Riding Up the Hudson With a Dash GPS On My Dash. it has internet connectivity and sends data to dash so if they ever hit critical mass in a city you’d have pretty killer traffic updates.

Motorola insider tells all about the fall of a technology icon – Engadget. fucking scathing.

Laptop Sleeves, Skins and Stickers | Smashing Magazine. for apple laptops of course.

StreetInsider.com – Toshiba Announces Discontinuation of HD DVD Businesses. officially dead. you can get one for $100 bucks now on amazon, even though the site also tells you that HD DVD is dead.

The Afterlife of Cellphones – New York Times. on the global pachinko machine of used cell phones.

Dell Crystal 22-Inch Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor. pretty cool, but for $1200? their standard 24″ is going for $375. i’ll stick with my cinema display. via jody

apple stuff

Apple’s new stuff today includes a subnotebook called the MacBook Air which is thin enought to fit in a manilla envelope and weighs 3 pounds. Cool stuff includes a multi-touch mousepad and an optional solid-state hard drive. Bad stuff includes only 1 USB port, no firewire, and no optical drive. Also released Time Capsule, which is just the Airport Extreme 802.11n wireless base with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive. And there’s a new AppleTV with a new UI and the iTunes store now has movie rentals including rentals in HD. I wonder how long those will take to download?

Biggest dumbass release is a software upgrade for the iPod touch which costs $20. No joke. I can’t believe they’d actually do that. It’ll piss way too many people off. Here’s the list of features. The iPhone got the same add-ons plus some cool stuff like auto map-location from cell-tower triangulation and sms to multiple people.

Apple also struck an interesting business deal with Fox which will now ship DVDs with copies of the movies already encoded for use on your iPod and for no extra charge.

Other interesting info, Apple has sold 4 million iPhones to date and 5 million copies of Leopard in 3 months. Considering there’s only 25 million OSX clients in the world, that ain’t bad.

Macworld 2008: 1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple’s Future. Dieter Rams definitely made some cool looking stuff.

ThinkGeek :: SnūzNLūz – Wifi Donation Alarm Clock. it donates your money to a charity you hate every time you hit snooze.

SanDisk flash drive to offer automatic Web storage | Reuters. just uses software that backs up whatever is on the flash drive on to Amazon S3. costs $30/year which means they make a killing on the average user.

Kindles on Ebay are going for over $800.

The first smart rabbit – Nabaztag. $179. i’d think about it at $100.

Amazon.com: Kindle: Amazons New Wireless Reading Device. still haven’t used one. free wireless downloads is nice. $400 is a lot though.

Review: Eye-Fi Adds Wi-Fi to Almost Any Digital Camera. SD memory card that can automatically upload your photos.

Etsy :: laptopwallet butterfingers – handmade in austria. very nice. via jody

Second Rotation. they buy old gadgets like cell phones, game consoles, etc.

Nextfest07: Video of a woman being smacked with a shovel on her knee. and it doesn’t hurt at all.

oobject – “like Billboard charts for Gadgets”. The lists for different types of watches are pretty crazy.

Apple – Keyboard. yup, literally buying this as soon as the apple store gets back up.

nhl + slingbox

Boris just sent me this link from arstechnica about how the NHL made an agreement with Slingbox to let users share video clips online. Slingbox is a device you hook up to your tv which lets you watch tv over the internet (It’s for people who are clinically addicted to watching tv). Anyways, the deal is interesting in that MLB and the NFL have basically told slingbox that they have no interest in partnering with them and that they’ll sue them to the stone age if they use their content.

What’s interesting is the difference in the leagues approach to online content. The NFL and MLB have high ratings and can tell Slingbox to piss off. The NHL’s ratings are abysmal and need things like Slingbox to get some sort of distribution. To give you some scope, NBC didn’t even show the first two games of the NHL finals and then for “those final three games averaged a 1.6 rating, according to NBC, putting it on par with Sunday afternoon golf for a minor tournament. Game 3, televised last Saturday night on NBC, produced an abysmal 1.1 rating—the lowest prime-time rating in NBC history”