Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

The folks over at HP have shown the first of what is sure to be a number of HD-DVD drive add-ons for your PC. Hewlett Packard’s HD100 is an external HD-DVD drive that plugs into your PC’s USB 2.0 port and can read HD DVDs, DVDs and CDs.

Xtreme Enterprise has shown photos of their clear case mod for the Nintendo DS Lite. Their SHOCK! DS Lite replacement cases lets you swap out the shell and buttons of your system with new colors incluiding yellow, blue, red, black and a translucent case that lets you see all the gory innards of your DS Lite.

There hasn’t been a lot of interesting news in robotics in the last few weeks, so I don’t get to post as often as I’d like about robots. That said, I thought this little video clip might tide you over.

If you ever wanted a little feline fluffball of your own but couldn’t deal with the sneezing and itching, your worries are over. For the low, low price of $4000, you can pick up a hypoallergenic cat from San Diego biotech firm, Allerca.

Says-it.com, home to all sorts of fun online graphic embellishers, has released their latest treat, the Cassette Generator. Other fun graphical generators on the site let you make your own fake concert tickets, official seals, church signs and vinyl records.

Remedy, the folks that brought us Max Payne have been working for some time now on the action/adventure game Alan Wake for the Xbox 360 and Windows Vista. This video shows the amazing 3d engine in action on a seriously fast multi-core computer.

Fossil has partnered with Sony Ericsson to develop a new watch that features some pretty nifty connectivity with their Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. The watch will come in several styles, both analog and digital, and will be able to notify you of incoming calls on your mobile phone, including caller ID information and remote phone control features.

After much speculation on prices ranging from $229 to $299, the Microsoft Zune media player has been officially announced for a November 14th release date at a price of $249.99. This places it head to head with other 30GB media players such as Apple’s iPod.

Gateway has introduced a new series of low-cost PC desktops which roll in a number of features typically found on higher-end gaming machines. Gateway’s DX420 series starts at as little as $599.99, including a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor.

In a surprise announcement from this year’s X06 show in Barcelona, Microsoft revealed a new Halo real time strategy game for the Xbox 360. Halo Wars is expected to provide us with a unique take on the familiar Halo universe.

In line with earlier predictions, it’s now been confirmed that the HD DVD add-on for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will launch in the U.S. in mid-November for $199 USD. The drive will include a HD DVD copy of Peter Jackson’s King King remake for a limited time, and also comes with a universal remote control.

With all of the terribly negative attention on Sony’s upcoming Playstation 3 console, you’d think that they’d take that to heart and really think about what they say in the coming months. Well rather than take that approach, the higher-ups at Sony continue to plant their feet firmly in their mouths.

This new LCD system from Sharp Electronics allows you to display different images on the screen when viewed off axis. Sharp’s European laboratory has developed a system that takes advantage of a concept called the “parallax barrier,” which limits what light can be seen along specific angles.

Sony has officially announced that their long-awaited e-book reader will be hitting the streets this October for about $350 USD. The Sony Reader features an innovative high contrast E-ink display, capable of allowing up to 7,500 pages to be displayed without a battery recharge.

If you take a ton of photos when you travel, and want a great place to store and organize all of your digital photographs while on the road, a a media storage bank might be worth the investment.

This new portable radio from SIRIUS enables true on-the-go listening to the satellite radio service. The SIRIUS Stiletto 100 allows live portable reception of SIRIUS programming and stores up to 100 hours of broadcasts or up to 10 hours of individual songs for later playback (using 2GB of internal memory.)