent back to you via haptic feedback, for taste, there could be device mounted on your tongue - as uncomfortable as that might sound - having headphones in your ear is simple enough and there’s no reason why there couldn’t be similar units for one’s nostrils.

So long as the user still has contact and appreciation of the natural world while plugged up with sensors, then there is still the mixing of the real and virtual and that is what AR is all about. A car’s increasingly rapid beeps when its bumper gets closer and closer to a static object could be considered AR, the noises of a Geiger counter are a form of AR and, doubtless, someone could invent a small nasal-lining film for hay fever suffers that might emit a strong smell when pollen passes across it.

All the same, for the time being, most of the development and much of the interest of AR lies with the visual mode, largely because it’s an excellent medium for getting across more rich information in any one moment, and it’s here where much of AR Week will be based. Tune in as we take a closer look at some of the more exciting applications that the future holds.