Take a lesson, Steve Jobs. You are not the only one who knows how to unveil a product. Via Reddit

Take a lesson, Steve Jobs. You are not the only one who knows how to unveil a product.

Via Reddit

Via [wired.com]

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Wooden Wii Accessories Are Real To Us and Us Alone [Wii]

There is an alternate universe much like our own, but in this universe there is no war and cows produce ice-cold milkshakes. And in this universe, you’ll also find the manifested counterparts to these wooden Wii peripheral concepts. Made of wood and featuring well-placed LED flare, the only thing better than the Wiimote and Nunchuk is this realistic Wiiglock:

It’d be a complete bitch for the TSA, but there really aren’t enough functional wooden firearms in the world. [flickr via ubergizmo]

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Gadget Lab Videoblog: Review of the HP TouchSmart IQ506
When is an all-in-one PC good enough to be used as living room entertainment center? In the seventh episode of the Gadget Lab Videoblog, Daniel Dumas and Terrence Russell debate over this central question while reviewing the 22-inch HP TouchSmart…

When is an all-in-one Computer good enough to be used as living room entertainment center?

In the seventh episode of the Gadget Lab Videoblog, Daniel Dumas and Terrence Russell debate over this central question while reviewing the 22-inch HP TouchSmart IQ506 PC.

With touch screen abilities, a 500 GB hard drive, and a TV tuner, this Computer cries out to be touched, but it might not have enough components (like HDMI ports) to give your HDTV a good fight.

If the video above isn’t working, please click here to view it: Review of the HP TouchSmart IQ506 All-in-One Personal computer.

You can also check out all of our previous videos at Wired’s own channel on YouTube. (Or you can click on the Gadget Lab Video category in the right corner of this post.)

This episode of the Gadget Lab Video was created by Annaliza Savage (producer), Niall McKay (camera), and Michael Lennon (editor).

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Spitzer Space Telescope Celebrates 5th Birthday With Portrait of Stellar Nursery [Happy Birthday]

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, the last of the space agency’s Great Observatories satellites to launch, celebrated its fifth birthday recently… giving me the chance to post this amazing multigenerational picture of star-forming region in the constellation Cassiopeia, 6,500 light-years from Earth. The photo takes in an area equivalent to four full moons and puts on show how one generation of big stars can give birth to the next.

The $800 million telescope, which was named after the first man to propose putting telescopes in space, Dr. Lyman Spitzer Jr., launched on August 25 2003 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Its mission will conclude when its onboard helium supply is exhausted—estimates from 2007 put that date at April 2009. So happy birthday, Spitzer Space Telescope! Might you continue to provide us with awesome pictures for the last leg of your journey! [Cosmiclog]

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First Ever Hydrogen Car “Cross-Country” Road Trip Had a Lot of Help [Hydrogen Fuel]

I’m all for hydrogen—or any alternative fuel source for that matter (Shai Agassi, my man, let’s get cooking already!)—but if you’re going to heavily promote your cross-country trek as the “first ever” for hydrogen-powered automobiles, at least make sure huge, 1,000-mile stretches of it didn’t involve having the automobiles carried along on flatbed trucks. This was the case today as the “Hydrogen Road Tour ‘08″ wrapped up in Los Angeles after its 60-strong automobile fleet entered the Los Angeles Coliseum. From Rolla, Missouri, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, the caravan was carried on the back of carbon-belching flat bed tractor trailer trucks. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of an alternative fuel road trip right then and there?

Part of the gaff was, of course, due to that fact that there are just 60 hydrogen stations in the U.S., and only two of those are open to the public “without prior arrangement,” states Reuters. Nevertheless, event promoter Catherine Dunwoody, executive director of the California Fuel Cell Partnership (a major tour supporter), was optimistic about hydrogen’s chances.

