At a recent family function, I showed my eight-and-a-half-year-old niece, Dandara, my new book, Obsolete. Specifically, I showed her the book's James Gulliver Hancock-rendered illustrations of various objects that are becoming obsolete. I asked her what she thought each one was. She guessed that the cassette tape was some kind of film dispenser; a can of 35mm film was, in her view, clearly meant for storing small food products. She correctly guessed that Wite-Out was a kind of paint, but she couldn't figure out what one would use it for. This was a really entertaining game... for me. Unfortunately, she quickly grew tired of me laughing at her.

Allison Louie-Garcia took this idea one step further by interviewing a handful of kids born in 2000. The resulting video serves as a reminder of how much has changed in the last decade. The children discuss their first MP3 players, recall using computers at age two, and marvel over the sounds of a dial-up modem. Napster, one kid guesses, must've had something to do with naps. And Britney Spears lives in their memory as "the girl who cut her hair bald."

Louie-Garcia also asks the children about war and terrorism. My nephew Miles was three on 9/11/01 and I recall, in the weeks after the attack, walking in Manhattan's Union Square talking to him about the American flags that were omnipresent. With his little hand reaching up to mine, we walked around and made a game of counting them. It was my little way of trying to brand the memory on him—a recollection he would one day be able to share with his own grandchildren if they ever asked if he remembered what it was like to be in New York during that fateful time.

A few months later, one of my editors at work told me to not reference 9/11 in anything I wrote. "People are already over it," she said. I was nonplussed. But, this video reminds me that, in the end, editors are always right. What do the kids of 2000 see as the most important event in their lifetimes? Michael Jackson's death. [Vimeo via Diary of a Madman and pretty much everywhere else on the internet]

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Rad Blaster also includes a 1.1-inch OLED screen and 2GB of built-in memory. It's certainly bigger than a shuffle, but it doesn't sound like a bad deal for $60. I mean, can you breakdance to a shuffle? I think not. [Rad Blasters]

The speakers are battery-powered and can be daisy chained together to create the Sanford and Son equivalent of a surround sound system. Although, that would be a pricey proposition considering that each can will run you about $46. [Folksy via Core77]

Perhaps my mustachioed butler and I can relive those moments with this retro cassette speaker. The device will work with any player that has a 3.5 mm audio jack. [OnlyHotTrends]

Your cat/dog/ferret may get peeved if it detects their thermal temperature and follows it about playing drum 'n bass, but I would love a roving music tank that I could control using any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled device. Mint claims its Mintpad is the perfect partner for the Music Tank, but you can control it with your PC if you so desire.

If it ever comes up against the effeminate Sony Rolly, our money is on the Mint Robot Music Tank. Just look at those tracks! [Mint Pass via DVICE]

A floating speaker that would play theme music when you entered a room, WWE-style. Movie protagonist style.

Imagine, you walk into the office, Every Rose Has Its Thorn deafens a whole room of cubicles. Pumped (and possibly greased), you march through the office in slow motion (or just very slowly, no one can quite tell). And it's all thanks to your little Melody Balloon, a concept that is now 1% less plausible but 10000000% more incredible. I mean, as long as we're making stuff up, it might as well include at least one 80s meme. [Yanko via UberGizmo]

MintPass' Cube MP3 player, a 2"x2"x2" box, sits somewhere between concept and product (leaning toward concept), and incorporates design details from analog music into the digital realm. The VU (volume unit) meter, a former staple of audio equipment, is celebrated front and center, backlit by LED. Similar battery and RF gauges dominate two other main sides, with the very back of the unit offering USB and 3.5mm out. (Expect Bluetooth as well.)

And then there's the top, which is spattered with 10 buttons. REMEMBER BUTTONS?? I loved buttons, especially the kind that if you pushed down would stay down unless you hit other buttons. It's like pressing buttons for buttons' sake, which is pretty much the most wonderful experience I could imagine (other than drugs and rock 'n' roll). [MintPass via Unplggd]

At any rate, the Panda head can connect to any computer via USB, or directly to your MP3 player via a 3.5mm audio plug. Rotating the Panda's ears controls volume and bass. [Gadget4all via Geekalerts via Technabob]

Here's what we know: Not much. The leaked sheet contains no image, no real specs and no launch date. The tablet speculation only arrives once you consider Cowon's MO, paired with Atom. Yeah, definitely a stretch, but an interesting one to consider on this lazy, post-Halloween Sunday afternoon. [DAP Review via Engadget]

There's also an mp3 player, movie player and an FM radio receiver. The video out is also intact, meaning this little guy can be used to play on the big screen.

Games in action below:

To answer your question, yes, this mod is very similar to one we've featured before. This one is cleaner, boasts more features, and plays Game Boy games too, so it gets the nod today. Nice work.

Oh, and the answer to the headline question, by the way, is unicorns. They would exist. [Ben Heck Forums via technabob]

First off, some reasons to take this road: iTunes is a decent audio encoder, and it'll get your music from point A—the CD—to points B, C and D—your computer, your MP3 player and your backup drive—without much trouble. But it'll do it with a less-than-great encoder, with occasionally inconsistent tagging, with album art that'll only work on Apple devices, and without support for the best lossless audio formats and MP3 encoding options, which you probably want, whether you know it or not.

