Here we have a geeks wet dream. We kinda have hit a plateau with how much SSD drives can store – and how much people are willing to pay for that storage. With 64GB costing about $1,000 its hard to imagine that SSD would ever hit the main stream. Well Toshiba, drinking from the Koolaide, believes that a 512GB SSD drive is a possibility by 2009.

The market for SSDs used in notebook PCs will surge on average 313 percent per year through 2011, according to a report from Nikkei Business Publications. The report referred to a speech given by Toshiba Semiconductor Company’s President Shozo Saito at an International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA) function in Japan on the 18th.

By 2010, SSD-based notebooks will be about 10 percent of the market, then jumping to 25 percent in 2011, Saito said.

The increase in capacity will be accompanied by sharp reductions in cost per bit, the biggest barrier to SSD adoption this year. An oft-cited example is the Apple MacBook Air. The Air model with a 64GB SSD is about $1,200 more than the model with a larger capacity 80GB hard disk drive. The price difference is largely attributed to the premium a buyer must pay for an SSD.

If the price for NAND flash memory is reduced by 50 percent per year, the price gap will shrink (by 2011) to 1.4 and 3.2 times the price of 1.8- and 2.5-inch hard disk drives, respectively, Saito said.

It is all about economies of scale, but SSD will – in my opinion – lag behind good ol’ traditional pattered drives and will always have a much higher premium.

Do you think Toshiba has gone insane by these predictions or do you believe that 2009 – 2010 will be the year of SSD?

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Yes, you read it correctly. Microsoft has released a program for the Blackberry before their WinMo powered devices.

Tellme lets you speak commands into your Blackberry to seach the web, look up movie times, check traffic and make other queries.

Once users download the program, they can push on their phone’s green “talk” button and say either the name of a business, type of business, or the keywords “weather,” “movies,” “traffic,” “map” or “driving directions.”

Using GPS, the system figures out where the user is located and delivers nearby results from Microsoft’s Live Search engine to the smart phone’s screen, along with links to call, get directions, buy movie tickets and other related actions.

Might be worth a shot for the Crackberry addicted sect out there.

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Isn’t is a pain in the ass to get the jack out of your car when you have a flat? Now with a ingenious invention, you can use your cars own exhaust to help you jack up your car.

This Exhaust Air Jack is a work of pure genius. It is a big orange bag which you set underneath your vehicle. There is a hose coming out of it which you connect to the exhaust of your car. In about 30 seconds the bag will have inflated enough to raise your car up off the ground. There’s even a one-way valve to prevent air loss if you decide to turn off your vehicle This will work on just about any surface, which isn’t the same for traditional jacks. I’d say that $129.99 for one of these would be money well spent.

I would have to say that is one the the coolest things I have seen today.

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I’m a blogger on the go with a massive iTunes library (45,000 songs enough?). I do a really good job of filling my iPod with the essentials but sometimes I need to listen to something not on my iPod. Thanks to Bonjour (previously Rendezvous or commonly mDNS) iTunes or any other Bonjour related service can only be shared on a local network since the mDNS beacons do not travel over a VPN.

Sure there are other pieces of software on the market, but I haven’t had much luck with them for various reasons – plus it really isn’t “true iTunes sharing.” If you connect to your home or business network over a VPN, with this guide, you can easily make those Bonjour beacons hop across the VPN to your remote machine.

In this installment, we will only cover how to use your existing VPN connection. In the next installment of this article I will show how to actually create an SSH VPN to your home network without any fancy software or expensive router.

On the host machine (the computer with the large iTunes library) all you need to do is download Network Beacon from Chaotic Software (as an aside I met one of their developers at Macworld – Really great people!) and launch it. Click on “New Beacon” and enter the following into the new dialog box:

Where it says service name enter whatever you want the share to look like in the remote computers iTunes (eg: Home iTunes Computer). Click OK.

Then on your remote computer connect to your remote network over the VPN. Launch iTunes on the remote computer. Within a minute you should see your other computers iTunes library.

Now, if you don’t have a VPN setup to your home network in a subsequent post I’ll cover how to create an SSL VPN to your home computer using free software and simple port forwarding (something any router can do).

No, this isn’t just a torn and shorting USB cable its actually a USB flash drive. A simple $10 DIY project can really make your friends (and strangers) do a double take when they see this.

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When your website is processing information there is no need for a boring “Please Wait” dialog box. Might as well use some Javascript to spiff up your home on the interweb.

Busy.js 1.0 allows you to add/remove loading indicators to html elements on your webpages (inc. overlay color & transparency). It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean. Requires no plugin/extension or any other external resource!
It works in all the major browsers – Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, Safari and IE6+. On older browsers, it’ll degrade to simple quadratic shapes.

Really great resource if you are a web designer if you ask me!

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Helio, the “Hip and Trendy” MVNO, touts a really cool feature called “Buddy Beacon” that allows other Helio users to know where you are – with your permission.

The company that powers that service, uLocate, has ported the seemingly popular web application to work with the iPhone via the web.

With Buddy Beacon, iPhone users can easily share their location with friends, as well as see the locations of friends on the iPhone’s map application. [...] Buddy Beacon for iPhone provides users with essential functions and features that have made the application so popular with users of other mobile devices across virtually all North American carriers. Users are in complete control of the Buddy Beacon experience and can choose when they want to share their location.

Buddy Beacon also allows users to easily grow their buddy network by inviting new friends to join, ‘nudge’ friends to update their location and status from within the application, and more. These features combine with Buddy Beacon’s seamless integration with Facebook to provide iPhone users the ultimate friend finding experience.

Now me being Mr. Anti Social Networking the integration to social networks is nil. But I think it’s really cool now that anyone with a iPhone can log onto a simple website and it can broadcast their position so their friends can meet them easily.

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With a recent study finding that most iPhone users carry two Phones (using the iPhone for data a music only), it made me wonder what our readers did.

How many Phones do you carry? What phone is it? Who is your preferred carrier? Sound off in the comments.

A perviously unknown company called “Psystar” is making claims that they will sell a $399 “OpenMac” computer that will allow you install Leopard’s kernel straight from the DVD that you purchased at the Apple store barring the addition of a few drivers.

The machines specs are as follows:

• 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB of DDR2 667 memory
• Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics
• 20x DVD+/-R Drive
• 4 USB Ports
• 250GB 7200RPM Drive

Now we all know that you can install MacOS 10.5 on an ordinary PC, but the legality of such a procedure is a grey area. This is the first time a company is emulating the Mac EFI firmware to achieve a true Mac clone. Sure Apple’s crack legal team have begin firing up the old C&D machine as we speak.

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Bring a little of the office home with you. Available for $7.95

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