“There’s a hunger out there for clean, safe vehicles,” Brubaker stated. “The common refrain everywhere we went was ‘Where do we get these vehicles.’” As a personal aside, I, too, would be interested in such a venture, especially if it meant large swaths of my morning commute meant hopping on the back of a truck, and having someone else do the driving for me.

More seriously, hydrogen as a major fuel source is pretty much nowhere near becoming mainstream. As the article notes, massive wig auto makers like Honda and General Motors only have plans to test a handful of hydrogen vehicles this year and next in select markets.

A best case scenario out of the automobile industry has only 2 million hydrogen-powered electric vehicles on the roads by 2020.

At least there was some diversity on this cross-country trip: Vehicles we provided by Honda, GM, Toyota Motor Corp, Ford Motor Co, BMW AG, Daimler AG, Hyundai Motor Co, Nissan Motor Co, and Volkswagen AG. No word on those flat beds. [Reuters]

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PC gamers with a slight sense of style might find this chrome joypad from Dream Cheeky worth a look. It’s got all the necessary buttons for some gaming streamlined console-esque gaming on PCs, plus a rubberized grip in the back to fight slippage during intense NES emulator sessions (sorry, no update: definitive Mac support WAS mentioned). Pricing info wasn’t available, but here’s some free Gizmodo advice as they hammer that detail out: Cheap. [Dream Cheeky via Technabob]

Via [gizmodo]

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Pioneer Sneaks Out $2200 Elite BDP-09FD; First Blu-ray Player That Crushes the PS3 [Home Theater]

Last May Pioneer told us that autumn would bring a “super duper” Blu-ray player—the most powerful Blu-ray player ever built. It makes up for the current crop, which are lower in price but are missing key features like BD-Live for internet-based content. Well, not a leaf has fallen off a tree, yet here it is already, the $2,200 Elite BDP-09FD. Feature-wise, the ideal Blu-ray player on the market has been the PS3—turns out, an extra $1,700 will purchase you something that kills Sony’s game console as far as Blu-ray and other media are concerned.

As you probably guessed, Pioneer finally accepts the need for 2.0. This will come with Ethernet and be fully capable of BD-Live playback, no firmware updates needed at the get-go. Unlike other BD-Live players, which require SD cards, this one comes with 4GB of internal memory for downloads.

The thing is a Mack truck, 45 or 50 lbs. of steel and aluminum with everything mounted carefully to eliminate vibration. The bottom layer of the aluminum-housed chassis is a quarter-inch plate of solid steel, and it’s even got feet from a Japanese company called TAOC, supposedly the most vibration-free platform you can get. There are no wires inside either; all connections are physically mounted from the circuit board to the walls to reduce noise.

Pioneer states all of the engineering is so that this can be a single box that replaces some home theater snob’s high-end CD player, DVD player and previous-gen Blu-ray player, blowing each in turn out of the water.

In the audio department, Pioneer suggests using this for decoding all music and motion picture soundtrack, and going analog out with those gold-plated 7.1 RCA jacks. It’s decodes all known codecs from DTS and Dolby using a separate digital-to-analog converter for each channel. This is a little like having a separate motor for each wheel of your car. Combining this with some crazy audio engineering, they created a way for “completely perfect noise-free signal” to come through RCA jacks instead of the costlier old-school XLR jacks. “It’s far better than what you find in most receivers,” states Pioneer’s Chris Walker. In fact, everything, including speaker preferences and other receiver-like tweaks, are adjustable from inside the player.

It’s also got that crazy CD-playback technique first seen on Pioneer’s summer models: When used with certain Pioneer receivers, it produces jitter-free disc playback.

In terms of video, it has 1080p/24 for Blu-ray and DVD content too, as you might anticipate, with a best-on-the-market image processor also found in Meridian’s crazy 10-megapixel projector.

