BTW, if you hate the gallery format as much as the Grinch hated Christmas, click here.

Remote Fetch: Ball chasing is very good exercise for pooches, even if it can cause obsession and anti social tendencies that will result in thousands of dollars in dog therapy. Capable of being remote triggered at 7 or 15 second intervals, or just automatically throwing balls your dog drops in the bucket, it might be worth the trouble. Think of it as the equivalent of a video game for a dog. And it's better than a doggie treadmill, which you can't really leave a dog unsupervised on for very long. $120 [Remote Fetch]

Hotdoll:Ugh! Someone actually went and turned the hotdoll dog sex doll concept into an actual product. The doll has a silicon...nevermind. We had one at Gizmodo Gallery and one owner brought one in to see if their dog—that loves humping—would hump it. He did not. I guess just like real people, it takes a flexible sexual orientation to find comfort in inanimate figurines. Price TBD [Hotdoll on Giz]

Indiana Jones and Star Wars Dog Costumes: Remember when Indiana Jones shot that guy with the swords in Temple of Doom? What if, no, listen, wait, what if Harrison Ford was a dog and in that scene and, instead of shooting the assassin, he used teeth! And, like in Star Wars, instead of light sabers, they had swords made of bones. Oh man, hilarious! Earnestly, these costumes are the only items on this list you should legitimately buy for your dogs. Roughly $14 each. [SpoiledRottenDoggies]

Autofetch Motion Pet Ball: It looks like the famous Super Happy Fun Ball* from Saturday Night Live sketches in the 90s, and although not radioactive, the Autofetch ball acts freakishly similar. The motorized dog toy takes a cookie and then spins around, wildly, til batteries go out, or your dog goes insane and crushes the life out of it. Recommended! *Do not taunt! $27 for two. [Autofetch]

Bissell SpotBot Pet: Puppy training is basically like potty training a kid, except your whole apartment is the diaper. Here we have a steam cleaner that sprays cleaning solution to the mess on your carpet, a rotating brush that scrubs while the vacuuming action drinks—sorry, that may have not been the best choice of word—up the dirty water, storing it in a reservoir for disposal later. Basically, it's an automatic poop/vomit/pee cleaner. I'm surprised they don't make one for frat boys. $140 [Bissell]
Catgenie: Look, I know I said this whole list is a bunch of things you shouldn't buy, but this is the one you should especially not buy: CatGenie is basically an automatic literbox that takes 45 minute to cycle out the poop. Until humans engineer smarter pets that can be potty trained, there is no tech that can avoid domestic animal excrement handling. $329 [Catgenie review]

Sleepypod Air: This is a travel bag for little animals. What makes it different from other bags is that it has special deceptive fold-in panels that squash your animal while going through security checkpoints, so no one can tell you your bag is too big. (Don't worry, I don't think it'll kill your cat.) Then, after you board, it expands a few inches but fits under a chair. It also has a slot for slipping through a rolling luggage handle, so the bag can rest on top, and has seatbelt clips for placing it in car seats. $150 [Sleepypod Air]

The Hydroglass: For those who believe fish are pets, even though you can't hug them, I'd find it hard to believe you could do better than this fish tank, which has a seven-head horizontal shower on top. $14,500 [Hydroglass]

Don't forget to recommend your own favorite pet gifts in comments-include pics and pricing if possible.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favorite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We'll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

I've had Malcolm for a year now. He's a little dog. He's a good boy although kind of a moron, but Lisa and I love him. As a puppy, he chewed on a good variety of things, as puppies do. Pens probably reminded him of bones, and he'd sneak up onto Lisa's chair to her desk to grab a pen and prance away to a quiet corner with his prize to crunch away to get at the inky marrow. He'd attack shoelaces with the enough fervor you'd think they were spaghetti with meat sauce. Eyeglasses, too. He likes biting up the ear pieces so they are jagged and painful to wear, and putting cracks into the lenses. But now that he's a bit older, he's developed a primary affinity for eating gadgets.

TV remotes are fun for him, but only rectangular ones and mostly on the corners. The Toshiba remote has a little bit of chew on the corners, but the AppleTV remote, made of that soft plastic and chicklet looking, is his favorite. If I leave it on the coffee table, I will find it under a couch cushion 2 days later looking more worn. The black IR cap is broken off and the battery case is popped out. I'm lucky he didn't swallow the batteries. Or get shocked the one time he chewed through a 110v cable for a heating pad. I'd unplugged it that morning!

