convenience
Latest
Simple Wood no longer needed to make campfires
This is quite possibly the most game altering change Blizzard has implemented in WoW thus far: Building a Basic Campfire no longer needs Simple Wood, only Flint and Tinder or a Gnomish Army Knife. This is right up there with stackable clams! Personally, my mind is blown.Okay, let's be serious, this is actually a fairly decent (and convenient) change. Is it absolutely needed? No, not at all, but how many of us carried around Simple Wood and Flint and Tinder at all times? Who took those things to raids with them? Very few people, if anybody at all. And I can recall tons of times that people have rushed to a raid just after getting home from work and had forgotten to cook up their consumables. These fires would've been legitimately useful right then, but the small annoyance of carrying stacks of Wood around made it pretty unlikely that anybody had them. Nowadays, I think just about everyone carries a Gnomish Army Knife (and they should if they don't), so this is actually very convenient! You don't need to carry anything extra at all.
SmartShopper prints out your shopping list using voice recognition
Don't you just hate shopping for groceries? Being around other people, having to spend time thinking about what you want to buy, and the inevitable "shopping hangover" caused by the later realization that you bought a dozen things you don't need or want: yuck. A lot of people head online for their shopping (where else can you read Engadget while you order loo roll?), but for those who prefer to take their cash into the real world, there's now a solution that could prevent the likelihood of encountering one of those aforementioned shopping hangovers: SmartShopper is a device that can convert a spoken shopping list into a printout to carry around in your wallet or purse. Just mount the SmartShopper on your fridge using the magnet, start waxing lyrical about apples and oranges -- don't worry, your neighbors already think you're crazy -- and the little gray box will neatly print all your choices onto a little piece of paper. At $149, the SmartShopper is on the low end of smart fridge solutions, but at least you can feel safe knowing that its limited artificial intelligence prevents it from sticking "5 kg of Soylent Green" on your list.[Via The Raw Feed]
NEC announces super-sensitive fingerprint scanner
With fingerprint scanners having become almost a commodity item nowadays-- we've already got a hard drive and thumb drive on biometric lockdown -- it looks like we may now be in for a sensitivity war (oxymoron?) among these devices similar to the ongoing megapixel escalation in digital cameras. Even though it's probably still vulnerable to Play-Doh-equipped hackers, NEC's new external USB reader offers an impressive 800dpi in its 15-millimeter wide sensor -- it seems the best you can do today is around 500dpi -- which at the very least will marginally speed up your web surfing, thanks to its slim 0.0001% chance of misidentifying a print. This "reading precision of the worldwide highest level" (thanks, machine translation) won't come cheap, though, as the pocket-size PU700-20 will cost about $250 when it ships on August 1st.[Via Digital World Tokyo]
