Greenpeace Green Scorecard: Nokia Wins, Apple Fails, Nintendo Crashes Again [Ecowhining]

Those rainbow warriors/whiners/heroes/charlatans (pick whatever makes you tick) from Greenpeace have released their new Guide to Greener Electronics. There have been plenty of changes compared to last year, with many manufacturers going up, but others going down. Nokia is now at the top, near the 7 over 10 mark, but Nintendo keeps crashing at 1 over 10. What about Greenpeace’s archenemy Apple? Despite their latest efforts, it keeps failing ad drops to the 14th position. It seems they are not impressed by Apple’s latest green ads:

Apple’s score increases slightly to 4.3 points, but the company drops to 14th position. Apple scores well for putting products on the market whose key components are free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and PVC vinyl plastic. Apple’s latest iPods - the iPod Touch, Nano and Classic - are now free of both PVC and BFRs and the MacBooks, MacBook Pro and MacBook are almost free of these substances. While Apple has now positioned itself amongst the leaders in the electronics industry on phasing out toxic substances, to score more points the complete phase-out of PVC and BFRs in its iPods should be consistent across all other future product ranges. Apple also needs to commit to phasing out additional substances with timelines, improve its policy on chemicals and its reporting on chemicals management.

Apple scores poorly on most e-waste criteria, except for reporting a recycling rate in 2006 of 18% as a percentage of sales 7 years ago; however, it needs to provide details on how this is calculated.
It does slightly better on energy criteria for disclosing the carbon footprint of every model of product – although not exactly what is being evaluated in the criterion. Apple scores top marks (doubled) for all desktops computers, portable PCs and displays complying with Energy Star 4.0 and their iPod and iPhone power adapters exceeding the Energy Star standard, despite making this information difficult to access.

Despite the fact that I don’t like Greenpeace’s Goebbelsian information tactics and their charlatanism, their arguments look reasonable for Apple and the rest of the manufacturers. However, their methodology seems weak, depending on the manufacturers instead of using their own field research, so take it all with a grain of salt. [Greenpeace PDF Document via Treehugger]

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Even Anime Has Turned on Sony [Clips]

It’s a sad state of affairs when Sony loses the hearts and minds behind Japan’s unofficial national past time: Anime. From the show Kannagi, we won’t ruin all the fun…but we will say, “It’s a Sony!!” [Thanks Tyler!]

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Dark Knight Batarangs: To Match Those Hockey Pads [Batman]

As we learned in the opening scene of The Dark Knight, Christian Bale wouldn’t like you buying these solid stainless steel batarangs. But you know what? Christian Bale is just an actor, some guy who gets paid millions of bucks when he’s on vacation between colonic cleansings. You, on the other hand, despise carrot juice diets and celebrity parties. You could actually be Batman. And at just $9.99 for two batarangs, it’s never been cheaper to get yourself killed emulating a superhero. Also, it looks like they come in a cute pouch that would be perfect for travel. [True Swords via Chip Chick]

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Microsoft details pre-beta release of Windows 7

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We knew good and well Microsoft was gearing up to drop a pre-beta release of Windows 7 in developers’ laps at its Professional Developers Conference, but now we’re being treated to a host of details from Redmond itself. For starters, it’s showing off (for the first time, mind you) its new Web applications for Office. As you’d expect, said apps are “lightweight versions of Microsoft Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are used from within standard web browsers.” According to Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, it’s aiming to bring “the best of the web to Windows, and the best of Windows to the web.” ‘Course, we’re also told about improved navigation, a new taskbar (preview shown), support for multi-touch gestures, Device Stage and enhanced AV integration — all things that have our interest decidedly piqued. Hit the read link for the full spill direct from the horse’s mouth.

Microsoft details pre-beta release of Windows 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BlackBerry Storm’s Shipping Delay: Blame the Firmware [Blackberry Storm]

Orders of the BlackBerry Storm online have been delayed, and according to some detective work from the Boy Genius Report, it’s not due to intense demand. The Storm that BGR got to toy around with was loaded with the OS firmware 4.7.0.82, yet all the Storms being sold now are branded .65. What gives?

The logical conclusion is that there was a problem with the .82 firmware, and it was so severe that every Storm had to be downgraded before release, hence the delays. It sounds a little far-fetched, but after peeling off the sticker reading .65, BGR found another sticker underneath reading .82. In other words, these phones were originally loaded with the newer firmware, but something went wrong.

