The verdict is still out on whether or not Sony’s Dash is a world changer, but while we patiently await the first mod to shove a battery into this thing and make it a bona fide tablet, we’re going to flick through your suggestions on tweaking what we’ve got. Were your hopes dashed (ahem) when Sony revealed that this thing was meant to be used inside? Are you happy with the widget software loaded on? Is this thing superior to your existing Chumby device? Feel free to really let loose here — we get the feeling that Insignia’s Infocast is just waiting around the corner to take your advice before Sony can pop out a revised edition.

How would you change Sony’s Dash? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Jun 2010 01:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Do you live at the heart of the sun? Maybe under an active volcano? Or under water? Then you need an ioSafe 500GB super duper drive. These monsters, if you recall, can take quite a beating, surviving backhoes, fire, and water.

So what can you guys get? How about one of two 500GB ioSafe hard drives. How do you win? Glad you asked!

Pop over to ioSafe, check out the specs, and then come back and email contest@crunchgear.com filling in the blanks in the statements below

The drive is…
Fireproof to ____° F for ½ hour
Waterproof to ____ feet of fresh water or salt water for ____ full days
Cost of 500 GB Solo – $____
Weight ____ lbs

Good luck. I’ll pick two winners randomly on Monday.

Giving a presentation is a nerve-wracking experience for most people and they wonder how anyone can ever give a smooth and end-right-on-time presentation. Take a cue or two from popular author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell to give a stronger presentation.

Photo by Pop!Tech.

Gidean Rachman, a writer for the Financial Times, found himself at a speaking conference with Malcolm Gladwell. He was enormously impressed with Gladwell’s presentation, specifically with the way the presentation appeared effortless, unrushed, and ended with perfect punctuality—a contrast to Rachman’s own speech which started off well paced but ended up rushed and didn’t finish the way he would have liked.

So how does Gladwell do it? Afterwards, I broke through the autograph-hunters surrounding him and asked him how he managed to time his talk so beautifully – so that it ended bang on 45 minutes, without ever looking at his watch. He answered – “I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them”

It sounds like a most elementary sort of advice—just memorize it!—but it contrasts sharply with the “put a few bullet points down on a piece of paper” camp that most people belong to when it comes to getting ready for a presentation.

Although Gladwell may come across to his audience as though he is having an informal chat with them, he’s heavily invested himself on the back-end by memorizing his speech, ironing out any problems, condensing it for the time he has, and refining his performance before it ever hits the stage. Treating his speeches like a performance and not him simply talking about the topic at hand allows him to polish his presentation in a way that informal speaking doesn’t allow for.

Have a tip or trick of your own for preparing for presentations? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

After years of shunning that most common of headphone styles, the earbud, Grado has at last taken a break from its over-the-ear, vented diaphragm purism (if you don’t count the China-built iGrado) and created an in-ear pair for the kiddies. The GR8 doesn’t really look like anything special, but the couple of reviews that have trickled in sound promising. The headphones are being built in Japan, but have some proprietary Grado magic in there to at least make them interesting — and it certainly should, at $300 a pop.

Read – Grado GR8 unboxing
Read – Grado GR8 product page

Filed under: Portable Audio

Grado takes on the earbud with the GR8 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows only: Microsoft has a new add-on for Office 2003 and 2007 that sets Microsoft Translator—used in the Live Search service—as a more robust and multi-language translator than the WorldLingo default.

If you’re intrigued, download the tiny executable at the link below, make sure you have all your Office programs closed, then run the installer. The change is subtle—the Translate button is still there on the Review ribbon, but it uses the web-connected Microsoft Translator as the default, with WorldLingo as a fallback option. Whether you click the translate button or right-click on selected text and hit “Translate,” the results pop over from the right and show your text in a new language. You can set up a default language pair to translate from/to, and, well, that’s about it.

The translator works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Publisher. It’s a free download that requires Office 2003 or 2007 on Windows.