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Apparently the sight of Susan Sarandon was too much for the final two contestants in the Netflix Movie Watching World Championship in NYC. After a record-breaking 57 movies or 123 hours and 10 minutes of nearly constant entertainment, Suresh Joachim (as predicted) and Claudia Wavra walked away with the coveted Popcorn Bowl Trophy during the…
Mozilla Labs has unveiled Geode—a plugin that will take advantage of the W3C Geolocation Spec in Firefox 3.1. The plan is to make the browser location-aware so that somewhere down the line, you could visit a site like Yelp on your laptop in a strange town and it will automatically find your location and offer…
Nothing says creepy like a crab robot with the head of a Cabbage Patch Kid doll. The robot, which is available in a DIY kit (sans head), takes about three hours to put together and is sure to freak out any kids that come around your house looking for free candy in a few weeks.…
Asus has admitted to its Japanese customers that some of the Eee Box B202 mini PCs they shipped included a recycled.exe virus loaded on the D: partition. When the drive is opened, the virus (identified by Symantec as the W32/Usbalex worm) attempts to infect the C: drive and any removable drives attached to the system.…
We’ve heard plenty about the iRiver Spinn PMP since it appeared at CES 2008, but now it’s finally available for purchase in US markets. The 3.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen MP4 player with Bluetooth 2.0 support and roto-dial UI navigation will retail at $250 for the 4 GB player and $290 for the 8 GB player. It’s…
I’m the kind of guy who roots for the underdog. Sure, the real iPhone is pretty great. But I’m just as happy to see a clever manufacturer pull one over on us all and sell me an iClone on the cheap. This knockoff found in Russia doesn’t look so bad at first glance, but it’s…
Click to viewWhen you were a kid using the swings at recess, you always would get just high enough to feel the chains go slack at the top. You always imagined getting so high that you’d go completely around the top bar and come down on the other side, but it always seemed like an…
Sprint’s enticing Xohm WiMax network is slowly making its way across the country, but Lenovo has complained of a major problem with it gaining popularity. According to GigaOM, Lenovo expected to dominate the market with a variety of WiMax products since they had put a lot of time and effort into testing equipment. But Lenovo…
We knew this day would come, but Netflix has just notified their customers that a new fee will be applied to Blu-ray renting accounts. But it’s not all bad news. The price increase is only a buck a month for unlimited Blu-ray rentals. Given that a Blu-ray purchase sticker price is often 30% or more…
We do not know if Sherlock Holmes had the customary stomach troubles related to his opium habit, but if he did, we’d like to think that such problems were reasoned out into this “Ms. Hudson” pipe shaped commode. The winner of a recent Russian bathroom design contest, this particular toilet seems to have to advantages…
The new ‘Gandalf’ project launched by DARPA is classified, so there isn’t much in the way of details, but it seems that the goal is to use a special set of “handheld devices” to track targets of interest using “radio frequency geolocation.” Spy planes and drones are already capable of similar functions, but this new…
Bathroom technology has taken yet another leap forward my friends. Hot on the heels of the news that toilet paper researchers have discovered the mythical 3-ply tissue holy grail, the Japanese have developed a simple but effective one-handed TP dispenser called the “Korobe-Kun”. The main purpose of the device is to help elderly individuals who…
Nearly nine years after filing for a patent on the Dock in OS X, it’s finally been awarded to Apple. Steve Jobs is listed as one of its three inventors. Besides the general idea of a userbar with “a plurality of item representations” that consolidates features like “launching and managing running applications,” the patent focuses…
AlertMe is a UK home surveillance company that has a pretty great idea for expanding its services. Their Smart Plug fits in your socket and monitors energy usage of various connected appliances. It wirelessly communicates with the AlertMe Hub, a (Wi-Fi?) and GRPS box that sends the information to the cloud. Through a monthly service…
Tired of over-complicated universal remotes, industrial designer Brian Garret Schuur created this single button remote that allows to change channel, volume, pause, play, record, and switch the TV on and off. This is not only a concept however, it’s a fully functioning prototype that uses a microcontroller connected wirelessly to a laptop. Despite all these…
I can’t say that I am all that thrilled with the look of the Powerwise desk, but the concept of sliding off the surface to reveal a hidden 8-port charging station is definitely intriguing. Each one of the outlets features its own on/off switch and there are storage drawers to keep your cords neatly tucked…
Opera just popped out the latest version of their desktop browser, 9.6. Besides being just plain faster, it adds feature improvements all around, like a new low-bandwidth mode in the built-in email client, expanded syncing (speed dial, search engines and notes), and RSS feed previews, so you can check out the content before you subscribe…
For some reason, a teapot permanently takes up one of the four, sacred burners in my kitchen. Occasionally I’m able to hide it, trapping the unused fixture in a cabinet where the Pyrex watches guard. To circumvent this subtle, strategically culinary mating dance that is marriage, I’d be glad to place this adolescently glorious UFO…
Banks aren’t the only thing failing right now. Beleaguered big box Circuit City’s stock has dropped below 50 cents a share, meaning it’s on the brink of going under. Since Blockbuster pulled out of a deal to buy them earlier this year, it’s looking like no one will step in to save them. I’m no…
We were amazed by Kota, a robot replica of a 40-inch-long baby triceratops made by Playskool. It can walk, it can growl, and the kids can actually ride it. It doesn’t get any better than that. Unless they can come up with actual cloned baby triceratops. You can buy Kota now from Amazon for $300.…