As far as shipment goes, here’s the rule:

- Bought before noon on Nov. 21: will ship Nov. 25.
- Bought after noon on Nov. 21: will ship Dec. 5.
- Bought on Nov. 22 (today) or later: will not ship until after Dec. 15.

If you haven’t bought your Storm yet, you better cross your fingers extra hard because it’s not looking likely that it’ll make it to you before a certain major religious holiday. [BGR]

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$1 Billion Electric Car Charging Grid Planned For San Francisco [Electric Cars]

In keeping with its progressive reputation, San Francisco is looking to pave the way for widespread electric vehicle adoption in the US. A Palo-Alto start-up called “Better Place” has received the green light from all three of the Bay Area’s big city mayors to begin carrying out an ambitious plan to build a network of 250,000 charging ports, 200 battery-exchange stations and a control center that keeps the system running smoothly. And if that wasn’t enough, they hope to have the entire thing up and running by 2012.

Naturally, a project this vast isn’t going to be cheap—$1 billion is a lot of money to burden the taxpayers with. Fortunately, that won’t be a problem because the project will be funded with an incentive plan directed at companies who install the chargers. Building permits will also be expedited to help move things along. Better Place will also be working with Renault-Nissan to distribute electric vehicles in “much the way telecoms distribute cellphones. Customers will subscribe to drive a certain number of miles and get an electric vehicle at a discounted price. Better Place will own the battery.”

Better Place already has similar systems in the works for parts of Europe, but getting a foothold in the US will be their biggest challenge. As San Francisco mayor-extraordinaire Gavin Newsom put it, the goal is to “make the Bay Area—and eventually California—the electric vehicle capital of the US”. [Better Place via Mercury News via Treehugger via DVICE]

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Dell Studio XPS (Featuring Core i7) Reviewed: Kicks Ass, Saves Cash []

Most of the new desktops featuring Intel’s impressive Core i7 processor are straight-up gaming powerhouses, with pricetags to match. That’s why I’m so pleased to see a glowing review of Dell’s Studio XPS, which starts at a very affordable $950. DesktopReview took it for a spin and found that, despite one or two small problems, the Studio XPS is lightning fast and a great deal.

The quad-core proc was able to handle audio and video compression a few times faster than rival chips from AMD, and was the top of the heap in almost every benchmark they threw at it. Given it’s not a gaming computer, the Studio XPS did extremely well on the gaming benchmark, and yes, it can run Crysis without exploding. The downsides? The design isn’t heartstopping, as it looks like pretty much every other Dell machine out there, and DesktopReview thinks the hard drive configuration could be faster. But all in all, it’s a stellar buy if you want a fast-as-it-gets machine that can even do a little gaming on the side. [DesktopReview via Engadget]

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A Complete Guide to Playing Video Files On Your PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii [How-to]

If you’re here reading Gizmodo, there’s a good chance you have a hard drive full of video somewhere. And you also probably have a PS3, Xbox 360 or Wii. If those two things aren’t working together for you in beautiful symbiosis, allowing you to watch all of your downloaded or ripped video on your TV instead of hunched over a laptop screen, well, this is the guide for you.

Now there are two general strategies you can take: physically copying your files to a USB drive, memory card or CD/DVD, which is pretty straightforward, or streaming your video over the network, which is where things get more fun and interesting. So let’s dive in.

First things first, codecs. Now that you’re all learn-ed on the ways of video encoding thanks to Matt’s Giz Explains from this week, the issue of codecs will make a lot more sense. Thankfully, it’s not something you have to worry too much about here, because all three consoles can handle a large number of the codecs you will find commonly: AVI, MPEG (1, 2 and 4), H.264, DivX/XviD, and WMV—and if a particular format you want to play isn’t supported, it’s often possible to convert it to work on the fly. The PS3 also supports AVCHD, a format used by many HD camcorders. Not all formats are supported with every streaming method though, especially in the 360’s case, which we’ll get to in a second. Now, for getting all those files on the TV.

Note: if you need to re-encode a video in a different format because it won’t play, nothing beats VLC’s transcoding wizard. Here’s a guide.

