Maybe I'm overreacting, but for those of us with heaps of photos lying around in cardboard boxes, this $199.99 frame is a great idea. Of course, you could always use a normal scanner and transfer them from a PC to the 1GB of internal memory, but where's the fun in that? Don't deprive me of my analogue fun. [Hammacher Schlemmer via CrunchGear]

Loaded an OLED display and an incredible 64GB of storage (further expandable via MicroSD), you simply run the pen (lengthwise) over text and color images to capture them at 600dpi. But to simplify matters even more, you can either unload images to a PC through USB, or you can just transfer shots to whatever device you'd like over Bluetooth.

According to DVICE, the quality was surprisingly good in testing, though for $369, it'd better be. [PlanOn via DVICE]

Cooler than books on tape and way more fun than subtitles, the ezRead transforms your reading material into televised material.

What? Cooler than books on tape? More fun than movies with subtitles? This is surreal.

Of course, people with serious sight problems can connect this to a huge TV to read books and drugs prescriptions—like they say at the end of their product description. But how many of this limited set people have a huge TV? And would they be willing to use this instead of just grabbing a large, perhaps cheaper magnifying glass?

I'm afraid the ezRead is just one of those devices that overuse technology directed to an extremely limited market that already have their needs covered with low-tech solutions. But everyone's getting old, including the technologically inclined, so there may be a market for this. [Scientific Online via Red Ferret]

I like this thing. It's probably because of the 2001: Space Odyssey retro look. Or the fact that this $400 Automatic Document Feeder for PC and Mac takes the hassle out of scanning and cropping documents by having slots for each kind of most common and annoying paper bits—namely business cards, receipts, and invoices.

Or maybe it's just that the procrastinator in me loves the idea of putting a whole lot of old receipts, business cards, and invoices all at once, and have the NeatDesk handle everything, creating address books, making searchable PDFs, and adding information to Quicken, Excel, or Quickbooks. Uncrate says that the automatic organization actually works "surprisingly well" and now I would like an excuse to try it.

But then again, I think I will stick to my previous method. It works great. [Uncrate]

Like their previous book scanner, the V100 uses character recognition technology to scan every word on a page, even words curved into the spine of your book. More than just cloning your books into PDF and other visual files, the Book Reader can automatically convert your literature into MP3s, which will use a "natural voice synthesis" as your storyteller.

Having your books in MP3 format would mean that you will be able to easily carry your books around on an existing MP3 player without having to purchase an electronic reader. However, as they are currently priced at $700, forking up the cash for a Kindle does seem cheaper in comparison. [Wired]

The Price: $300

The Verdict: So far, man is it awesome... for a printer/scanner/copier/fax machine, that is.

I know printers. Like intimately. For a few years, I'd get the newest ones and run a double-blind print quality test. I got bored because Epson would always win. HP accused me of letting personal taste get in the way of objectivity, to which I replied, "Call me back when you get the color blue figured out." (My phone has yet to ring.)

Anyway, when I heard about Epson's total revamp of its all-in-one, I was happy and scared. Epson might have been the champ at photo quality, but its printers weren't always the easiest to use. Besides, they were often slower than Canons or HPs. But the Artisan could have traded in print quality to improve speed (an old HP trick). And besides, the Artisan has Wi-Fi, a sure sign of future tech-support calls.

Happily, my fears turned out to be nonsense: Setting up the printer was easy (though I did follow directions carefully, which is not my standard MO). The wizard worked great on the Mac, and I easily added the printer's wireless profile and drivers to another Mac and a Vista PC afterward with the same install disc, all printing without a hiccup. You might say "Big whup!" but trust me, wireless networking set-ups often don't work as billed, especially across both Macs and PCs.

The new touchscreen interface is great, giving you plenty of soft options in plain English, rather than a few choices in terse one-word buttons. As you can see in the shots below, there are fixed contextual touch buttons in addition to the LCD, making the interface even more flexible. I especially like that the fax dial-pad is hidden away, so that if you use it, great, but if you don't, you won't feel like you're wasting part of your purchase. Speaking of fax, the 800 has a document sheet feeder built right in, crucial for multi-page faxes and useful for copying and scanning too.The print quality was amazing, as I anticipated. What surprised me was how damn fast this bugger is. I could get a gorgeous borderless 4x6 in under 18 seconds, and of course it could manage larger sizes fairly speedily too, including the elusive 8x10. (HP once told me that 8x10, which it didn't support, wasn't in demand by photographers; Epson has always had an 8x10 option.)