But Malcolm's favorite thing to chew on is an animatronic lion cub. Someone sent it to me last year, unsolicited, and it turned into a dog toy. It's basically a little robot cub that growls and moves its eyes and mouth. The size of a teddy bear. Malcolm used to be scared of it, but now he just unleashes all the hell a 9 pound dog can on it. I think he hates it. After all, he's flesh and blood dog, and the lion is a robotic cat. Not only is the conflict inter-species, but its a battle between a biological being and a robotic one.

At first, he'd drag it across the floor, by its limbs. After awhile, he learned to grab it by the nape of the neck and shake it. After 2 months, the neck opened up and the plastic spine, surrounded by various cables that powered the mouth and eye servos. He chewed through off of them, killing the robot, and gnawed on the neck bones. Sometimes he humps it, but it's pretty clearly dominance, not cross species homosexual technophilia. I think.

I don't have a point here. I just find it amusing and fun to watch nature's greatest machines destroy primitive man made replicants. Oh, how far we have to go.

*Yes, I spray things down with bitter apple now.

The video illustrates what Sniff can do, including sniffing out RFID tags to instigate "activities" such as different behaviors and vibrations and melody games. I can't tell how well this works, but that little girl in the video looks like she's having the best time ever, so that's pretty cool. And Sniff is designed with sight-impaired children who have special needs in mind, which makes it even cooler.

You'll have to wait a bit longer if you want to get Sniff for your kid, but you can get a book right now about a day in the his life, written by the creator. [Nearfield via Make]

Despite connecting to your outdoor plumbing lines, the PowerLoo is not a backyard doggie toilet. The PowerLoo is a backyard crap flusher (read: you pick up dog crap then place it in the toilet). And while I'm sure it adds some level of convenience to doodie disposal, the $1000 price is on par with one of those fancy, Japanese toilets that literally air dries the cellulite from your butt. Coming this June. [PowerLoo via Treehugger via DVICE]

I really don't know if this photo is staged or not. And quite frankly, I don't care, because knowing—and loving—dogs, this is how things should be. At least, if we are talking about Jones here. Screw training, lips be damned. [Dark Roasted Blend]

The collar illuminates at night, thanks to built in, solar powered LED lights, which could be helpful if your pooch is the wandering type. But the best part is the integrated humidity sensor that triggers a CO2 cartridge to inflate the collar when submerged in water. It's a little bulky, but if for some reason you live in a flood-prone area and your dog is defective and can't swim, it might be a good idea to strap him to one of these collars. Or you could, you know, teach him how to swim. [MAKE via DVICE

The dog mansion contains two bedrooms and a day lounge, temperature-controlled beds outlined with sheepskin, automated food and water dispensers that pour their goods into self-cleaning eating and drinking bowls, a 18-inch deep pool, a $230,000 sound system (they can hear sounds we can't, you know) and even a retina scanner... to stop other pets from entering.

Well, at least the dog house is kind of environmentally friendly—with geothermal heating and solar and wind power generators, it produces more energy than it uses. Yay, Earth? [Dailymail via Born Rich]

The video ends with a "Hatfield engineer" looking into the distance and musing about how nuclear power might be in the future for the launcher: "We've talked about rocket-propelled hot dogs, we've said, you know, is nuclear power an option? We'd have to play with it a little bit..." It's pretty much the best mockumentary I've seen since Summer Heights High. Thank you, Hatfield, for extending my Philly pride six minutes further. [Grill the Goodness via Boing Boing Gadgets]

It'll have to cope with stairs, water hazards, desert levels of heat and arctic levels of snow and ice, navigate through GPS waypoints, and it'll have to respond to speech and gesture commands—at which point you imagine a soldier commanding it to "sit!" and giggle slightly. But only slightly, as none of these enhancements seem too beyond the pale, given the already amazing development of BigDog.

Just one sad point though: Darpa's labelling the new machine the "Legged Squad Support System" or L3. Would it have been a bit much for the military eggheads at the defense research agency to exercise their imaginations and dub it K9? Much better name. [FedBizOpps via DangerRoom]

GLONASS has had difficulty getting up and running: it was supposed to be fully operational by the beginning of 2008, but delays and repairs have forced the 24-satellite system's worldwide availability back to the end of 2009. It will be working for Russian territory by the end of this year, however. The AP helpfully reminds us that while Russia's satellite navigation tool may be, um, really late to the game, they were the first to put a dog in space. Unhelpfully, the AP doesn't make even a single Yakov Smirnoff joke. Help them out, commenters! [AP]

In 2003, we reported on a GPS navigation device that led the visually impaired to their impending doom due to an "inaccuracy" of the system.

