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Roomba Driving Owners Crazy with Anthropomorphic Robot Love

A study of 30 Roomba users found the owners of the robotic vacuum cleaner often developing emotional attachments to their little bundles of plastic, metal and wiring. Of the 30 people in the study, 21 of them named their Roombas, 16 of them referred to it as a “he,” and some even went so far…

Priestman Goode Post a Phone Landline Ringer Is Flatter Than 10-Year-Old Coke

UK industrial designers Priestman Goode breathed new life into using landlines (so 20th century) by stripping a phone down to its bare essentials—literally. The Post a Phone is 4mm thick, fashioned from either recyclable cardboard or plastic, pops out of an A5 envelope and is ready to be jacked in. The design and product’s definitely…

After purportedly popping up in Best Buy’s internal listings, the 40GB PS3 is now apparently logged in the UPC database, whose codes come from GS1. This is like the worst-kept secret console since the Xbox 360 Elite. [CrunchGear] https://gizmodo.com/399-40gb-ps3-shows-up-in-best-buy-listings-306146

Vertu Goes “Budget” With the $6,600 Ascent Ti

We told you about Vertu’s Ascent Ti a few months ago when it was found in an FCC filing. Well, it’s been a couple of months and the Ascent Ti is finally being released along with official details. So what does $6,628 get you? For starters, a quad-band GSM phone with 3G and a 3MP…

Broadcom VideoCore III multimedia processor could bring 720p HDTV to cellphones, mobile devices [TG Daily]

Viacom CEO Still All About DRM, Will Hopefully Retire Soon

While it seems like many sensible companies have realized that DRM doesn’t curb piracy and just pisses off their customers, it appears that Viacom didn’t get the memo. Today, CEO Philippe Dauman whined to the US Chamber of Commerce that it’s too easy to copy media and that companies should be using stronger, more widespread…

Fake Steve Jobs says there might be an iPhone SDK being released the week of Oct. 15. Is he just making crap up or does Dan Lyons actually know something? Likely not, but who knows what his Fake Steve persona has access to. Also, Lam and Diaz are desperate for any word on an SDK.…

Lobie Ear Things Hold Earbuds Outside Ears

These Lobies are probably the worst idea we’ve heard in a while. They’re made for people who don’t like having earbuds inside their ears, but still want to use earbuds for headphones. It wraps around hte earbuds and over your ear, essentially turning your earbuds into over-the-ear earphones that you can buy right now. The…

Panasonic DMR-BW900 Blu-ray Recorder Writes to 50GB Dual Layer Discs or a TB of HDD

Recording 18 hours of 1080p on a single disc is pretty serious stuff, and Panasonic Blu-ray recorders launched at CEATEC Japan do this. They do this via a digital TV tuner, MPEG 4 compression and support for 50GB dual layer discs you’d see on a PC recorder, but never before on a home theater box.…

Baguette Computer Wrist Rest: Staff of Life Protects Your Carpal Tunnels

Maybe it’s because it’s around lunchtime, but this Baguette Computer Wrist Rest is looking pretty good right about now. Made of cell foam that looks good enough to eat, all its makers need to do is infuse that unmistakable smell of baking bread and the illusion will be complete. Its $19.95 price is not much…

Flash Zune Specs Leaked by FCC

Lending a little more credence to all the Zune launch rumors we heard yesterday, the FCC just leaked out some sketches and specs for the flash Zune. It’s not even a mystery Toshiba like last time—these 4GB and 8GB mini-Zunes even have the Zune symbol on board. It looks exactly like the display model we…

Prince’s Wii Sports Tennis Controller

Unlike the lousy plastic Wii tennis add-ons we’ve seen before, this Prince Wii Tennis add-on smells of authenticity. This is partly because Prince is a well known name in the Tennis industry, but it’s also partly because they used actual strings to construct the face of the racket. We’re not saying this is great or…

USB Whack It (Like Whack-a-Mole You Pervert)

At first glance this USB Whack-a-Mole–like game stirred up all kinds of great Chuck E. Cheese like emotions. Then we realized that Whack It doesn’t have two things, one being moles and the other being fun. Everyone knows that the fun part of Whack-a-Mole is when you get to take out all your pent-up aggression…

Bill Gates (Degraded) Throughout History Photoshop Gallery of Glory

Yet again I’ve stupidly called down the fire of Giz readers’ Photoshopping, uh, abilities, this time asking you to Photoshop Bill Gates throughout history. A lot of you seemed to miss the whole history part of it, and while a few less-than-historical images slipped through, I tried to only choose ones that followed the rules.…

The FlipStart UMPC we got our hands on back in March just got its price slashed by $500. But it’s still $1499, which may be too much for most people. [Flipstart via Pocketables] https://gizmodo.com/vulcan-flipstart-hands-on-gallery-see-what-makes-this-242158

Yamaha Down-Firing Subwoofers, Compact But Packing a Punch

Sure, these Yamaha down-firing subs that will be released tomorrow don’t quite qualify as the mother of all subwoofers like the JL Audio Gotham mutha we showed you yesterday, but these are reasonably priced, with the 130-watt YST-FSW150BL costing $249.95, and the 100-watt YST-FSW050BL costing $179.95. Both have 6.5-inch drivers, pointing straight down so those…

$399 40GB PS3 Shows Up in Best Buy Listings?

Evidence for the imminent launch of a sweet-spot $399 40GB PS3 model continues to mount, the latest piece of proofage coming in the form of a Best Buy listing, which (if true) also confirms the Spider-Man 3 Blu-ray pack-in, so you can relive Peter Parkers’s emo phase in HD for free. While the slip is…

Indian Guy Sells Flights in Plane that Never Takes off

An Indian entrepreneur has come up with the ultimate low-cost airline: one that doesn’t fly anywhere. Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, bought an old Airbus 300 from an insurance company in 2003, rebuilt it, and it now sits in a Delhi suburb where people pay $4 per “trip” so they can experience…

iPhone Extreme Hidden in Apple’s iPhone Feedback Page (UPDATED)

We did this HTML code capture of Apple’s Feedback page a few minutes ago. It shows an option for the “iPhone Extreme,” which following Apple product naming convention for Airport, it could mean a faster iPhone or a new iPhone with a latex case. Or maybe, just some joke by some bored HTML programmer. What…

EcoModo – The Best of TreeHugger

This week at TreeHugger: Dealing with (and eliminating) “mystery machines” might be the best way to make IT greener. Take a closer look at this ultra-thin, protein-based, anime-inspired computer memory chip; that’s right — inspired by anime. We got some hot shots of the new Suissa computer, called Enlighten, a beautiful, endlessly upgradable machine designed…