Xbox 360: Streaming (PC)
In typical Microsoft fashion, there are tons of different ways to pull of streaming your video to the Xbox 360—and the only one that’s truly comprehensive, in our opinion, comes from a third party. TVersity is a free UPnP media server that can manage your video and music files anywhere on your PC and stream them out to your 360 over the network. It will also kindly transcode just about any video you can throw at it into a codec your console can definitely read. You might have to install some additional codec packs here and there for Windows but for the most part, you can forget about worrying about codecs with TVersity. This also allows TVersity to handle files not officially supported by the 360, like MKV containers.

1. Grab TVersity here and install it.
2. Click the giant plus sign in the top left corner to “Add Your Media Source” - namely, the folder on your PC with all of your videos.
3. Under advanced options, set your transcoding preferences: “When Needed” will make sure most all of your files play.
4. In the main TVersity menu, select “Start Sharing”
5. On the Xbox 360, TVersity will now appear as a source in the Media blade or under My Xbox -> Video Library in NXE.

The other three options via Microsoft’s own various software solutions all have their own drawbacks, which we’ll cover here briefly. Our advice? Use them only if you already use the Zune software, Windows Media Player or Windows Media Center to manage all of your video.

Windows Media Player 11: WMP 11 can stream out to the Xbox 360 pretty easily. Here is an in-depth guide. Drawbacks? Somewhat clunky format support. In our tests we could not stream Quicktime video at all, and had inconsistent experiences with MP4 files. MPEG-4 and H.264 support are technically supported via third-party WMP codec add-ons, but even with those, we still had trouble—MP4 files tended to play fine on the WMP 11 end, but not show up as browsable on the 360. Somewhat unbelievably, the Xbox 360 team actually recommends you manually rename your unsupported MPEG-4 and H.264 files, adding the “.avi” container extension to fool WMP into playing them. This worked occasionally, but not for every file and was generally inconsistent.

Zune Software 3.0: Zune offers a much nicer interface than WMP (Settings -> Sharing -> Add is the extent of the setup), and thankfully supports MPEG4 and H.264 much more consistently. Drawbacks? No DivX or Xvid support, which means a huge chunk of your Torrented video probably won’t work.

Windows Media Center Extender: If you already have a Media Center setup honking on your network, there’s a good chance you won’t need this guide, but the Xbox 360 can of course stream your MCE content to your TV seamlessly (a complete guide is here). The interface is really fantastic. Drawbacks? The gimpiest codec support of the bunch: only MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and WMV are supported. So unless you’re converting everything you have into those formats, you’ll still need something like TVersity to play most files you’ll find up for download.

So, in the end, TVersity wins hands down as the easiest and most elegant streaming setup for the 360. But do keep in mind—if you’re playing a format that your Xbox can’t handle (MKV being the most common of these you’ll find), TVersity will have to transcode, which means you will lose a bit of quality.

Xbox 360: Streaming (Mac): UPnP support—the networking standard used by both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 in various flavors to play network-streamed video, music and photos—is not natively supported by OS X yet. And unfortunately, there isn’t a stellar all-in-one free package like Windows’ TVersity.

Nullriver, however, makes an incredibly slick piece of software called Connect360, which easily streams all of your iLife libraries or any folder full of video on your Mac to the 360. Unfortunately, it’ll cost you $20. There is a free trial version that supposedly shuts off after 30 minutes of sharing, but sometimes it seems to forget and lets you play longer. But even so, $20 isn’t bad for the convenience factor here. No transcoding, but it will handle every codec the console itself can play back.

1. Download and install the Connect360 preference pane.
2. In System Preferences, start up Connect360 sharing. Here you can also add folders for more sharing.
3. Access the Connect360 source on your Xbox in the usual way. Done.

Xbox 360: Physical Media
1. If streaming isn’t for you, and you don’t mind hauling a storage device back and forth between your computer and Xbox, then this is super easy: Insert Flash disk/USB/CD/DVD and browse it with the Media blade or the Video Library section of NXE (under “My Xbox”). Enjoy.

Playstation 3: Streaming (PC)
TVersity: Again, Tversity is your friend. It works just as well for the PS3 as it does for Xbox 360 (see above for setup).

1. With Tversity set up and sharing turned on, just browse to COMPUTERNAME: TVersity in the XMB and you’ll see a listing of all your shared files.

