When in the course of human events people lose their jobs and their ways to pay for bags of random stuff and close-out smoke detectors, it behooves all good men to approach shopping site Woot.com with trepidation and distrust. The result? A steady decline in traffic from the post-holiday period of 2009 until about May 2009. Now, however, that is changing. If I can draw your attention to this graph, you’ll notice that yes, traffic is going up. Everything is going to be OK.

The general trend at Woot has been heading down since 2008 and seems to be rolling back up this summer. Obviously none of this stuff is set in stone and absolutely accurate but it’s fairly clear that Woot is turning around. But what does this mean?


Woot is obviously cyclical and is a direct pointer to the pocket change of a certain technical class who may be interested in lasers and walkie-talkies from China that didn’t sell. That said, one would assume said walkie-talkies would be more desirable when you’re in a job than when you’re out of one and/or when you have a little disposable income.

So to recap: Woot traffic took a dive in January and is slowly creeping up. This means it is more popular. As it is a shopping site I suspect the folks visiting aren’t like street urchins in some Victorian novel, their noses pressed up against the glass of a sweet shop dreaming of toffees and crumbles. They are actually shopping.

In short, while I wouldn’t stake my dissertation on this trend, Woot’s ability to predict a financial rebound should not be dismissed and that trend is going up. Also they’re selling a Bluetooth headset with case right now for $30 clams. Not a bad price.

[Thanks, Thomas!]

Well look at that, a BioShock belt buckle. And, if you’re handy with all sorts of machinery I’ve never heard of (read: TechShop), you can make your own.

The computer work isn’t so difficult: a little bit of PhotoShop, a little bit of Solidworks (which reminds me of my high school AutoDesk Inventor class). But then you need access to a CNC machine, which I couldn’t identify if my life depended on it… maybe Matt could?

Fear not, though, because if this belt buckle steams your clams, then the creator will be selling them on demand for a bit.

Imagine walking into, I don’t know, Local Discotheque, and people freak out. “Whoa, is that BioShock?”

And… scene.

What can be said about the latest Eye-Fi SD card that hasn’t been said about every other iteration? The Pro is just that, a Pro. With support for RAW files, Ad Hoc network support and Selective Transfer, the Eye-Fi Pro is perfection.

Using the Eye-Fi Manager, it took all of three minutes to get the Pro up and running on my Mac. Setting up an Ad Hoc network to my Mac was simple enough that a donkey could do it. From the wireless network dropdown list, select the “set up ad hoc network” option and create an ad hoc network. Once you’ve done that, refresh the network list, select your new ad hoc network and configure the Pro to recognize it going forward. Switch back to your wireless network and you’re done.

DSLR users can now shoot in RAW or RAW+ and have those images directly upload to their respective desktops/laptops over Wi-Fi. Eye-Fi creates two separate folders for RAW images (7-6-09) and JPEG images (July 06, 2009) with differing date formats.

Rather than uploading every single image or video that you capture, the Selective Transfer mode utilizes your camera’s protect function to identify which images to upload and which ones to leave. It’s dead simple. Protect the images you want to upload and then Eye-Fi takes care of the rest.

The Pro, as I’ve said before, is a dream come true — but at $150 it’s tough to justify such a purchase for a slow 4GB SD card. However, it also automagically uploads to your photo sharing site of choice and supports Ad Hoc networks. In a pressure-filled situation, like a live blog, the Eye-Fi Pro is a required gadget in a blogger’s bag. I’d throw down $150 clams for one, but I have the luxury of expensing it back to the big guy.

Eye-Fi Pro [Eye-Fi]

By Shane McGlaun

For the most part notebooks and netbooks that come with SSDs tend to have smaller capacity SSDs inside. In the netbook realm, you usually get 4 or 8GB SSDs while notebooks commonly go up to 32GB and 64GB capacities. Toshiba has announced a new notebook that offers many times more storage than your average SSD equipped notebook.

The Toshiba Portege R600-ST4203 is now available with a massive and expensive 512GB SSD. The SSD is made by Toshiba and is crammed inside the notebooks 12.1-inch chassis. The machine weighs 2.4 pounds and is 0.7-inches thick.

The SSD uses MLC technology for faster access time and better performance. Toshiba clams that the 512GB SSD has a 3x faster data access speed than a 128GB SSD. Other specs for the notebook include a 12.1-inch screen, Windows Vista, Intel ULV Core 2 Duo processor, and a USB/eSATA sleep and charge port. The notebook retails for $3,499.99 — a lot of scratch.

[ Toshiba ]