Hawt Gadgets

After people have fought, rioted and been shot while waiting in lines for the mythical PS3 machines during the great 2006 PS3 Crime Spree, we had to make Video Game Consoles the #1 most requested and wished for item this season. While the PS3 garnered a lion share of the press regarding crazy people just needing some Sony gaming power, the Wii managed to outsell Sony hands down. Even the older XBOX 360 got in the act bringing Amazon to it's knees for over 15 minutes... of course the XBOX 360's sold out in only 29 seconds.

It looks like the future version of iPods will have a specific subject in the menu handling everything about podcasts. A blog over at ZD Net has a bunch of illustrations and workflows published.

iPod podcast menus, navigation depicted in new Apple patent app [blogs.zdnet.com]
via [Crunchgear]

I’m pretty sure that kids of today won’t be that impressed by any of the classic View-Master models that was really cool when I was a kid. Here’s a whole site dedicated to View-Masters and other stereo viewer related material.

20th Century Stereo Viewers [viewmaster.co.uk]
via [swissmiss]

I guess that this ‘Ming Vase 3D puzzle’ is just a joke, but you never know…! Anyway, I thought it was quite a funny idea worth mentioning. Please comment if you know anything more about this product.

Realistic 3D puzzle [haha.nu]

Check out these spy photos of the upcoming ultra-thin mp3 player from Samsung called Samsung YP-K3. There’s no information available on features, memory or pricing yet - but at least we can see that it’s way thinner than an iPod nano…

Samsung’s YP-K3 caught in the wild! [Engadget]

Update! Even more pictures over at Gizmodo.

If you’re would be interested in ripping the full content of a blu-ray movie disc (or a blu-ray ps3 game disc), the Playstation 3 and Linux is your best friends. All you have to do is enter a single command line…

World’s First PS3 Blu-ray Movie dumped! [PS3 News]
via [Gizmodo]

Alice Hill from Realtechnews tells us about a upscaling DVD player for under $200...

Not interested in the HD format wars? We don’t blame you. Luckily in this case technology comes to the rescue with an affordable solution - an upscaling DVD player. Upscaling is not to be confused with progressive scan DVD players. Upscaling is just what the name implies - your tickets to full-on 1080p HD resolution with your existing DVD discs.

What is it?

It’s a bookmark-sync app for Macs.

Giving up some love for the Mac users on the DG today. As many of you know, I dropped my .Mac subscription this year (horrors!). The service just did not stack up against so many widely available free alternatives available, and it really didn’t justify the $99/year cost.

Thus far I’ve found alternatives for everything I actually used in .Mac, and quite a few for things I didn’t.

SafariDepot is a solid and pseudo-geeky way of getting your bookmarks to sync across several Macs. While there are a few free plug-ins for Firefox that do the same thing, Safari users don’t have such easy solutions, having to mostly rely on .Mac.

What’s good…what’s not so good.

You don’t really have to install anything for the app to work, just run it periodically to keep current. The setup requires that you have FTP or FTPS access somewhere, so this may not be the best solution for a casual user.

The interface and directions are clean and clear enough to follow, but sometimes the folder hierarchy need to be manually set. Again, this is pretty simple, but if you’re not comfortable with mucking about like this, it’s just not going to appeal to you.

Yes, the app works. Tends to be a bit more speedy than .Mac, and you don’t have to worry about the service going down at an odd time for maintenance or high traffic.

You can’t set SafariDepot to sync on a schedule, but you can easily write a script to do so or get a terminal command to run it.

Can I recommend it?

If you really need to sync your bookmarks across several Macs and you don’t want to pay for .Mac service, then yes, I can say give this a spin. Otherwise, give Firefox a try and one of their sync options. You’ll more than likely find it easier, and find you like a new browser in the process.

Ever feel like the responsibility of undoing even a tiny smidgen of the damage your one little self has done to the planet over your lifetime is just too daunting to tackle? We all contribute to global warming, but most of us have no idea to what extent. BeGreen, a beta website from Green Mountain Energy Company, allows you to measure your use of energy (the categories are natural gas, electricity, vehicles and air travel), so you can see the size of your carbon footprint. You can then offset your big fat emissions by making a payment that goes towards Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), forest sequestration, and other carbon offset technologies. My offsets will cost me $294 (for 20.67 metric tons of carbon emissions -- yikes!).

The site also includes a BeGreen Toolkit and a place for you to create a profile to join the BeGreen community. Signup is free, and plans are under way to enable businesses to participate.

(Tip from Bill)

The Geeks first featured an incredible LCD HDTV by Aquos so we figured we should feature a plasma display as well. This Panasonic is priced well and has become a best seller through online retailers... probably because of winning the consumer reports ratings.

If you don't trust consumer reports, check out the user ratings on Amazon. Out of 35 ratings, 29 were 5 stars and 3 people gave the set 4 stars. That's pretty impressive.

This has to have some folks in Redmond pretty happy. NPD Group’s weekly point-of-sale data for the week ending November 18 indicates that the Zune is selling just behind the iPod in terms of overall sales. The Zune garnered a 9% unit share which indicates a 13% dollar share in terms of DAP sales in the US market.

Now, this is pretty good news for the Zune, as it shows that it’s scored a #2 spot as a brand behind the iPod. This means that SanDisk was pushed out of the spot in the initial week of offering.

My take? The Zune enters a crowed and somewhat complicated market. Apple and SanDisk both offer several players in several different configurations, while the Zune is currently a one-device brand.

Good news for Zune owners.

With our friends in the Northwest getting walloped, and we here in the Midwest looking to get hit tonight and tomorrow, I started to think about being “snowed-in” (glee!) and what tended to do.

Last time I was snowed in anywhere was just a few year ago, actually. We lost power for a time and it got pretty chilly in the house. I got under a heavy wool blanket and read books on my Palm for hours. I was actually pretty surprised at the battery life on the unit at the time.

Do you guys make any sort of special plans or have any “rituals” you go though when expecting foul winter weather? Do you look forward to it?