We've seen plenty of gestural alternatives to the standard wireless mouse, but here's one that's lightweight enough to hang on your index finger.

The Flick Finger Mouse from the indefatigable gadget magicians at Japan's Thanko lets you manipulate a cursor by pointing in the air and clicking with your thumb.

Designed for Windows, Mac, and Android, the pointer has two modes: laser and air. In the former it works as an ordinary mouse, but set it to "air" and it's no longer bound to your desk. … Read more

It takes a steady hand and creative sensibilities to craft great coffee art. Still, there are certain limitations to the medium. It's hard, for example, to create a somewhat photo-realistic image. Unless you have a latte printer that can do it for you.

Taiwan coffee chain Let's Cafe has a series of kiosk-like locations. It's in competition with chains that run full stores. To separate itself, the company introduced a marketing gimmick that combines portraits, printing, mobile, and a steaming hot cup of coffee.

The Let's Cafe latte printer works when customers upload an image from their mobile phone to the machine. Put a cup of joe under it and the machine sprinkles the image onto the top of the latte in the form of cocoa powder. Text can also be added, so conceivably you could make your own drinkable LOLcats.… Read more

The new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard can't get more official than this.

The Wi-Fi Alliance today launched its Wi-Fi Certified ac certification program, paving the way for the new standard to be easily adopted and interoperate among different hardware vendors.

This is significant since the new standard offers up to three times the wireless speed of the existing and ever-popular Wireless-N (802.11n) standard, enabling support for even the most demanding applications such as Ultra HD, 4K video, multimedia, and fast file data transfer within the wireless home network.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance's recent poll, the number … Read more

If there were a clock speed war going on, AMD would win again.

The chip maker unveiled today the most powerful member of the AMD FX family of CPUs, the eight-core AMD FX-9590, which it claims to be world's first commercially available 5GHz processor.

Back in 2000, AMD was the first to break the 1GHz barrier by delivering its 1GHz Athlon chip to the general public in May of that year. The FX-9590 will be available this summer and Intel has until then to unveil its own 5GHz CPU. Currently the fastest CPU from Intel is the 3.5GHz … Read more

Intel today introduced the DC S3500 series solid-state drive, which brings enterprise performance at a cost that general consumers can afford. The new drive is optimized for read performance, which is important for data centers, or storage servers.

The new drive supports the SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard and is available in both 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch designs. The former is available in 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 240GB, 300GB, 480GB, 600GB, and 800GB capacities, while the latter is available in 80GB, 240GB, 400GB, and 800GB capacities. Both designs are 7mm thick.

Intel says the new SSD uses its 20nm NAND flash … Read more

One of the lures of a 3D printer is the ability to create and get a result that is so tactile. Your design dreams become real objects. If only the price weren't so high.

A lot of people are waiting for a 3D printer that is easy to use and doesn't cost much more than a regular printer. The Buccaneer from Pirate3D on Kickstarter is looking to deliver on both those fronts.

The Buccaneer goes all-in with an Apple-style aesthetic. It's the sort of printer you won't hide under your desk. The plastic printing material comes spooled in cartridges, which are placed into the top of the machine. The printing happens inside the cube. A plate in the bottom lowers to access the object once it's done.… Read more

Power line networking -- the technology that enables electrical wiring to transfer data -- is about to get a lot faster.

Broadcom announced on Monday what it claims to be the industry's first HomePlug AV2 power line system-on-a-chips (SoCs) that deliver up to 1.5Gbps data speed. That's about three times the speed of the top existing power line devices.

HomePlug AV2 is the next-generation power line standard that uses an extended frequency band of up to 86MHz, while HomePlug AV was limited to 30MHz. In addition, HomePlug AV2 supports Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) -- a technology … Read more

We've all been there. We're out on the town, had a few drinks, and just wish Siri could tell us if we're over the legal blood alcohol limit for driving.

Of course, given her requisite levels of snark, it might be better to hear it from a voice other than Siri.

A company with offices in Italy and America is launching a product today called Floome that it hopes will bridge that dangerous gap between trying to guess if you're safe to drive and finding out later from the professional breathalyzer operated by a police officer that it turns out you weren't.… Read more

Western Digital announced today the WD Se SATA 3.5-inch standard hard drive, which offers up to 4TB of storage space.

While it's not the first hard drive with this top capacity -- both WD and Seagate have had other 4TB hard drives -- WD says that the new WD Se is the first that's designed for scale-out data center deployments, yet is still affordable. The hard drive supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard, comes with 64MB of cache memory, and spins at 7,200rpm.

According to WD, the new hard drive uses enterprise components and technologies … Read more