Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Once again your printer is out of ink way before you think there is any way it should be. Yet somehow, BOOM. It just refuses to print another page until you replace the cartridge. Well, when Farhad Manjoo’s Brother printer suddenly stopped printing; he started to wonder if his printer wasn’t simply lying to him that it was out of toner just so he would buy more before he actually even needed it. His prints hadn’t been fading at all; his printer just suddenly simply refused to keep going without a new cartridge.

Manjoo decided to look to the ‘Net for a way around this. And he indeed found some answers. He learned that by covering up the sides of his toner cartridge with a piece of electrical tape he could “trick” his printer into thinking it was full. He says the printer was been chugging along just fine ever since...eight months and hundreds of pages down the road...printing out perfect pages. 

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Brother has introduced its newest inkjet multifunction printer, the MFC-6490W. Although it may seem just your usual high-end all-around printer, for Brother this printer is the first in their product line which can print, copy, scan, and fax on an 11-inch by 17-inch sized paper, which is the same size a fully spread tabloid newspaper.

Features of the MFC-6490W include USB ports for connecting USB flash drives that allow for direct printing, PictBridge compatible ports, external multimedia cards, built-in auto-document feeder, dual paper input trays, four ink cartridges, a 3.3-inch color LCD which also serves as a control center for the printer. For its color printing speed, the MFC-6490W gives out up to 35/28 ppm (Mono: 450x300dpi, Color: 600x150 dpi).

This printer will be available sometime next month and it will retail for $299.

Via [Crave]

A prototype for a retinal scanning display that is currently in the works has the potential to change the way we watch movies. Cleverly constructed with a complementary eye-piece and weighing in at a very light 25 grams, Brother Japan’s retinal scanning display scans images and beams them on top of your retina, ala mini-projector. This in turn, makes your eyes look like a little canvas, on which you can see displayed images of what’s before you, clearer and more distraction-free than ever.

The way this works is by beaming low-intensity light on your retina and scanning it with light at a high speed. The resulting image is then displayed on top of your eyes, just like how current age projectors work. Only this time, everything’s miniaturized, and yet still works perfectly fine.

But unfortunately, like Toshiba’s Apripoco, this product is far from its final stages and is still a prototype. However, Brother Japan does hope to commercialize this by 2010. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. Think, no more worrying about the screen size of the latest gadgets. Forget high-def, this is eye-def!

Via [dvice]

Are you proud of everything on your office computer? Are those items you might not be so eager to display really hidden from the view and scrutiny of others? Alas, for the answer is now unequivocally “no.” Your office PC, thanks to Microsoft’s new Big Brother-style software, may now be considered a weapon loaded with ammunition!

This new software is a lazy, ineffectual office worker’s nightmare, for it is capable of remotely monitoring a worker’s productivity, physical well being and competence. This monitoring system would enable computers to wirelessly pick up on a user’s heart rate, galvanic skin response, brain signals, body temperature, facial movements and expressions, blood pressure, and respiration rate. Previously, this technology was only the headache of pilots, fire fighters and NASA astronauts. This patent from Microsoft marks the very first time a company has proposed such a software for use in mainstream offices. 

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