Traveling can sometimes make it difficult to keep gadgets charged up, especially when hiking or spending time in remote areas. This backpack from Voltaic Systems has three durable, waterproof solar panels across the back of it which generate up to 4 watts of power, which is plenty to charge up your things.

Inside the backpack there are channels that run throughout the pack and shoulder straps to run wires through which can power and charge various items. A 2,200mAh Li-Ion battery and eleven adapters also come with the Voltaic Backpack to hook up to a wide variety of gadgets and run them temporarily with no power source. The battery has three different voltage settings available to store the solar power.

When riding in the car or indoors, the solar backpack also contains adapters to charge your gadgets and it’s battery through a standard …

iLoad copies your music CDs directly onto your iPod without a computer or Internet connection. Measuring 8″ x 7.25″ x 3.35″ and weighing 4 pounds, iLoad is convenient and portable and is targeted towards consumers who have a massive CD collection or those people who prefer to buy music CDs to its digital counterpart.

iLoad records at a default bit rate of 128K and can transfer a CD to an iPod in about 8 minutes depending upon the length and condition of the CD. Clean CDs will transfer faster than scratched CDs, so your well-used copy of Van Halen 1984 may take a bit longer to copy.

iLoad will also load all of the track information from your CDs. The iLoad database contains information on more than 1.8 million songs. To keep this database current you will need to get periodic updates through …

Stormtroopers, Sand people, Ewoks and all the favorite characters from Star Wars including Darth Vader and R2-D2 marched into Pasadena for the Rose Bowl Parade.

The parade featured a three part ensemble called the ”Star Wars Spectacular.” The entry commemorated the 30th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977. George Lucas was on hand as well as a large group of Star Wars fans who dressed up as Storm Troopers to march in the parade. Lucas also served as the Grand Marshal of th parade. The Storm Troopers were from the Bloodfin Garrison of the 501st Legion, a Star Wars fan club located in Indiana.

Here is the YouTube footage of the event:

This is a follow up to the previous post on the Gmail Contacts Exploit.

It appears the the problem has been partially fixed by Google. A blog on zdnet is claiming that the issue is partially fixed. They are reporting that the issue may still exist on some Google domains. Another blogger is stating that the vulnerability still exists. SlipperyBrick is researching the issue and will keep our readers informed of any developments in the case.

Update: The author has posted to the Google Group handling Gmail issues to get a response from Google. The author of this post uses Gmail as his primary email client.

Placeblogger.com is a recently launched searchable index of localized blogs. Searching or browsing Placeblogger will help you discover and subscribe to blogs that cover news and events for a particular neighborhood, city, town, or region.

Placeblogger consists of sites known as Placeblogs. Placeblogs are websites that pay “sustained attention to a particular place over time.” Placeblogs are also known as “hyperlocal sites”, because they focus on news, events, and information for a particular geographical area.

The current top 10 Placeblogs include:

1. Baristanet, Montclair, NJ
2. Edhat, Santa Barbara, CA
3. Fresno Famous, Fresno, CA
4. Westport Now, Westport, CT
5. ChiTown Daily News, Chicago, IL
6. New Haven Independent, New Haven, CT
7. Gotham Gazette, New York, NY
8. Philly Future, Philadelphia, PA
9. …

If you’re into electronic gadgets, practical jokes and for some reason still don’t think you’re already annoying enough, getting this Annoy-A-Tron would probably put you over the top.

My boss had something in his office that would periodically emit a tiny beep and it drove him crazy for weeks trying to figure out what it was. I’m not sure what the source ended up being, but it was proof enough for me that this gadget would do the trick.

The Annoy-A-Tron runs on a small watch battery, is slightly larger than a quarter and emits a beep and two different sound levels and random intervals from 2 to 8 minutes. For $10 you can get your own and hide it in the vicinity of some deserving soul, but rest assured that if found this small device will be subject to some blunt force trauma.

Catalog Page …

The i-Station Mini DX is a cool little gadget that plays digital audio and video, as well as supports viewing still pictures. It can also pick up FM radio and DMB television in Korea, which is probably part of the reason why this gadget isn’t available in the US.

THe Mini DX weighs only 80 grams and measures about 86x54x16mm. It has a 2.4 inch TFT LCD display and comes with internal memory of 1GB, 2GB and a 4GB version in the works with an SD slot to add some more.

The player also supports MP3 encoding which is a nice feature for any device that receives external audio such as a mic in or FM stereo. This allows the user to record incoming audio and converts it directly to MP3 files, which in this case can be listened to later or transferred to a …

The NOVOMAX Joypot C210 is a little digital audio player that could give the iPod Shuffle a run for it’s money, depending on the money of course. There isn’t word as to the price of this little interface-free player, but it may provide some competition due to it’s similar size, capacity and increased functionality.

This digital audio player will be available with internal memory capacities from 1GB down to no memory whatsoever. You can then add external memory in the form of an SD or MMC card.

Since the Joypot C210 connects to a PC via USB 2.0 and it takes external memory it can double as a card reader to transfer any data from a the memory card to a PC. Charging the JP C210 will not happen the the USB cable however; it runs of a single AAA battery.

A full battery will give the …

Former Vice President Al Gore, an outside director of Apple Computer Inc., chaired a committee which recently cleared several Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, of any wrong doing in a recent scandal over Apple’s stock-options practices.

Stock options have come under scrutiny following concerns over the practice of back dating options. Back dating is common practice among many companies. It involves changing the grant date of options to a date on which the stock price is lower. Options work by giving the holder an “option” to buy the stock at a specific price, called a strike price, after a certain period of time has passed. Usually the great the difference between the price at the time of the granting of the option and the price at the time the option is exercised (used), the more money …

In what was apparently a mistake the image for the Dell 20″ monitor was mistakingly replaced with an image for a 27″ monitor.

In a posting on a Dell Forum an employee of Dell indicated that the image was from a training manual for the “not yet released W2707C.”

So it appears that there is a Dell 27″ display on the horizon. This monitor is rumored to be an enthusiasts model. If the fabled 27″ display uses this Samsung screen then it is possible to infer some data about the upcoming model.

It appears to have a 1920 by 1200 native resolution. This is the same as the existing Dell 24″ models. The image from Dell’s site reveals the inputs to W2707 to be very similar to the 2407 that SlipperyBrick has in-house. …

The problems continue for Gmail users. A vulnerability was found in the Gmail web based email application that allowed anyone to see a Gmail user’s contacts. The vulnerability came from the fact that apparently Gmail stores the users contacts in a JavaScript file. Any clever web hacker could steal this information as long as the user was logged into their Gmail account and visited a malicious site.

Gmail has had problems in the past with this sort of issue. Jeremiah Grossman discovered the issued and reported it to Google.

Both issues revolve around using JavaScript, the scripting language used in web pages, to make requests for data. If the request is made from the HTML within a Gmail message then the cookies used to authenticate a user to Gmail may be used to get information …