A: The Commodore Pet

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

Breadbox64 runs on the embedded Contiki OS, and lets you tweet and view your friends' timeline from the ancient platform, provided you have the proper networking gear installed. It will even automatically update your timeline every two minutes. The UI is as 8-bit as can be, though I wouldn't call it the most aesthetically pleasing thing in the world (you didn't expect it to look like TweetDeck, did you now?). Anyways, you can download it if you want here. It's good for a novelty tweet or two. [Van den Brande]

Yes, Firefox thinks that, instead of typing the name of our beloved publication, I should instead choose from Gizzard, Quasimodo, Commodore and Sodomize. While they're not necessarily the four words I would immediately choose to sum up the wild, at times off-color yet always authoritative spirit that exudes from these pages, I couldn't help but be impressed at what may have been the Firefox dictionary AI's first successful attempt at humor. Gizmodo: Is it a chicken part, a tragic hunchback, a top-ranking naval officer or a sex act named after a damned Biblical town? Can't it be all of these things, Firefox?

Chiptune musicians mod archaic game systems from Atari, Commodore, and Nintendo, among others, to be used as musical instruments. The music sounds a lot more varied than I would have expected, from hard-pumping dance electro to atmospheric pieces, not to mention the workshops, screenings, and presentations that are included in the Festival.

The documentary Reformat the Planet, which debuted earlier this year at South by Southwest, will be shown at the festival, and the trailer here does more than I could to describe how cool this is. The Blip Festival's tickets are $15 a night, and held at the Bell House (149 7th Street, Brooklyn).

[New York Times, photograph by Richard Gin]

While the price for the entry level Commodore G has been determined, prices for the GS, GX, and XX models have yet to be announced. You can still expect quad-core Intel processors, Nvidia 8000-series graphics cards, and a proprietary heat sink. You will also be able to select from a variety of paint jobs marketed as "C-kins" that cover the front and side panels. The PCs will initially sell online, but future plans for retail sales are still in the works. [CNET News]

All you have to do is get one C64 keyboard, a couple circuits, some open source software, and a bunch of free time. When you're done, you get one dirty C64 keyboard hooked up to your machine. The only problem is the lack of function keys, Num Pad, and various other niceties that we've come to expect from our keyboards over the last 20 years. – Jason Chen

Project Page [Symlink via Make]

Product Page [via Daily Tech]

Then again, maybe people will purchase a Commodore for the ironic value, giving them the much needed boost to get traction in a market dominated by names like Falcon and Alienware. – Jason Chen

Comodore Returns [Wired]

Given the frighteningly low pay in my chosen line of work, I often fantasize about dropping writing in favor of something far, far more lucrative. Alas, I lack the hops necessary to make it in the world of professional basketball (even on the Minot Skyrockets), and my brain's too feeble to handle the likes of arbitrage, bond trading, or high-stakes pai gow. The one thing I might be cut out for? Importing low-end Chinese electronics.

Sounds difficult, I realize, especially since my Cantonese is little better than my Xhosa. But in the era of quick-and-easy sales leads via Tootoo and Alibaba, as well as Guangdong factories that really, really want to be your friend, low-end moguldom is hardly the impossible dream.

Case in point: the man behind Sundial, which sells MP4 players like the Nanoish knock-off pictured at right. After the jump—and in partial honor of the impending Year of the Pig—an anatomy of how a gadget gets from Southern China to Norfolk, Virginia. PLUS: Commodore in Argentina!

Our story starts in one of Shenzhen's myriad industrial parks, located in the factory-clogged Bao'an District. This is the headquarters for MJN Technologies, an erstwhile hi-fi manufacturer that now focuses on making portable audio/video players "built with latest controllers from Actions, Samsung, and Sigmatel." MJN also wants you to know that 30 percent of their labor is done with human hands, making this precisely the sort of company that Edward Burtynsky would certainly love to document.

Among MJN's hottest products (at least according to them) is the FY-910. The aesthetics are obviously cribbed from the Nano, but it's a different beast—it'll play MP4 files and has a built-in FM receiver, but the memory tops out at a gig.