Although this new GPS device is not as cuddly as a guide dog, it is made up of one earpiece and microphone, which would allow the blind a certain anonymity, kind of like Daredevil, in that he would no longer need a cane or furry pet, which would leave both of his hands free ... to fight crime, perhaps? [create the future contest via gizmag]

* Not Safe for Mental Health

I'm afraid this beats the Jesus Switch by a wide margin. [Fail]

Wan Love Yu's micro bubble technology can stably produce bubbles with a 20μm average diameter, that's roughly 600,000 bubbles in one square centimeter. The bubbles are negatively charged so that they attach to positively charged organic particles and lift them off. The result—foam that reaches way down into a dog's hair to dissolve dirt and grime.

The Wan Love Yu generator attaches to a regular hose in the bathtub, so it doesn't require any additional piping work. IDEC is planning on releasing Wan Love on June 20 in Japan for between $6,000 to $7,000. Though if that's the price for shampoo free doggy eyes, I say Fido ought to just suck it up and bathe the old fashioned way. [Fareastgizmos]

The controls are only operable by animals with opposable thumbs, but it is suitable for any gender of dog, not just bitches, as the fantastic title of this article suggests. If your canine compadre is the very apple of your eye, or you are Legend, we recommend paying out the highly unreasonable, 18,500 yen ($173.) Be warned though; your little mutt (not a euphemism), is likely to rip through the Cool&Hot pad with its teeth, piss on the exposed electric wiring of the heating element and then scorch its face off as it collapses in a horrific electrifying spasm due to electrocution. You just can't buy that kind of publicity. (No animals were harmed in the making of this article.) [Dvice]

Unfortunately, the manufacturers did not see fit to actually add a memory component upgrade to the mix. With any luck, that is on the slate for Humping Dogs 3.0. If you can't wait that long, you could always use this hack and perform the upgrade yourself. Available for 998 yen or around $9. [Product Page via Gizmodo Japan via Everything USB]

Personally, I don't understand why people are funding all of these new anti-dog-walking gadgets, like the dog treadmill. I have had all kinds of dogs, ranging from 200-lb Newfoundlands all the way down to a 20-lb King Charles Spaniel, and the one thing they all have had in common is that they could walk much further than I ever could. Who buys this crap? [ProductDose]

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What I want to know is why they went with the name Wanko. [Gizmodo Japan through Google Translate]

last year's American Inventor who made the solar-powered pet fan that sits in your cars window. [Product Page via Washington Post]

They're going for $35.00, and I apologize to your dog in advance. – Ben Longo

Dog Hotdog Cooker [Uneasy Silence]

The bowl feeds your dog/cat/baby with three separate trays, which can be programmed to open at 8-, 12-, or 24-hour intervals. That means the maximum you can leave your house for is three days, unless you somehow put enough food in each tray to last more than one day.

Our idea? Make one of these for wives to use when they go away on business trips so their husbands don't starve. No really, we're totally serious. – Jason Chen

Product Page [WildElectronics via Nerd Approved]

Thanks DJ!

The Amazing Nintendo Wii-Playing Dog? [TecheBlog]

Product Page [Via Get USB info]

Be forewarned. If you're not a fan of seeing pictures of your dog's own feces, closeups of the toilet bowl, and the backs of other dogs, you probably want to avoid that last feature. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Takaratomy via Plastic Bamboo]

Testimony continued today in the trial of David Lin, who allegedly mailed a bomb [on behalf of Anthony Chang] in a toy robot dog that resulted in the death of 18-year-old Patrick Hsu in 2001...When Patrick came home for a weekend visit from the University of California-Santa Barbara, he placed batteries in the toy, detonating the bombing device.

Anthony's woman had left him for Patrick. Geek love, gone tragic. –Brian Lam

Toy robot dog is star exhibit in S.J. murder trial [via Core77]

Toy robot dog is star exhibit in S.J. murder trial
By Howard Mintz
Mercury News

The metallic toy robot dog sits on the prosecution table, perched a few feet from the jury and not looking particularly lethal.

