The Showwx laser pico projector can be connected to any device that display photos or video, such as a Mac Book or iPod or iPhone. Always stays in focus, whether projecting a 6 inch image up to 200 inches, in WVGA (848×480) format. The battery can usually power projection of an entire movie before requiring recharge. The Showwx should be available in the US in March, they had a working prototype at the expo. It is currently available in Europe and Asia. Certainly deserved the best of show award.

Office for iPhone or IPod Touch allows viewing, editing and creating MS Word and Excel documents. Many of the commands in the full version are included in the iPhone/Touch version and are listed on their web page. A number of the commands take advantage of the iPhone/Touch, particularly the Excel commands.

Both the Showwx and Office for iPhone/Touch would seem useful together, though graphs are not mentioned as a feature.in Office for iPhone/Touch.

Eye-Fi adds Wi-fi to your camera, enabling one to send photos to their computer without connecting either one to each other.

There is a compatibility page, as some camera’s can not accept a 4 GB SD memory card. My Nikon D50 can not read more than a 2 GB memory card, whereas my wife’s CoolPix S710 can.

Eleven Engineering, a semiconductor company, has targeted a new wireless technology for use in portable devices with what it contends is better-than-Bluetooth performance in stereo music applications. This company is the chip maker, partnering with potential product companies.They were demoing a wireless speaker system, nothing tempting. The technology is the key, it they can convince their partners to use their circuit board in their products. As said, Wi-Fi is preferable to Blue-Tooth. Any product using the symbol, which is a abstract of TRIK will be assurance they are using Eleven Engineering’s technology.

We are pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.8.6i. This is a bugfix release. VLC media player 0.8.6h and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the WAV demuxer.

This release also includes improved audio visualizations on FreeBSD and miscellaneous bug fixes in multiple modules.

The number of players has stayed limited, with Panasonic, Sharp, Marantz, Sylvania and Philips the only ones to have a player available. Pioneer and Sony are still in development. The PC drive are now under $200, even those from Sony and Pioneer, even though I admit I initially look for those DVD brands who represented quality. The burners are still $500 and above.

nVidia didn’t come through, so we’re having to do it. Should be ready in about a month.

Lets hope the video card is still reasonably current when it becomes useful.

We are pleased to announce the release of VLC media player 0.8.6f. This is a bugfix release. VLC media player 0.8.6e and earlier versions suffer from security vulnerabilities in the Subtitle demuxer, Real RTSP demuxer, MP4 demuxer and Cinepak codec.
This release also includes improved video output on multi-screen setups running Mac OS X and compatibility with Windows 9x/ME has been restored. We strongly recommend all users to update to this new version.

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VLC media player is free and supports a large number of multimedia formats. Even with Quicktime Pro,with the MPEG-2 codec, can not play most avi files. As mentioned before, do not be dissuaded by the version number, this software has performed as a final release for a number of years.

The US is moving to HDTV, slower than I thought, yet with the continued drop in the price of the LCD HDTVs the conversion is picking up speed. Those that have HD quality TV probably wonder how they got along without it. Almost all channels have an HD version of that channel, including the PBS channels. PBS KQED, in the bay area, has at least 4 HD channels that I know of. It makes sense for TIVO to be HD capable. Being able to control when and what you watch began with the VHS recorder, but by all reports has been surpassed by technology. Actually, TIVO has been around quite a while, and digital has it all over tape. In this version TIVO does HD, but at a resolution limit of 1080i, and further does not work with Direct TV. Below I have referred you to an article about HDTV resolutions. Read more about TIVO, including the FAQ linked on their TIVO HD web page.

See this about.com article explaining the display differences between 1980i and 1080p. It all comes down to a matter of personal tastes.

Toast 8

While this version is not new (Macworld best of show 2007), Toast has had the ability to convert video files to a DVD, with a menus, since Toast 5, much like iDVD in iLife. If the TIVO is connected to your network, Toast 8 has the ability to import TIVO data and make a DVD.

What’s new in VLC media player – 0.8.6d:

* Mozilla plugin: supports a reasonable amount of MIME types on Windows
* Automatic recovery on unexpected stream discontinuity (clock gap) occurrences in input
* Use field order (top/bottom) for correct bob/linear deinterlacing
* Fix invalid free in bookmarks loading code
* FLAC Security Update (CVE-2007-4619) to prevent multiple integer overflows
* Security update (VideoLAN-SA-0703)
* Apple Remote support on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with enhanced functionality
* Improved Video Output compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
* Improved behavior of the Fullscreen Controller and mode changes between Fullscreen and Windowed Video Output
* Softened the white flash artifacts that may appear during the transition of two different movies
* Support for current Ogg file formats NOTE: This release requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. Mac OS X 10.3.9 is not supported anymore.
* Improved H.264 encoding speed on Mac OS X
* The automatic updating facility was removed
* You now need to append –m3u-extvlcopt to your command line to enable EXTVLCOPT options parsing in m3u playlists.

As USB 2.0 stated 480 Mb/s is considerably slower than FireWire 400, it would not be a surprise that FireWire 3200 (assuming 3.2 Gb/s) is equal to or faster than USB 3.0. Any possibility of testing this idea is much in doubt.

Additionally, VLC media player 0.8.6c supports the playback of the following video formats: MPEG-1/2, DIVX (1/2/3), MPEG-4, DivX 5, XviD, 3ivX D4, H.264, Sorenson 1/3 (Quicktime), DV, Cinepak, Theora (alpha 3), H.263 / H.263i, MJPEG (A/B), WMV 1/2, WMV 3 / WMV-9 / VC-1, Indeo Video v3 (IV32), Indeo Video 4/5 (IV41, IV51), Real Video Download