Best New Technology

American Idol fans who wish to live the fantasy while watching their favorite Idols sing it out may want to check out the Karoke Groove Station. The multi-function plug and play microphone lets users plug into their television and have the lyrics to the chosen song appear on screen while the music plays from the TVs speakers. And savvy rock god wannabes will use their TVs picture in picture feature to have Idol playing at the same time.

The Groove Station also has controls for adjustments to tempo, pitch, and even a “sex change” button for those out of range falsetto’s like Barry Gibb or Bass like Barry White. There’s also a Spatial Effect mode which will make the singer sound like their singing in a huge sold-out arena, a harmony button that turns your voice into a perfect 3 part harmony, and Doubling effect to create a duet with yourself. And in a Guitar-Hero fashion, singers can keep score – the more accurately you sing, the higher your score.
Powered by 4 AA batteries and comes with ten free songs come in four cartridges and more for an extra fee.

Cost is around $100 US from I WANT ONE OF THOSE.

Simon’s snippy comments, Paula’s incoherent babbling or Randy’s uber-cool slang not included.

Hat Tip: gadgets Club

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Built in the UK’s Legoland to mark Lego’s 50th anniversary, this monster is over 100′ tall and has half a million bricks. The Lego snob in me doesn’t like the random use of colors!

via methodshop

Posted in Miscellaneous

The Eiko egg broiler was designed to fit over the top of the boiling pot of water. It holds the egg in place and makes it easy to retrieve the egg when the egg is done cooking. The Eiko is shaped so that the egg hangs down in the boiling water and still allows the handle of the spoon to stay cool to the touch. This product is colored so that it makes it easy to differentiate the times. When the egg is finished cooking, just remove the entire spoon and run cool water over the egg. The spoons can then be used as an egg cup. No more extra dirty dishes. After all, geeks hate cleaning!

The Eiko egg boiler is made of plastic and will not change the flavor of the egg like many metal spoons are thought to do. It is made of heat resistant and scratch resistant materials. The egg boiler is also dish washer safe.

Gimme!

More info from the manufacturer

Price: $19.00 for a set of 4
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Posted in Gizmo of the Day, Miscellaneous, Tools, DIY, Home, Office

Boy, isn’t it awesome? Dell is really getting better in design department with each passing model. The latest to join their stylish products are Inspiron 1435, 1535 and 1735 for fashion conscious prosumers. According to Engadget, they start at around 1-inch thick and taper up to 1.5 inches thick. All of them features Intel Core 2 Duo T5850 processor, Blu-ray drive, and 3G options in addition to usual configuration. As per Engadget’s sources, the 1435 isn’t due until October, but the 1735 is coming on June 9 and the 1535 on the 26th of this month.
[ Source ]

I suppose it is widely documented that hardcore drinkers often come with a beer belly, evidence of years of boozing. Eventually, this group will evolve into a couch potato, gaining weight on a steady diet of TV programs, pizza and beer. This makes walking over to the fridge to bust open a new six-pack sound as challenging as climbing Mount Everest, which is why the Remote Control Drinks Cooler is heaven sent. Not that the celestial powers up there would want to see you in such a sorry state though, but at least you don’t have to move unless you really have to. The remote control has a working range of 30 feet, and the Drinks Cooler itself can hold up to a dozen beer bottles or 10 cans. It will cost £39.95, making it perfect for Father’s Day next month.

Klipsch is a name synonymous with great sounding audio, and the Palladium P-39F doesn’t only offer superb audio but it does so with a clear conscience. I say so because it comes clad in a “Linia” veneer, which is available in three different finishes and proves to be a very close match to rare zebrawood. After all, it was carefully hand-selected and made from real trees in government-sanctioned controlled harvests - sounds more like a jam advertisement, hand-picked berries and all that jazz. The only drawback is the price - you would have to be loaded in order to afford the £7,685 asking price.