In short, the ripping process deserves a little more care than iTunes or Windows Media player can give it. You can pay people for this, which feels dumb and wasteful, or you can do it yourself. It's not difficult, at all. Here's what you do:

Get Your Software

The first step to ditching iTunes is to, well, ditch iTunes. What we're looking for is ripping software that offers more encoding options than iTunes, but more importantly, a better encoder. And as far as MP3 encoders go, the open source LAME is as good as they get. There's plenty of software for both Mac and PC that leverages this encoder, but here are two programs that do lots, lots more.

Mac OS X: Max
From the makers:

When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction. For damaged discs, Max can either use its built-in comparison ripper (for drives that cache audio) or the error-correcting power of cdparanoia.

What this translates to: Great error reduction, fantastic sound quality, and tons and tons of encoding options—not that you really need those to do a good rip, but hey, they can't hurt. On top of all this, Max is also a great file converter, in case you've got some delinquent WMA files scattered around.

Windows: Exact Audio Copy
From the makers:

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are
• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can't be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

What this translates to: The best error correction money can buy, for free. Seriously: Audiophiles swear by exact audio copy, and with good reason. You'll have to download your own LAME encoder before you can enable MP3 encoding in the program options, but you can do that right here without a problem. Additionally, setting up tagging, which you'll definitely want to do, takes an extra, albeit easy, step.

If you want to take a simpler route you can just download CDex, which supports LAME and tagging databases out of the box, and produces results nearly as good as—if not as good as—Exact Audio Copy.

On both platforms, you're going to have a lot of personal decisions to make. How do you want to organize your files? How do you want to name them? Unlike iTunes, these apps don't pressure your to store your music in a certain way—it's up to you to archive as you please. Both offer plenty of options for storage and organization, easily available in their Preferences menus:
As I said, this one's up to you.

Choose Your File Type

MP3: If you're encoding only for portable devices, not concerned about archiving perfect copies of your music, hate hate hate audiophiles, think FLAC and OGG just sound like gurgling baby noises, you're probably going to want to stick with MP3s. Yes, there are other formats that offer a better size-to-sound ratio, and no, it's not open source or anything, but for pure compatibility, control, and encoder choice, it's hard—-no, impossible—to beat MP3. And if you set up your encoder correctly, MP3s can sound great.

It's tough to pick the optimal MP3 bitrate on your own, since at a certain point, differences in sound quality seem to come down as much to psychological factors as to actual clarity. Thankfully, we've crowd-sourced this issue and come up with a rough guide: 256kbps is, it seems, where people just can't really tell the difference. In practical terms, this means setting your encoder to these settings:

That's no higher than 256kbps VBR—for variable bitrate, which modifies the amount of information in your file's stream according to how much is needed, and saves you space without sacrificing quality—with the highest (read: slowest) available encoding option. For almost everyone, in almost all circumstances, this'll do, and it sure beats iTunes default 160kbps constant bitrate rips.

FLAC: If archiving is your intention—as in, digitizing your music without losing any quality, no matter how imperceptible—then you're going to want to go lossless. And of the lossless formats, FLAC is the most well-supported in terms of software and hardware, albeit not on any of Apple's products—though iTunes can be made to play nice with FLAC with a few simple tweaks.

But don't fret! The beauty of FLAC music is that it can be converted to other lossless formats, like Apple's iPod-compatible Apple Lossless, without losing any quality, or compressed into MP3s without having to worry about muddy transcoding. Think of them as CDs without the physical disc, basically.

Embed Your Album Art

On Mac OS, assuming you're doing your listening in iTunes, which is pretty handy at fetching album art, you can just use one of Doug's famous iTunes scripts to write said album art directly to your MP3 files. Here's how you install it:

To install the files/folders, drag the items in the disc image window to your [username]/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ folder. If there is no folder named "Scripts" there, create one and drag the files into it. AppleScripts placed in this folder will be listed in the iTunes Script menu. You do not have to install the .rtf/.rtfd documentation file in the "Scripts" folder, but it's as convenient a place as any.

For Windows users, Lifehacker's written a fantastic guide to collecting and embedding album art, which you should definitely read. The short version? Download MediaMonkey, and let it do the work for you.

Granted, once you embed album art into your files, apps like iTunes and Windows Media Player might not display it, and may ask you to search for it from their databases. This is fine: Both programs use proprietary album art storage systems, so just because they can't see your ID3 tag album art doesn't mean it's not there, or that you shouldn't have embedded it—having it around can't hurt, and it's by far the most compatible and rational method for storing album art, as far as other software, most MP3 players and long-term storage go.

Anyway, that's it! Now you can set your CDs aside comfortably, knowing that you've squeezed the purest, most delicious audio files you can out of them. Now:

Listen to Your Music

Because that was the whole point.

If you have more tips and tools to share, please drop some links in the comments-your feedback is hugely important to our Saturday How To guides. And if you have any topics you'd like to see covered here, please let me know. Happy ripping, folks!