Obviously, this isn't the sort of thing that's gonna end up at Best Buy. MJN instead hooked up with Jhansene Lopez, a college student in Norfolk, Virginia who's also the chief executive of Sundial. And what's Sundial? As far as I can tell, it's a one-man electronics importers with a kiosk in Norfolk's Military Circle Mall. It also has a thriving eBay store that, strangely, goes under the name Garment Liquidator. (The eBay prices are actually better than the kiosk's, it seems, with one-gig MP4 players going for c. $36.)

Sundial seems to have solicited its MJN connection through both Alibaba and this site. What's amazing about connecting with factories in this manner is how little you're required to order nowadays; shipping costs have come down to the point that you can get steep price breaks on buying a few hundred units, as opposed to a few thousand. Heck, one MP4 manufacturer I came across would do wholesale deals on as few as 25 players.

You can quibble with the quality of MJN's merchandise, but I gotta say, much respect to Lopez for bringing low-end Guangdong gadgets to the American mall. I'm blessed in that, as a New Yorker, I'm within a quick subway ride of not one, but three fabulous Chinatowns where such electronics are easy to find. Not everyone's so lucky, but they may be if Sundial makes good on its stated intention to franchise its kiosks.

So should I gather some start-up cash, purchase a bunch of MP4 players via Tootoo, and become a low-end tycoon? Or is this business a lot less lucrative than I'm imagining it to be? One potential stumbling block I foresee is direct sales from factories. Take this Nano knockoff, which lists at a ridiculously low $29.99—where they get you is on the $25 shipping cost, which is a pretty sure tipoff that they're boxing the player up in China and sending it right to your doorstep.

If the shipping rates come down appreciably—which may largely be a matter of cutting red tape on the Chinese side—the likes of MJN may no longer need the likes of Sundial. But for the moment, my low-end hat off to Lopez and his efforts to bring off-brand electronics to the masses. Perhaps I'll join you in that line of work soon.

Or maybe not. On second thought, wiring money to some dude in Shenzhen I've never met sounds a bit risky, and cheapskates like myself don't like taking such risks. In my quest for a better payday, perhaps I'll stick with something safer.

COMMODORE LIVES!: I'm pretty sure that a good three-quarters of this column's readers owned a Commodore at some point in their geeked-out lives. I certainly remember unwrapping a VIC-20 one glorious Christmas, and spending the next six months coding a ski-racing game onto a frickin' cassette. (Yes, I'm old.)

Y'all will be glad to learn, then, that Commodore's comeback effort seems to be working...in Argentina. An Argentinean reader snapped the cellphone pic at the right while computer shopping. The hard-to-read prices for the Commodore SP-3600 LX are 1620 pesos (c. $523) for the CPUbox alone, and 1949 pesos (c. $629) complete with a 15-inch monitor. The specs? Straining my eyes, it looks like an Athlon 64 3800 processor, 512 MB of RAM, a 120-gig hard drive, and a Linux OS.

Oh, and a Samsung DVD combo drive. Though I'm sure you can figure out how to attach a cassette drive if you really, really want to. (Thanks, Jose Luis!)

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for both The New York Times and Slate. His Low End Theory column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

Read more Low End Theory

Then there's the Gravel in Home system, which has a 80GB hard disk, which has Video On Demand and Replay TV support, but to what extent we're not sure. There should be more information at IFA from September 1 to September 6 in Berlin. – Jason Chen

Press Release [Business Wire]

Product Page [Via Retro Thing]

The best thing about the next device was the cute girl talking to me about it. This is the Mediatower. It is a massive, over 8-foot tall tower that allows you to connect your cell phone or MP3 player to it for music and content downloading. These towers are currently around South Africa right now and will be made stateside in 2006. The tower allows for connections via Bluetooth, USB, and through a variety of different memory cards. Hook up your device, download some crappy wallpaper or ringtones...it's as easy as that. It is a damn shame that YMV has turned the proud Commodore legacy into another Jamster knockoff.

Initially I sat down with the Navigator Combo with high hopes. First off, the display looks like complete crap. The navigation is done with a pretty responsive touch screen, but what was difficult was actually reading what the options were. I tried to check out the GPS features and I was greeted with a fantastic error. The Navigator Combo is powered by Windows CE, so when there is an error, Microsoft lets me know there is an error. If you are really interested, this features a 3.5-inch touch screen, 20GB hard drive, playback options for most audio/video formats and even a bitching NES emulator.

Welcome Back Commodore! [Trusted Reviews]

Commodore Set To Make Comeback [Bios Magazine]