Gadgets, Gizmos, and Games for Geeks

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.)

The folks over at Midway have been so kind as to convert a number of old arcade classics into Macromedia Shockwave versions. (I do wish they were in Flash, but they’re worth the extra download of the Shockwave Player) The games are available for free play on Midway’s website and are very good emulations of the originals.

Just introduced today, the Nokia N75 mobile phone integrates a wide array of multimedia capabilities in a compact package. The phone supports MP3, M4A, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA sound file formats and includes a digital equalizer and built in stereo speakers with “3D” sound.

According to a forums posting on MacRumors, one of their members came across an interesting surprise on his new iMac: The user claims he took this photo on his iMac Core 2 Duo, when he installed and ran Windows Vista RC1 on the machine.

Modern technology has taken the concept of the old “Magic 8 Ball” fortune teller and amped it up a notch with the Fortuneball. The Fortuneball uses a computerized fortune prediction system that draws on the theories of astrology, numerology, the I-Ching and numerology to predict your fortunes.

The StormBlue A9+ from Advanced MP3 is one of a handful of media players out there with built-in Bluetooth support. You can use the player’s Bluetooth capabilities to listen to your music with a wireless headset or pair it with your cellphone to make/retrieve calls through the same headset.

The race for miniaturization continues to produce some unbelievably small products. This time, we’ve got the Xun Chi 138 mobile phone. It’s just a tiny bit longer than a AA battery (2.64 inches long) and weight just 55 grams.

The new Kensington Vo300 USB Internet Speakerphone allows you to make Skype VOIP phone calls from your desktop using the familiar interface of a regular desktop speakerphone. The phone features a standard telephone keypad and volume controls, as well as an integrated LCD that lets you control Skype without looking at your computer screen at all.

About every 3 minutes a new iPod dock is born. At least this one is little creative. The $99 FUNKit is a dock for your iPod that features a small robotic “DJ” that moves between two tiny turntables and makes goofy comments while playing your tunes.

The Retro-Encabulator implements the crudely conceived idea of generating inverse reactive current for use in unilateral phase detractors and automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. Also it features modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance. Huh?

I was doing some investigating on Microsoft’s Japanese Xbox site today, and stumbled across this cool feature called the “UserMap.” Much like Digg Swarm, the Flash-based application produces a very slick real-time map of player activity on Xbox Live.

There are plenty of devices out there these days that let you store all of your media on a hard disk, but the handful of devices capable of outputting high definition video are usually very expensive.

Looking for a cool way to incorporate technology into your interior design? These new Mood Light Shelves might be just the ticket. Each shelf is embedded with an array of red, green, and blue ultra-bright LEDs, and can be controlled by a remote to change colors.