Fans

Another reason watch the game at home

Anyone who's witnessed the flash-bulb fusillade that accompanies every swing of Barry Bonds' bat knows how distracting they can be to the rest of the crowd. So we shudder to think what a massive LED barrage would look like if it becomes a stadium standard.

The "Fan Light" from FoxFury--which is already trying to make coal miners out of all of us with its headlamps--is peddling its latest bulbs as a way to show your team's true colors, or at least two of them, while in the stands. "With each shake of the arm, … Read more

Built-in mouse fan sure beats Axe

Brando is such a thoughtful company. When the Hong Kong gadget maker isn't dispensing heated mice to warm us up, it's worrying about how to correct our posture. It's even given us a USB lightbulb to brighten up the gray days of winter.

And now it's extended this compassion to matters of personal hygiene with the "USB OptiWind Mouse." This fan-cooled peripheral is designed to keep palms dry even for the most avid gamers with its built-in air conditioner. And it's a lot more discreet than such alternatives as the "Anti-Perspiration Wrist Pad&… Read more

Prince now sues for peace with fan sites

Prince is close to making up with three fan sites that spent the past week trading nasty publicity releases with the purple music king.

Prince Fans United (PFU), a group formed by three fan sites dedicated to Prince; Housequake.com, Prince.org, and Princefams.com, was trying to hammer out an agreement with the artist's representatives on Wednesday, according to Gavin McLaughlin, a spokesman for the group.

PFU was formed after Prince allegedly demanded that the sites remove all "photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to Prince's likeness," the site operators claimed.

"We'… Read more

Snocap CEO on layoffs: 'pioneers take arrows'

On the morning after laying off 54 percent of his staff, Snocap CEO Rusty Rueff, greeted me in his San Francisco office.

Guarded at first, Rueff slowly began offering details on Friday about why the music-licensing company, cofounded in 2002 by Shawn Fanning of Napster fame, cut its workforce from 57 to 26 employees and put itself up for sale.

Snocap offers to handle copyright and music licensing for musicians and also powers embeddable download stores that artists can place on any site. From these digital-music vending machines, the artists can sell their own music. According to Rueff, there are … Read more

Shawn Fanning's Snocap lays off 60 percent of workforce

UPDATE (12:15 p.m. PDT Friday): CNET News.com interviewed Snocap CEO Rusty Rueff after this story was published. He says the company's music stores just weren't catching on fast enough and its time to sell the company. You can read what he has to say in this story.

Snocap, the music-licensing company best known for being the follow-up act of Napster founder Shawn Fanning, has cut its staff by 60 percent, a spokeswoman for the company said Thursday evening.

Founded in 2002 by Fanning, Jordan Mendelson, and Ron Conway, Snocap started out trying to provide digital-music … Read more

Iomega targets Apple fans with new hard drive offerings

Iomega announced today that the company is expanding its lineup of products geared towards the Mac community. The announcement, made at the Apple Expo 2007 in Paris, covers both existing and new products. Support for the HFS+ file system, new designs, and a wider array of connection options are designed to attract the attention of Apple fans.

Dual-drive RAID products: The UltraMax Pro Desktop Hard Drives feature two hot-swappable SATA-II drives for RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurability. The industrial design mirrors that of the Apple Mac Pro desktop line. The UltraMax Pro lines comes in two configurations. The first … Read more

Gaming the "fan club" system

I hate the whole experience of arena rock shows today: the security staff who assume you're a criminal, the overpriced food and drink, the "down in front" screamers who always seem to be seated behind me (it's a $100 rock concert, not your daughter's piano recital). Consequently, I don't go to many big shows--one or two a year.

So I was a little surprised when I first encountered the "fan club" charge when the Stones rolled through Seattle's Key Arena in October 2005. The ticket prices were painful enough--$200+ for … Read more

Subwoofer or electric fan?

If you're of a certain vintage, you may remember an old TV commercial and print ad campaign from Maxell that featured gale-force winds blowing from a stereo. That's the first thing that came to mind upon viewing this weird subwoofer from Eminent Technology.

The "Thigpen Rotary Woofer," which the company bills as "the world's first true infrasonic home audio or home theater woofer," looks more like an electric fan than a piece of audio equipment. Here's what the propeller supposedly does: "If you want to hear and feel the 4-5 hertz … Read more

Necktie or noose? Japanese corporate culture and the knot fan

It's no surprise that the first necktie to come with a USB-powered fan built into the knot comes from Japan. Having lived in Tokyo for nearly three years, I can confirm that which you already know: Japan is technology heaven.

It's where old tech hopes to go when it dies so it can be resuscitated by an Atari 2600 fetishist, and it's where new tech hopes to be born. It's one of the few countries in the world where bleeding-edge cell phones shaped like pens and that, in fact, are pens can enjoy a limited if well-lit 15 seconds of fame.

Cooling a MacBook Pro with smcFanControl

A few months ago a friend recommended smcFanControl, and I've been cool ever since. Cool as in temperature, not cool as in Mark Shuttleworth.

Macs are awesome, of course. This goes without saying. But it also goes without saying that you can fry eggs on the MacBook Pros (and the Powerbook G4s before them). I have third-degree burns from long blogging sessions.

Enter smcFanControl.… Read more