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In order to combat the rising number of mobile phones smuggled into prisons, the UK Government is considering installing the Boss II scanner chair in every jail in England and Wales. The Boss makes every inmate its bitch thanks to three sensitive sensors that can detect internally hidden metal items as small as a pin…
If you’re one of the lucky ones who are getting a Pleo under the tree this year, you can enhance his “holiday” spirit with the holiday behavior pack. All you need is a blank SD card and the ability to load that up with the new programming before you shove it into Pleo’s gut and…
Wisconsin State Senator Jon Erpenbach wants to pay to keep non-violent youth offenders out of adult court by funding rehab programs for juveniles declared delinquent by taxing another class of (usually) non-violent delinquents: gamers. His proposed one-percent tax on game consoles and games actually doesn’t tack an obscene penalty onto the receipt—$4.50 on an Xbox…
Lousy, lousy puns aside, these USB shoes can store 1, 2, or 4GB of your data, making it not only stylish, but fairly useful. They come in basketball and futbol varieties, meaning that if you’re more of a baseball fan, you need to wait for the next version. On the other hand, if you’re a…
Somewhere between 2006 and today, I stopped considering Apple an underdog. And I’m not just talking about their iPod numbers nor am I talking about their nowhere-close-to-Windows marketshare. I mean, screw marketshare, really: Does Porsche outsell Honda? Apple busted out some serious products like the iPhone and iPods and made aggressive growth in their notebook…
Nielsen’s survey of the state of console gamer HD setups reveals nothing too shocking, though I suspect the numbers are slightly inflated since participants were from the top 20 U.S. markets, over 18 and played at least one hour a week, skewing it toward more affluent, older and less casual gamers. The quick conclusions, followed…
• A security researcher published code that is capable of bricking corrupting Windows boot sectors on most HP and Compaq laptops. That doesn’t sound too good. [Slashdot] • Microsoft continues to rename everything in sight, this time folding IPTV, HD DVD, and Media Center into one group called Connected TV. [News.com] • Comcast settled a…
These animated Christmas light shows get more sophisticated every year. Case in point: this one in Valencia, California (about a 30-minute drive north of L.A.) where you can listen to its music loop broadcast over an FM frequency while you sit in your car out front. This is true artistry. Spectacular. [YouTube]
Way to go, Caddo School Board. You’ve won yourself the Gizmodo luddite of the week award. See, when a student films the principal of your Huntington High School fighting another student, the correct response isn’t to ban cellphones, it’s to make sure principals don’t fight with students. It was only after the student showed the…
Fantastic. Not only are people trying to stop you from skipping ads on your DVR, Microsoft’s patent will stop you from skipping ads on video you watch on your computer. The technique uses DRM to prevent any sort of playback until you watched the appropriate number of ads, and would essentially allow content providers like…
Someday, 3D images could actually catch on, and if that ever happens you’ll be ready with this Loreo 3D Lens in a Cap that lets you snag stereoscopic images with your digital SLR. Inside this Viewmaster-like contraption are a couple of focusing lenses that gather images from two slightly different angles. Therein lies the 3D…
The three methods for running Windows on a Mac (Boot Camp, Parallels and Fusion) have been around for a while, but Mactech’s numbers seem to be the first we’ve seen on how the three stack up on Leopard. The results weren’t that surprising. Boot Camp won out for overall speed, where Parallels won for virtualization…
If you’re jittery about an electric blanket frying your brain, here’s the ChiliPad from T2 International to keep you warm all night long, using technology normally seen in cooling systems for overclocked PCs. Water flows through soft coils in this mattress pad, either heating your bed up to 105° in the winter or keeping you…
Nokia’s “First Access” service that would let N81 owners play the 2nd Generation N-Gage games has been delayed until 2008, citing issues that they discovered via their 1000 global testers. We actually tested this new N-Gage platform earlier this year, and found it kind of to be like an Xbox Live Lite for mobiles. It…
Well, Redmond, it’s been a funny year, hasn’t it? Even if you ignore those Apple commercials, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Vista was probably one of the main reasons people switched to the Mac OS, or to third-party Linux-based systems. We’ll get to the big V—and that other mighty stain Windows Mobile—in a…
Skip this post if you’re at work, but we’ve found a webapp for the iPhone that actually shows a man how to properly “stimulate” a woman. It’s called RubMyClit, and it’s a webapp (that means everyone can see it in Safari, not just people who hacked their phones) that grades you on how well you…
Chris Lanier, Media Center fan, has just found a couple job postings by Microsoft that point to an long-delayed introduction of DirecTV support in their Media Centers. The job postings point to Pay-Per-View access, HD in H.264, two-way communications to and from the satellite, and integration with both US and European satellite systems. The one…
If we had to give our sponsors a year-end report card, we’d give them an A+. Thanks Adobe, Amazon Anywhere, Ask.com, Atari, AT&T, Audi, Bank of America, Blu-Ray Disc Association, Canon, Casio, Ford Focus, HP, Helio, IBM, Lead Tools, Mio, MS eHome, The New York Times, Nikon, Nokia, OQO, Patron, Ricoh, Ruby Tip, SanDisk, Sharp,…
If you have a Tassimo single-serve coffee brewer and can’t get enough of Starbucks coffee, now those little TDisc pods are available with four different varieties of Starbucks brew. Tassimo has teamed up with Starbucks to offer Breakfast Blend, House Blend, Caffé Verona and Africa Kitamu coffees in pod form. We went to our local…
Is this RAM Wing 100 yacht by Levi Designs a catamaran or a monohull? It’s both, starting out in front is a catamaran and ending up as a monohull in the stern. The most remarkable aspect of this design concept is its tremendous speed, 100 knots with a range of 2000 nautical miles. That’s not…