But inside a federal courtroom in San Jose, the toy has been an eerie, star exhibit — a replica of the murder weapon in a trial that began unfolding this week against a former Milpitas engineer charged in a revenge plot that killed a local college student six years ago.

Testimony continued today in the trial of David Lin, who allegedly mailed a bomb in a toy robot dog that resulted in the death of 18-year-old Patrick Hsu in 2001. Prosecutors allege that Lin, 39, mailed the device on behalf of Anthony Chang, who is accused of masterminding a plot against the family of Wendy Hsu, his estranged wife and Patrick's sister.

Now in its fourth day, testimony in Lin's trial has for the most part focused on Chang, a phantom in the courtroom who remains a fugitive suspected of living in Venezuela. Wendy Hsu testified earlier this week of her abusive, rocky relationship with Chang, who vowed retaliation against her and her family for leaving him.

Lin's lawyers maintain he never knew there was a bomb in the package he mailed for Chang, and the outcome of the trial may well hinge on prosecutors' ability to prove otherwise. Lin faces life in prison if convicted of murdering Patrick Hsu.

Today, the prosecution provided what may be its key testimony linking Lin to the bomb plot. Jenny Barrera, Chang's former girlfriend, testified in detail how she watched Chang assemble the lethal device in their Las Vegas apartment weeks before Patrick Hsu's death, taking apart the toy and inserting a pipe bomb inside.

Speaking softly through a Spanish interpreter, Barrera, who has been placed in a government witness protection program, testified that Chang told her he was sending the bomb to Wendy's San Jose home because ``she had ruined his life.''

Under questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Shoemaker, Barrera then described numerous conversations in which Chang told her that he mailed a box with the robot dog to Lin, who allegedly was responsible for sending it to the Hsu household. Police linked Lin to the package through a Milpitas post office.

``He said he'd asked David whether he could send the package to Wendy,'' Barrera testified, looking forlorn on the witness stand. ``That he had told him there was a bomb inside. That he should be careful when he held it, that he should wear gloves.''

Barrera admitted lying to police and federal agents at various times when questioned about Chang's role in the bombing early in the investigation. She then broke down and cried on the stand when she recounted changing her story and admitting her firsthand knowledge because she felt guilt when agents told her about the victim, Patrick Hsu.

Daniel Blank, a federal public defender representing Lin, plans to present testimony showing that Chang told conflicting stories about whether Lin was aware he was mailing a package containing a bomb. Blank will cross-examine Barrera when the trial resumes Monday.

During opening statements earlier this week, Blank told jurors Lin is a ``non-violent, peaceful person'' who was duped into mailing the package on Chang's behalf.

``David did not know Patrick and he did not know what was in the package,'' Blank told a packed courtroom that included Hsu's mother and father.

Chen Hsu, Patrick's father, received the package in January 2001, but left the robot dog for his son when he could not locate batteries to make it work. When Patrick came home for a weekend visit from the University of California-Santa Barbara, he placed batteries in the toy, detonating the bombing device implanted by Chang.

Chang also faces murder charges if he is returned to the U.S. Prosecutors could seek the death penalty against him.

[Textually]

Will Fido understand that no, you're not hiding near the dog bowl? Or will he spend hours searching your house, tearing apart your newly-purchased sheets and blankets in a costly game of hide-and-seek? If you're truly up for punishing your pets, the bowl costs twenty bucks and you can order online. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Chatterbowl via Gizmag]

Apparently, when a dog eats too fast, his stomach can distend with air until it's so big the dog goes into shock and dies. The syndrome is called Gastric Dilation/Volvulus (GDV) and by placing three rods in the bowl, a dog can't wolf down his food.

Available for $14.99.

Brake-Fast Doggie Bowl [via Strange New Products]

Intimsport [via Swissmiss]

Doggie Driver [Smarthome via Red Ferret]

These look like they would be pretty fun for kids, and Japanese studies have seen that robotic dogs have garnered smiles from patients suffering from Alzheimers. We just hope this one doesn't do "two hour yipping sessions", or else we're going to hear a lot of "ROBO PUPPY MISTREATMENT ALERT!"

Genibo: A New Robot Pup Rises [PC Magazine]

No availability, but if you're a purveyor of crappy USB junk, they're looking for distributors.

In the Dog Pound with the USB Barking Dog [EverythingUSB]