Windows Media Player 11: Just like for Xbox 360, you can use WMP11’s built-in DLNA/UPnP serving capabilities to stream to the PS3, too—but with the same codec funkiness as noted above.

1. In the Media Sharing preference box with your PS3 powered on and connected to the network, select “Unknown Device”—that’s your PS3.
2. Your library should now show up in XMB.

Playstation 3: Streaming (MAC)
Mac: Nullriver didn’t just hook up 360 owners—Media Link is the version especially for PS3. It costs 20 bucks, but will give you totally seamless and painless streaming of all of your iLife libraries (photos and music too) as well as files in any folder you can access with your Mac, whether it’s on a network or local.

1. Operation is just like Connect360—with sharing enabled in the Media Link preference pane, just browse through all your files under the “Media Link” source in XMB.

Playstation 3: Physical Media
1. Easy as pie. If you’re using a USB flash or hard disc or an SD or CF card, just dump all of your videos into a folder named VIDEO on the root of the drive and they’ll show up automatically in the XMB.
2. You can also browse the entire drive or disc by pressing triangle and choosing “Display All” to find videos that aren’t in the VIDEO folder.

Wii: Physical Media
For playing video on your Wii, physical media is the way to go, which is easy to pull off with some homebrew hacking. There are lots of services that will transcode your video and ouput it in a Flash player that you can view through the Wii’s Opera browser (like Orb), but you’ll take a hit quality-wise and it’s not as easy as just playing the source files directly with Mplayer.

1. Install the Homebrew Channel and Mplayer on your Wii. We’ve got you covered here with our complete Wii homebrew guide—but hopefully you haven’t installed the latest System Menu update. In that case, you’ll have to wait for a workaround, but it probably won’t be long.

2. Install Mplayer via the Homebrew Browser (also covered in our guide).

3. Now, you can use Mplayer to play files off or even an attached USB drive (as long as its formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, which most are). The interface is not nearly as nice, but it gets the job done.

4. Mplayer for the Wii covers a ton of codecs, but sadly, the Wii’s processor chokes on HD content. If you’ve got HD files, you’ll need to transcode them into a lower resolution with VLC.

And that’s about it. Now, no more huddling around your laptop screen or fiddling with TV and audio-out cables. Welcome to the good life.

Additional reporting and testing by Seung Lee. See more Giz how-to guides here. And as always, if you have anything to add to our findings, please let us know in the comments.

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At Gizmodo Gallery: Weird Japanese USB Gadgets! [Gizmodo Gallery]

The Gizmodo Gallery lineup isn’t just mega gadgets like the Red One Camera and prototypes like the Ancient Apple phone concepts from Frog Design. On a recent trip to Tokyo I raided Thanko HQ for the latest and weirdest USB gadgets I could find, including this USB Tie with a fan in it and a USB heated gloves. I mean, I don’t know how anyone gets through winter in NY without USB heated mittens.

[Gizmodo Gallery wouldn’t be possible without help from our friends at REED ANNEXand dynamism.com]

GIZMODO GALLERY

Reed Annex
151 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002

Dates:
December 4th-7th

Times:
12/4 Thursday
12-8

12/5 Friday
12-8

12/6 Saturday
11-8

12/7 Sunday
11-4

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Woz Really Does Everything On His Segway [Gyro-pee]

The balance, the precision aiming. The man: Woz takes a piss on his Segway. If this is Photoshopped (or the world’s most convincing Woz lookalike), there truly is no God. [Macenstein] UPDATE: Woz confirms in the comments!

From the man himself:

not photoshopped…it was years ago…some wild eyed guy was blurting out questions at a Shoreline Amphitheater concert and he asked if I went to the urinal on my Segway. What would you say? I answered “yes.” Always say “yes” when someone is excited with a weird or impossible question. Then this guy asked how I did it. I was stalling to think of some funny reply when he asked if I stood on it backwards and held the handlebar so I said “yes” again.

Then I went into the urinal and set up the photo with friends. I posted it myself on urinal.net.

Later that night I showed the photo to a friend and told him how I turned the Seway backwards because of splash from the Segway stick. I then rubbed the stick and commented that it was still a bit sticky and asked him to rub it too but he would have nothing to do with that.

It was a fun evening!

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