Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

If you’ve been intrigued by the excellent image quality of LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) rear projection TVs, but don’t care for the depth of these screens when compared to LCD and plasma sets, you’re in luck.

In celebration of the release of the new Xbox Live Arcade title, Assault Heroes, Sierra is giving away 100,000 Microsoft Gamer Points to a single lucky winner. The best part of the contest – all you need to do is fill out this form to be entered to win.

The mobiBLU series of mp3 players is getting a new little sibling, the CUBISTO. The 1-inch cube player will come in 512MB, 1GB and 2GB flash memory versions. The players feature a built-in FM tuner, FM recording capabilities as well as SRS WOW HD and TruBass sound enhancement.

The folks over at Home Theater Blog got their grubby little mitts on a Toshiba’s second generation HD DVD player, the HD-XA2 and we’re pleased to hear that the horrifically slow load times of the first generation HD-A1 and HD-XA1 appear to be a thing of the past.

Now that we know that the Nintendo Wii “sensor bar” doesn’t actually sense anything, rather just provides an infrared point of reference for the Wii-mote, it seems like it would only be a matter of time before we’d see a cordless variant.

A while back, we reported on the availability of Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express, which allows you to roll your own homebrew games for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox Live Arcade. Starting on January 2, 2007, you’ll be able to participate in Dream Build Play, a competition offering a shot at prizes including a chance to distribute your gaming creation on the Xbox Live Arcade.

Some guy with a cell phone camera recorded this incident at a recent press conference showing off Honda’s Asimo humanoid robot. If you fast-forward the video clip to about 0:59 seconds, you can witness the pratfall: Watch in horror as the brave little robot attempts to climb the stairs and instead does his best Chevy Chase impression.

The About Time rolling clock from Dutch design firm Buro Vormkrijgers presents time in a truly graceful fashion. The modern black clock gently rolls itself around your desktop, telling the time through a sentence emblazoned along the edge of the clock.

This new accessory for the Nintendo DS Lite lets you add both rumble features and additional storage in a single device. The SuperCard Lite RUMBLE is a 3rd-party module that adds rumble to games that support the feature as well as providing a MicroSD memory card slot for storage of movies, music, game saves and e-books.

Is your new HP LaserJet making funny noises? Before you call tech support, you might want to double check that there aren’t any rodentia living in the box. A chain e-mail has been circulating with a claim that someone found a mouse living inside their laser toner cartridge.

After a number of concerns about easily broken wrist straps on the Nintendo Wii’s “Wii-mote” controller (and Nintendo’s denial that anything was wrong other than aggressive game play), it appears that Nintendo has started to include improved straps with recently shipped consoles.

Spilled one too many Red Bulls on your laptop in that marathon coding session last night? NEC seeks to solve that problem with their upcoming waterproof laptop computer. In addition to being waterproof and dustproof, the NEC Shield Pro ???????

While it’s way to early in the game to call the Sony Playstation 3 down and out, there continues to be compelling evidence that the system does not have the graphical prowess of the more mature Xbox 360.

Some guy has set up this tiny little room with a tiny little 1.5″ diagonal color TV, connected to a life-size Nintendo Wii and posted a YouTube video for all to see: Why I find this amusing, I don’t know, but it is quite silly.

In the past I’ve written about these little plastic pixel block sets that let you build classic video game characters in 3D. Those sets always seemed a little cheap looking to me, so I’m excited about these new pixel blocks made entirely out of wood.

Today Toshiba announced a compact 1.8″ hard disk drive, which would enable media players and other portable devices to store up to 100GB of data. The new Toshiba MK1011GAH is just the right size to fit in an iPod, measuring in at 54x71x8mm and weighing just 59g.