Power strips are something that just about every computer user has a few of around the house or office. There are a number of green power strips on the market today that use a switch to turn off all the power to connected devices when not needed. There are also some that are on timers to turn things off at specific times to save power.

A new power strip called the HiSaver has turned up that uses motion sensing technology to determine when no one is in the room and turn off your gear. The power strip has a motion sensing box that sits on the desk. When it senses no one in the room it waits ten more minutes and then shuts devices attached to three power saving outlets off. The device has one outlet that is always on.

That always-on outlet is for a computer or notebook and one of the four power saving outlets has a switch that can be flipped to turn it into an always-on outlet as well. The HiSaver is a cool green product that will also protect your gear for power surges. It sells for a bit more than $100 and can be purchased right now. The reason for turning off the peripherals is to save power and money on your electric bill.

Today Epson announced the world's first HT Projector with 3LCD reflective technology with contrast ratios up to 1, 000, 000:1

The new models are to be named, PowerLite Pro Cinema 61000 and 31000 and also the Home Cinema 21000. Designed for custom installers and HT enthusiasts, these projectors feature a world first 3LCD reflective technology as well as featuring Epson's "UltraBlack" technology for exceptional picture quality and astounding contrast ratios.

"We are very excited to debut our new home theater projector line-up to the custom installation channel," said Marge Ang, senior product manager, Epson America. "These powerful, feature-packed projectors demonstrate Epson's commitment to provide dealers with top-of-the-line products that allow them to design customized home entertainment systems for their customers."

Today SteelSeries announced the SteelSeries Shift gaming keyboard.

From SteelSeries CEO, Bruce Hawver, he has the following to say:

"The Shift redefines what it means to gamers when they hear a keyboard can be fully customized. Starting with its solid outside appearance, the Shift adapts to games through interchangeable keysets with pre-defined mods and common commands. Players, whether at the professional level or learning a new blockbuster title, will be able to create multiple layers of macros for every key and fully remap every key on the entire keyboard. Ultimately, the Shift can reduce reaction time in First Person Shooters, it can increase Actions Per Minute in Real Time Strategy titles and it can do advanced macros (including timed delays) in Massive Multiplayer Online games."

NVIDIA is getting smartphones with its dual-core Tegra CPUs onto the market in time for the holiday shopping season and there are other dual-core processors for smartphones and tablets headed to market as well. Marvell has announced today what it claims to be the world's first tri-core application processor aimed at smartphones and tablets.

The processor is called the Armada 628. The two main cores of the processor run at up to 1.5GHz and the third core runs at 624MHz. The third lower power core will run the basic tasks of the smartphone and sip power doing it with the other cores there when needed. The processor uses heterogeneous multiprocessing and has a 1MB L2 cache.

The processor supports 1080p dual stream 3D video applications at 30fps and has 3D performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second. The processor also has an integrated image signal processor. The thing supports dual LCDs, HDMI out and an advanced EPD controller along with USB 3.0. The Armada 624 is sampling to customers right now.

Thing's just can't go right for NVIDIA's Fermi - now an interview is out with Jen-Hsun Huang, in which he blames TMSC for Fermi's problems - all of it's performance issues, heat problems all TMSC's fault.

He had the following to say: "The parasitic, umm, characterization from our foundries and the tools and the reality are simply not related. At all. We found that a major breakdown between the models, the tools and reality."

But, as Charlie says in his article (in which I agree with) if TMSC were completely at fault - then wouldn't all fabrication done at TMSC have had issues. AMD were able to release the 5xxx series to a smashing success and over 20, 000, 000 GPU's sold in the 5xxx family alone in under 12 months shows this.

You're sitting there, quietly playing a game... your spare controller is sitting on the table in front of you... you walk around a corner and expect zombies on the screen - KABOOM, you wonder where it came from, where is that sound???

Oh - it was your FREAKING PLAYSTATION CONTROLLER EXPLODING.

Sony today has issued a consumer warning to anyone who currently uses an unofficial PlayStation 3 controller.

Nicole Scott of Netbook News is on the ground for us again and this time she is at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose.

The next stop was at an NVIDIA demo station where we were shown a real-time rendered beating heart and just how it can be used in hospitals in the future to assist doctors to help patients with heart related issues in potentially a quicker and more accurate fashion.

Not only are would be doctors who implement this software able to measure and see real-time heart density data and blood flow, but using NVIDIA 3D Vision stereo technology, the doctors would be able to see it in 3D. It was mentioned in the video that this type of rendering has been possible in the past, but just one frame would take too long to render, hence making the technology pretty useless in a practical sense. In the video above, we see many thousands of particles moving around the heart and they indicate blood flow. Of course being an NVIDIA sponsored event, the video card GPU used to make this tech possible is a Quadro 6000.

If you aren't familiar with the company called Quirky it is an interesting firm. Quirky takes product ideas from users and then they build some of those products and share the money with the people that came up with the idea and those that help to design the product as the process goes along. One of the latest products to come from Quirky is a cool one called the Trek Support backpack.

The Trek Support backpack looks like a normal backpack, but it is designed to help you keep your gadgets charged up. The bag has an internal, removable battery that is rechargeable and gets power from an AC outlet. The bag is able to charge up to three gadgets at one time. The bag also has a laptop sleeve that is detachable and works with security scans at the airport so you don't have to take the notebook out of the bag.

The laptop sleeve will fit most 15-inch machines and uses Velcro to connect to the main compartment of the bag. The gadget dock can only charge three devices at once, but has pockets for four devices. The Trek Support bag is up for pre-sale right now and will cost $130. Quirky wants to build 1200 of the things and 35 of them have been ordered already.

KitGuru have an exclusive interview with AMD Marketing Director, Bob Grim.

Without spoiling it completely, here are some things Bob had to say:

"AMD Fusion APUs represent a new type of x86 processor design and software development", said Bob. "This will enable breakthroughs in visual computing, performance-per-watt and device form factor. AMD Fusion APUs are engineered to deliver powerful CPU and GPU compute capabilities in a single-die processor for today's HD video, 3D and data-intensive workloads"

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TMSC) might be showing off a glimpse of the future of chip manufacturing tech smaller than 20nm when it pulls back the curtain on it's latest research involving FinFET transistors at a chip industry event later this year.

Most existing products are built using planar transistors, invented in 1959 they are low-cost, efficient transistors. But, chip makers are now looking at other transistor design methods to shrink their die below 20nm, TMSC seems to heart the FinFET design because of their "fish-fin" design which reduces the size of working transistors.

TMSC will show off high performance 22nm and 20nm tech that features FinFET transistors at IEEE's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) which is happening on 6 - 8 December of this year in San Fransisco.