Let’s take a trip back to 1975, the year the digital camera was born. Here is the Gadget Lab entry as it would have appeared 33 years ago:

Kodak’s Steve Sasson has come up with a brand new alternative to film. Dubbed “Film-less Photography”, the prototype camera records images and plays them back on a television set. Sasson hacked together the camera from spare parts: the lens is from a Super 8 movie camera, the image is captured by a CCD (Charged Coupled Device, an array of capacitors which convert light into an electrical signal) and the resulting image is recorded onto a cassette tape. The whole thing is powered by 16 nickel cadmium batteries.

The portable electronic still camera takes 23 seconds to record a 100 line image to tape. To view the picture, you pop out the cassette and slip it into the custom-built playback device. This uses another cassette player and a frame store to boost the image to 400 lines and outputs a standard NTSC signal for use on any television. The Kodak engineers are optimistic:

The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.

We’re not so sure. Who would want to look at pictures on a TV screen? And even with leaps and bounds in technology, I predict that people won’t want to press the shutter and wait for the camera to snap a picture seconds later. We’ll stick with our Instamatics.

Look at that. Even back in 1975 I was moaning about shutter lag in digicams, and they still haven’t fixed it. Check out the history behind the first digicam on Sasson’s blog.

We Had No Idea [Steve Sasson’s Posts via Retro Thing]

Check it out: According to a memo obtained by the Boy Genius Report, AT&T has some sort of big “promotional launch” planned for this summer. As such, the company is asking its employees not to schedule any holidays from mid-June to mid-July so as to ensure adequate staffing. Me, I’m banking on that highly anticipated 3-G blackberry 9000, but there are others in the blogosphere that seem to think it could be related to another launch.

Peep the full memo below.

AT&T Mobility

Vacation Schedules

To: All Employees

Last year at this time we asked that all vacations be scheduled before June 15 or after July 15, to ensure adequate store staffing and to give everyone an equal opportunity to benefit from an exciting product launch. Thanks to your hard work, we experienced excellent sales during the mid-summer period. This year, the numbers you produced in 2007 will be hard to beat; but as a business, we must rise to the challenge, and make every effort to exceed last year’s sales results. Your management team is counting on you!

We’ll meet the challenge “head-on” by providing an exciting Summer Promotional Launch to enable your sales to soar. We again anticipate heavier than normal customer traffic in our stores, providing an excellent earning opportunity for every front line retail sales consultant (RSC) in company owned retail stores.

To ensure proper staffing during this period, Sales personnel planning to take approved time off are encouraged to schedule their vacations before June 15 or after July 12 to participate in the heavy selling period.

Previously approved vacation will be allowed where voluntary rescheduling is not feasible.

No additional vacation will be approved for 6/15 -€“ 7/12

If customer traffic is manageable, there may be an opportunity to approve vacation toward the end of the period. Managers will communicate updates as they become available.

If you buy one of Psystar’s Hackintoshes, you’ll get even less than you thought you might. Macworld ordered one to test and has filed an unboxing post on the site. We’ve already heard about the leaf-blower fans, but Macworld’s Open Computer came with a power cable tangled in the fan and, according to reviewer James Galbraith, “As soon as I hit the power button it sounded like I’d turned on the garbage disposal”. Attention to detail: Minus one point.

Apple’s legendary packaging design is also missing, replace by a cardboard box full of foam packing peanuts. But the most important missing feature? The “it just works” design of all Apple products. Time Machine fails (there is a fix on Psystar’s site), FireWire Target Mode doesn’t work. Neither do “SafeBoot, zapping of PRAM, and startup drive selection via the Option key ” or, as previously mentioned, Software Update.

So it looks like the PC level price will get you a PC level experience: hardware troubleshooting, downloading and manually applying patches. This isn’t to knock PCs – there will always be incompatibilities with such a huge array of hardware and software available. Apple makes the whole shebang, inside and out. That’s why it just works. And Psystar’s little science project is the best argument yet against Apple licensing its OS to third parties.

Opening up Psystar’s Open Computer [Macworld]

Troubleshooting page [Psystar]