The 09’s next-level accomplishment is that it upconverts color information to 16 bits, previously unheard of because nobody had a system that could handle 16-bit color data. (Pioneer had to build their own for this mission.) That means that each picture can have up to “2,800 trillion” (um, 2.8 quadrillion??) colors, which the processor interpolates by looking at each frame of the Blu-ray’s 8-bit color motion picture. Though most Televisions only process 10-bit, Walker says that it’s better to send over a richer signal that the TV has to tone down, than letting the TV upgrade the Blu-ray data itself. When Televisions hit 16-bit, this sucka will be ready.

Cooler to me are the two HDMI jacks on the back. It’s a first for a Blu-ray player (or PS3), and it means you can hook up the same player to both your projector and your flat-panel display without a splitter or some on-the-fly rewiring. You can even split it up so that HDMI 1 only does audio, while HDMI 2 does video, freeing up more video bandwidth, especially in those pesky longer cables that might get a bit choked. The HDMI can detect the source, and automatically determine what audio and video to send over.

Obviously, some people are going to be content with their PS3s for the time being (after all, they’re only $500, a small price by comparison). And Walker acknowledges that speed is always going to be the saving grace of the game console. (”If we were to build a Blu-ray player around an Intel or Cell processor, we’d have those kinds of speeds too.”) But as far as picture and audio output, nothing quite resembles this “super duper” machine. And on top of all that, we can stop bitching about Pioneer ignoring BD-Live, and getting on with the future. Now, seriously, why would ANYONE buy Pioneer’s last batch? Save your money, home-theater snobs. This badass will be out soon. [Pioneer]

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Apple might neglect the Mac mini more than apparently hipsters do showers in mid-August, but some people love it enough to lavish it with the attention no one else does. Hideo Takano is one of those people, transforming the little fetish block into other boxes people obsess over: an over-sized Lego block for Apple-loving manboys to dream of building a Mac minizord, and a cute tiny gas can for pyromaniacs. Or simply other Macs—like a Quadra or a Mac Pro. We really love the bright red gas can:

Do check out the rest of his roundup at Mac Mod Lab. The Pro envy feels a played out, though an actual Pro stuffed into a mini would be worthy of wankage. [Mac Mod Lab via Technabob]

Via [gizmodo]

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Here’s a potential get-rich-quick scheme: If you see an extremely successful product, begin a magazine about it. That’s what Japan’s been doing with Apple’s iPhone, anyway. The iPhone has given birth to at least four magazines (pictured on the right)….

Here’s a potential get-rich-quick scheme: If you see an extremely successful product, start a magazine about it. That’s what Japan’s been doing with Apple’s iPhone, anyway.

The iPhone has given birth to at least four magazines (pictured on the right). It makes sense to devote an entire publication to the immensely popular handset: The iPhone has become a rather huge subcategory (if we have the ability to even use that word anymore) among Apple’s offerings, and Gadget Lab’s well aware there’s plenty to write about it.

But at least four magazines? Geez. And we’ve even got an iPhone mag coming to the United Says called iPhone Life. At this rate, eventually someone could compile a bible about the Jesus phone.

iPhone magazines massive in Japan [TUAW]

(Photo credit: magerleagues/Flickr)

Via [wired.com]

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TomTom Go 940 Live Leaked: Includes Live GPRS Traffic Data and Google Searches [GPS]

A “leak” at a UK on the web retailer’s site reveals a whole bunch of info on TomTom’s Go 940 Live GPS system: it looks like the system comes with a GPRS unit to give it live traffic and fuel-price info and the ability to Google search. Yep, alongside the IQ routing and intelligent lane advice that the Go 930 and the new Pro units have is a TomTom HD Traffic unit using GPRS to garner local traffic info, weather conditions, and lets you Google for whatever info you might need on the road. That traffic info is gathered “via anonymous cellphone monitoring,” but whether its these units that do the uploading, or a different system, is unclear. The unit’s available on pre-order in the UK for around $800, with the Live service prone to cost $10-$15 per month, but there’s no data on when it’ll hit the US. [Handtec.co.uk via GPSLodge Thanks, Jay!]

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