The one thing you're still gonna hate about the printer is that each ink cartridge is still the size of a matchbook and damn if you won't burn through them all too fast. You get a second (BONUS!) black cartridge in the box, but all that tells me is that Epson is embarrassed about its ink addiction. Other printer makers will try harder to solve the ink-deficit problem—Kodak sells printers for more money and ink for less—but inevitably that solution comes at the cost of good hardware and high-quality prints. Go with Epson if you want the best pictures and, in this case, the best all around use, but remember that you will pay for that satisfaction in ink. [Epson]

The video is pretty self explanatory, but here it is for those who can't see it: A man and his wife had been noticing lots of ants on their computer desk but couldn't figure out where they were coming from. It wasn't from outside or anywhere else in the house. Later, the wife tells the husband that the printer wasn't working correctly. He checked out the printer/scanner combo only to find that the ants had turned it into a home. The video's pretty good, but what's he going to do next? Throw out the printer/scanner? Evict the bugs? What would you do?

[Dixau via TechPin via DVICE]

Here is the thing though—the parents probably have the same horrible eating habits, so it would be hard to dole out the discipline without looking like a hypocrite. Besides, if the school is so concerned about the kids' nutritional welfare, why do they continue to serve them crap food? Oh, and the school claims that that the stored information recorded has "no forensic value." Yeah, right. I'll bet you drop one joint on the ground behind the school and your fingerprints combined with data indicating that you enjoy large quantities of sugary and salty snack foods will do you in. [Breitbart]

At first it may seem like a lot of trouble (and pain) to go through just to make a very foul-smelling phone call now and then, but it appears that the inmates can use the phones to make drug deals or intimidate witnesses on the outside. All I know is that I would hate to be the guy at the prison who had to "retrieve" those phones. [Times Online]

All you do is wave the cellphone-sized device over the text you want translating. It just takes a couple of passes before the Voiscan starts relaying the info in whichever language you choose. The gadget is expected to be aimed at travellers and the visually impaired when it is released sometime next year. [The Raw Feed and TECH CHRONICLES]

Philips' scanner can give a patient a full body scan in less than a minute — and exposes them to 80 per cent less radiation than a traditional X-ray machine. The machine scans the body as well as rotating around it, sending out 256 pulses every one-third of a second. It is so powerful that it can capture an unblurred image of an entire heart in less than two heartbeats.

The machine could prove useful in the battle against cancer. As well as picking up tumors in the body, the scanner should be able to show medics how the disease spreads and new patterns of abnormality. There is currently just one 256-slice scanner in use, at the Metro Health medical center in Cleveland, Ohio. [Daily Mail]

By soldering two additional light sensors inside the CD player, and then using software, the researchers were able to control how the device "played" a disk. The substance to be analyzed (in this case, the team was trying to detect traces of three different pesticides in various samples) was then placed on a normal compact disc, and inserted into the machine.

While the first light sensor identified where the sample was on the disc, using black marks on the edge of the disc, the second analyzed the sample itself, measuring the amount of laser light that was able to pass through the disk. Normally, discs reflect around 30 percent of the laser beam onto the reading head, while the rest passes through.

The sample, half a millimeter in size, was treated to produce dye or silver that was inversely proportional to the amount of pesticide in the sample. Using the modded CD player, they could detect pesticide levels as low as 0.02 micrograms per liter just by seeing how much laser light passed through the disc to the second sensor.

While it may not be as accurate as genuine lab sensors, which can cost between $42,000 and $85,000, the hacked CD player is accurate enough for many laboratory tasks &mdash some experts think the cheap and cheerful device would work wonders in developing countries, helping the fight against malaria, for instance. And the shorter wavelength lasers of Blu-ray and HD DVD technology will make the process even easier. [New Scientist]

The only problem is whatever you're scanning becomes covered in milk. It's actually pretty difficult to get out, as my mom found out the hard way every morning since I liked to chug a gallon of it before I went to school.

– Jason Chen

Instructions [Instructables via Geekologie]