Music, motorsports and well-executed videography are an irresistible cocktail. Just ask The Piano Guys. The group has made a name for itself by composing beautiful classical arrangements and pairing them with well-shot videos, and their latest effort took the group to the Spring Mountain Motorsports track just outside of Las Vegas. With three percussion tracks, six piano tracks, a staggering 43 acoustic cello tracks and 48 vocal tracks, The Piano Guys created a flawless arrangement of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna,” the first movement of “Carmina Burana” that plays well against the raucous noise of a couple of Radical SR3 racers screaming their way around the desert track.

According to the YouTube description, The Piano Guys created the arrangement in just three days. Orin Harker and Simon Shepherd were kind enough to lend their behind-the wheel talent for the on-track shots, and the finished product will make your hair stand on end. Hit the jump to enjoy the video for yourself.

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The Toolbox KVM Extender consists of two devices, one sender and one receiver box. The sender is connected to a PC via HDMI and USB 2.0 and the receiver via HDMI to an HDTV display. The two boxes are then connected using two CAT-5 cables to transfer HD video data.

According to Gefen, the distance between the PC and display can be up to 330 feet or 100 meters. AN IR blaster can be used to control the PC from the location of the display, while an IR extender enables users to increase the range of the IR control. Data transfer via CAT-5 supports 1080p video, 12-bit color, LCPM 7.1 Audio, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD Master Audio.

“The emphasis here is that you can extend hi-def video with your peripherals from a central location to wherever you wish to control them,” said Hagai Gefen, president and CEO, Gefen.

The company said that its technology is based on HDBaseT specifications, allowing the delivery of high definition video with IR and Ethernet over the same industry-standard cable. A second cable is used to extend USB 2.0 signals from the source to the display at up to 480 Mb/s.

The range extender devices are offered for $1200. If you intend to leverage the full range of 330 feet, calculate another $130 – $150 for a 300ft CAT-5 cable.

SOURCE via Gefen

One of the new apps that have hit the App Store is the “Find my Friend” app that helps you find other nearby iOS users in the area for fun and frolic. There are times when you find yourself using an app for a different reason than it was intended for, and if you believe the story of  Thomas Metz as written in the MacRumors forum, you can see where “Find my Friend” might have other good uses than getting together with other iOS totin’ people for a good time.

The story begins with Mr. Metz purchasing a new Apple iPhone 4S for his Wife and loading “Find my Friends” onto the phone without her knowledge. Later in the day, his wife told him that she was at her friend’s house in the east village. Now, it turns out that Mr. Metz had some suspicion about his wife and a guy who lives uptown. He checks “Find my Friends” and sure enough, instead of being in the east village, she is at this uptown address with that other guy. According to Mr. Metz, he texted his wife who lied to him that she was on 10th Street.

Of course, Apple probably didn’t expect that the app would be used for checking up on the alibi of a cheating spouse, but it certainly keeps everyone honest. As far as the husband is concerned, well, Mr. Metz is far from depressed about the incident. In fact, in his post, he thanks Apple and the App Store. As he put it, “Those beautiful treasure trove of screen shots (is) going to play well when I meet her at the lawyer’s office in a few weeks. Thankfully, she’s the rich one.”

SOURCE via Mac Rumors

We think Nissan has found its new spokesman for the all-electric Leaf. A microbiologist at the University of Arizona known as “Dr. Germ” says he’s identified gas pumps as the biggest biohazard in modern society.

According to The Los Angeles Times, the doctor’s research results show 71 percent of gas pump handles are “‘highly contaminated’ with the kinds of germs most associated with a high risk of illness.” Other highly-contaminated items we encounter on an everyday basis include public mailboxes, ATM machines and escalators.

Now, before you run off and buy an electric car to avoid germ-covered gas pumps, know this: The study also found 40 percent of parking meters to be similarly infested. Maybe you should just keep a can of disinfectant wipes in the car. It’d be cheaper, at least.

SOURCE via LA Times

Researchers at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain, have created what they call an “intelligent t-shirt”, which monitors body functions and provides the data for analysis.

The fabric of the-t-shirt integrates electrodes that record bioelectric power, and there is a thermometer and an accelerometer as well as a periodically active localization device that is used to determine the position of a user. The researchers say that the t-shirt can monitor body-temperature, provide data for an electrocardiogram, measures the physical activity of a body as well as a relative position of a body – whether a person is reclining, standing or lying down.

The scientists believe that the shirts could be used in hospital environments or telemedicine, but they also see use in other areas, such as sports where the shirts could provide early diagnosis of cardiac anomalies in athletes. All information is stored in a information management system, where it can be accessed for analysis. For example, physicians could examine how a particular patient’s level of physical activity affects the quality of the electrocardiogram.

So far, only a prototype of the technology exists. There was no information when these shirts could be available for purchase.

SOURCE via UC3M

What rhymes with Nokia? Why, Lumia, of course. And there, fellow gadget freaks, lies the poetic branding key to Espoo’s first, great Windows Phone. Alright, it’s not that simple, but the company’s marketing team did make a concerted effort to find a moniker ending with a vowel sound.

Of course, before this catchy, albeit odd, name could be settled upon, a list of potential winners had to be cross-checked with over 300,000 tech trademarks. After broaching that hurdle, “only a handful” survived and were then parsed by linguistic experts to avoid any embarrassing malapropisms and pronunciation difficulties across 84 dialects.

Despite finding “lumi” to be an out-of-date Spanish slang term, resulting surveys found most Spaniards associated the term with “‘light’ and ‘style’,” and thus it was saved. We know how this genesis story ends, so we’ll spare you the obvious marketplace conclusion.

And as for that new Asha range? Well, the thinking there is quite simple. It’s the word for hope in Hindi, and as the line is intended for emerging markets, that just seemed apropos.

Click through to the source for a more detailed walk through this mobile origin story.

SOURCE via Nokia

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you “the world’s most advanced wireless home router”, or so Netgear claims, the N900 dual-band router. And why is it so advance? Well, let’s just think of “almost” 1Gbps, over the air.

Netgear says the sleekly-designed $180 box which packs six antennas for an extended WiFi range is capable of speeds up to 900Mbps. That’s with both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands delivering data at a full 450Mbps. Sure, TRENDnet’s already called First! with its own 450Mbps concurrent dual-band device, but the real focus here is on the added extras.

In addition to the two USB ports — capable of 30% faster transfer rates — Netgear’s thrown in a suite of goodies, like its Genie network monitoring application, Live Parental Controls, printer sharing, video stream optimization, DLNA, gigabit wired ethernet, guest access, WPA and WPA2 security protocols, usage meter and, lastly, a shutoff timer. Clearly, this isn’t your ordinary wireless router, and that’s exactly the company’s point. Click on past the break for the official presser.