Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

What better way to wrap up your holiday presents but with those little invaders we all love so much. Whimsy Press is offering their “Paper Invaders” wrapping paper for all of your gift-giving needs. The wrap comes in 24 x 36 inch sheets for $4.50 each.

The folks over at New York’s DigitalLife consumer electronics and gaming show have extended the kind offer of free tickets to their show for all Technabob readers. Tickets are normally $15 each. The DigitalLife conference features consumer, gaming and entertainment technologies and runs from October 12th through October 15th, 2006 at the Jakob K.

Looking for a bookshelf speaker system for your digital music player that doesn’t suck? Audioengine’s Speaker System 5 has the specs and looks of a true audiophile speaker system but costs just $349, including free shipping.

Even though we all know by now that the Nintendo Wii will retail for $249.99 USD when it launches this November, that’s never the amount you really spend once you buy all your games and accessories.

What’s wrong with this picture? Looks like someone at Amazon made a pretty big freudian slip. I’m not sure how long this will remain up on their site, but here’s the original page. [via Digg]

It must be the season of giving. First Apple and Creative dropped their prices on their media players, then Microsoft cut the price on their Zune, now Sony has announced that their Playstation 3 (the low-end model,) will drop its price too.

Everyone’s getting into the digital camera accessory business, what with add-ons available for the Playstation 2, Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS, the PSP was starting to feel left out. That said, Sony’s entry into the fray seems a little anemic at first glance.

I guess good things come in threes from Microsoft. First, the Zune was revealed to be just $229.99, then the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive announced for under $200, and now they’re offering to repair any Xbox 360 manufactured prior to 1/1/2006 for free by extending the warranty on those machines by an additional year (over and above the orirginal 90 days.)

From the “glimmer of hope” file, photos have surfaced on the web today from what appears to be the Sony Playstation 3’s assembly line: Check out the massive box. And I thought my Xbox 360 box was big!

Back in the day, LCD monitors were known for their flicker and image tearing issues as a result of abysmally slow response times. Decent quality gaming and television was a rarity on LCD screens. Well how times have changed… Hyundai has now shown off their new S90D 19-inch LCD TFT monitor which claims an astounding 1 millisecond seponse time.

Imation has developed these convenient USB flash drives which are integrated into a rubber wristband (think Lance Armstrong’s “Livestrong” bracelets). The memory bracelets are available in sizes from 32mb all the way up to 1gb of storage and 8 colors.

Ever wanted to annihilate your annoying office-mates? Tired of your boss giving you crap? Well you can now put an end to all that with the $54.99 USB-controlled desktop missile launcher. The rocket launcher fires soft foam missiles from a software-controlled platform that can rotate and tilt to aim at your target up to eight feet away.

After early assumptions that the 30GB Zune media player would run $299, it’s been reported that Microsoft’s “iPod killer” will actually launch at the surprisingly low price of $229.99. This surprise announcement certainly shakes things up, what with both the iPod 30GB and Creative Zen:M 30GB both just reduced to $249.

At this year’s CEDIA and IFA shows, Yamaha showed off updates to their single-box surround sound line known as “digital sound projectors.” The top-of-the-line YSP-1100 features 40 high/mid-range speakers and 2 woofers, along with 42 discrete amplifiers to position sound using beam-focusing technologies.

At just under $200, the iLuv i180WHT Video System allows you to record VGA quality (640×480) video directly into your iPod. Simply feed in your camcorder or other video source via Composite or S-Video and RCA inputs for audio.

In another blow to Sony’s floundering Blu-Ray format, Universal Pictures has announced that it will be dropping support for the disc format. For the forseaable future, the will solely release high definition discs in HD-DVD format.