Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

The new WACS7000 Streamium Wireless Music Center from Philips features a complete wireless music system in a sleek wall-mountable package. The system includes built-in stereo speakers, a 40-watt per channel amp, a cd player and an 80GB hard drive for local storage of up to 1500 CDs.

Epson Japan and design firm Industrial Facility have completed a collaboration to rethink the design of portable color printers and the result is quite striking. These new portable printers feature an integrated carrying handle and can run on batteries.

The folks at Playstation Magazine (PSM) received an unexpected surprise on Friday when Sony dropped by with a shiny new Playstation 3 for them to play with. Here’s what they had to say: You can even see the reflection of Motorstorm in the shiny exterior….

Back in 2001, the artists’ collective Temporary Services started a project with a prison inmate named Angelo in which they asked him to document how inmates adapt to their surroundings while confined. The project, entitled Prisoners’ Inventions, resulted in this fascinating 119-page book of detailed drawings that explain exactly how prisoners build contrivances from all sorts of found materials.

Who said that robots needed to be all clean and shiny (or functional for that matter?) The Bennett Robot Works designs sculptural robots made from junk. Each (non-functional) robot is unique and handmade by Gordon Bennett and made from a carefully selected assemblage of old and new parts.

With the impending release of the Sony Playstation 3, I thought I might take a moment to reflect on some of the finer points made by Sony’s management team regarding the PS3: It’s probably too cheap… – Ken Kutaragi, Regarding the $499 to 599 price point (the PS3) is not a game machine… – Ken Kutaragi, Regarding the machine’s beefy hardware architecture If you asked me if Sony’s strength in hardware was in decline, right now I guess I would have to say that might be true.

While NEC was showing off their cute little robot, capable of “tasting” wines (using its built-in) photospectrometer to the Associated Press, they got just a little more than they bargained for… When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto.

Every few days, I report on a “world’s largest” or “world’s smallest” thingamabob, and today should be no different. JVC has just shown a new D-ILA (aka LCOS or SXRD) rear projection set that measures a whopping 110 inches.

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.