Less than an inch at its widest point, the .28 ounce Micro Sports MP3/WMA/WAV player comes ready to store 2GB ($55) and 4GB ($75) of tracks. Syncing and charging over micro USB, the Micro Sport can run for about 4 hours before giving in. But honestly, if you're enjoying outdoor activity for more than 4 hours at a time, chances are you're taking part in risky activities that could lead you to fall on your head and have this thing permanently wedged into your ear canal. During the next several years of painful, costly operations, even a 24 hour battery would have proven inadequate in overpowering the cacophonous buzz of saws grinding against your skull, let alone the very sad, very internalized song that is your life. [Geek Stuff 4 U via Akihabara News via UberGizmo]

The 3D gaming example, Forza 3, debuts at about the 30 second mark in the video above. It's a fleeting glimpse, but it's solid evidence nevertheless.

For authenticity's sake, we tell you that Microsoft PR reportedly asked the leak's originator, Buy TV, to take the videos down, but not before brigands at sites like Neowin were able to upload them to YouTube, where they spread like a New York Times homepage virus.

Zune HD drops in two days. [Neowin, Buy TV via ars technica]

Influenced, in the most irritating way, by "mobile multimedia gadgets, those quintessential objects of modernity and style that have become both everyday objects and icons of our era," this cologne features a touch-based play button that presumably sprays whatever club-scented girl-repellent lies within the bottle. It's a pretty silly idea and actually features poor design: No 3.5mm headphone jack? Did JT learn nothing from the T-Mobile G1? But if you want to smell like an international pop star, or at least like an international pop star's publicist, it's available in Europe right now. [Givenchy via Boing Boing Gadgets]

It has 12 different Star Trek LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) interface themes, and the site says more will be available for download. File format support is listed as MP3, MP4, AVI JPG, BMP, and WAV.

What gave me goosebumps: Seeing that beyond the TR-590 Tricorder X-style design, there are also Medical, Borg, Marine, Workbee and Troi-styled models available. The starting price of $349 might bring you back down to earth, though. [AmeralisGrafx — Thanks Junior!]

In one of the more interesting pull down notices we've seen in a while, the Portuguese retailer said:

Yesterday a new set of products for iPod in our catalog, we have been asked to remove them. It was then clarified that we were not allowed to publish it. We have immediately accepted to remove that information, and would like to express our sincere apologies to our costumers. We are expecting to make those products available in September.

September eh?

A rumored September keynote (when iPods tend to be announced), apparent iTunes 9 details emerging, mounting case leaks? New iPods are a comin', and it's looking more and more like they'll have cameras. And the tablet? Not until 2010 apparently. Probability Thing-o-Meter back to 70 percent!

New: JIVO TPA Case Blue for iPod Touch 3G

New: JIVO TPA Case Blue for iPod nano 5G

One of more than a dozen case shots that Cult of Mac obtained:

[Obrigado fanático das maçãs for the store tip!]

Granted, you will have to be willing to take those speakers apart—so I wouldn't use anything expensive here. Still, it seems to be a pretty simple project that results in a usable waterproof speaker. Check out the instructable for the full DIY directions. [Instructables via Lifehacker]

Since we don't know anything about this keychain-esque DAP, we're left to guess based on the interesting ad, with its repetition of the "circle + square" tag. Is it a lost-in-translation attempt at our "square peg in a round hole" idiom? A nod to the design of the gadget itself, which is, in fact, a circle combined with a square? A hint at the future aesthetic of Cowon's players (which have certainly been more attractive lately; compare the blocky utilitarian square of the D2 with the sleek curves of the S9)?

I personally hope it doubles as a USB drive—I really miss the design of the first iPod Shuffle and the Sansa Express, low-profile DAPs with built-in USB. That was so convenient! But we'll have to wait for a real announcement from Cowon to figure out what's going on here. [DAPReview]

The Price: £44.99, or about $75 at the moment.

The Verdict: It's one of the most adolescently satisfying gadgets I've tested in some time, but the audio quality is (expectantly) mediocre at best.

The K-Box charges its 20-hour battery via USB and plugs in to pretty much any audio player through a 3.5mm (headphone) jack. The spartan design lacks fancy switches or fancy equalizer displays. Once it's plugged in, the speaker just automatically turns on.

While it feels like a chunky MP3 player of yore in one's hand, the rear is sticky, similar to the gecko foot pad you find on the Palm Pre Touchstone. This "gel audio technology" transfers the bass frequencies to whatever the K-Box is stuck to, from windows to coffee tables.
Just holding the K-Box makes it sound like any treble-heavy micro speaker. But sticking it to glass (which I found to be the most acoustically receptive surface next to thin metal) completely alters the audio quality, highlighting the mids and bass line with a poor but probably better quality than you'll find in competing speakers of this size and an impressive level of volume.
Really though, it's that 10 minutes of euphoria as you run around the house sticking the K-Box to the shower stall, coffee table, dryer door, and cat that may make the K-Box a satisfying gadget purchase. A $20 pair of headphones will offer a better listening experience, as will the average iPod dock. [K-Box]

Gimmicky fun

Simple, understated design

Works better than expected, but still pretty lousy

Often it's not sticky enough to stick to some surfaces