A company's releasing a Guitar Hero ripoff that doesn't make you taint your soul by rocking out to tunes by Satan.

Slated for a September release, Guitar Praise features a diverse Christian Rock song list, including "Undo Me" by Jennifer Knapp, "Jesus Freak" by dc Talk and "This Fragile Breath" by Todd Agnew. And of course, for $100 the game comes with a plastic wireless guitar, which unfortunately isn't shaped like a Holy Cross.

For $70, you can also purchase an extra guitar separately for two-player mode. By tilting your guitars toward heaven you'll be able to send each other "surprises." Hallejujah.

Christian software company Digital Praise is introducing Guitar Praise to Mac OS X and Windows Vista and XP users -- but let us pray the company will bless us with a console release.

Guitar Praise [via Boing Boing Gadgets ]

Fictions are comforting, and we live best when we live by them. At least until the batteries run out.

Continue reading "Eight Things We Pretend to Care About, But Don't. " »

You're walking along New York's 59th Street, proudly carrying your shiny new MacBook Air. You trip on a pothole and take a face-dive toward the pavement.

Do you a) Save yourself, letting the Mac take the impact. Hell, it might not break, and that scratch will be a badge of honor. Or b) Protect your shiny toy at the expense of your own head. Hell, it might not break, and that scar will be a badge of honor.

If you are journalist and gadget-freak Charlie Rose, the correct answer is b), with the result clearly visible in the picture above. According to Rose's office, "The Macbook Air is fine, he showed us the blood stains on it this morning."

Mr. Rose, we salute your dedication to disposable electronic goods.

Charlie Rose Face Plants To Save His MacBook Air [Tech Crunch]

Wal-Mart's decided not to restock stores with the $200 desktop computer from Everex, though it'll keep plugging them at its online store. Linux simply isn't ready for its customers, according to the mega-retailer.

"This really wasn't what our customers were looking for," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien told the AP.

Though it sold out fast, the gPC was not without its flaws, and nor was Everex's $400 linux subnotebook, the CloudBook. My general opinion of these machines is that they're great as cheap Linux machines for geeks to experiment with or use as home servers, but that the included Linux setup (and hence the desktop experience) isn't much cop.

Wal-Mart Ends Test of Linux in Stores [AP]

Some are classy. Some are trashy. But scant few transcend such barriers to become works of art.

Continue reading "The Most Beautiful Computers of all Time" »

Monster Cable is fighting back against critics of its overpriced cables, responding to a Consumerist expose of profit margins. Monster issued a long, rambling denunciation of the criticisms therein.

Continue reading "Monster Cable Defends Overpriced Cables: The Short Form" »

Feh on red meat and booze -- who can't live without those for a day or two. Hardcore Jesus types are suggesting that those who want to make a meaningful sacrifice for Lent need to look at their Blackberries, iPod and MySpace habits.

''My friends are talking about giving up their cell phone or not using Facebook or MySpace because they compulsively check their profiles,'' one Pennsylvania college student said in a survey of pre-Easter sacrifice plans.

A reminder lest you take this thing too far, however: God likes blogs, newsreaders and Digg.

Lent in the wired age: No iPod, no MySpace [The Morning Call]

valleywag 18.1.08 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

Time for some Friday Fanboy Baiting. According to market researcher NPD, PC owners are too cheap to pay for music downloads, while Mac users have an Apple-shaped halo when it comes to piracy: 50% of them have paid to download music versus just 16% of PC users.

The report also tries to claim that Mac owners are buying more CDs than their PC brethren, but the figures are so close – 32% against 28% – it seems statistically insignificant. The difference between 50 and 16, though, is big.

Who knows why? Are Mac people more honest? Higher earning? Or are they just too stupid to work out BitTorrent? Tell us in the comments.

Some gadgets change the world. Others don't. These ones, however, are very effective at one thing in particular: teleporting money out of customers' pockets.

Continue reading "10 Great Snake-Oil Gadgets" »

Pear Cables, makers of the $7k Anjou coppers singled out by debunker general James Randi for excoriation, has said it doesn't want them tested as part of Randi's million-dollar challenge.

Last week, Stereophile Magazine writer Michael Fremer accepted the challenge, in which he would set out to demonstrate, in a double-blind test, that the expensive Pear cables are more "danceable" than less-extravagant Monster cables. Pear originally supported him, but now sees the writing on the wall, and told Randi's people they were out.

"We would like to inform you directly of Pear Cable's decision to not participate in your claimed challenge. While we support Mr. Fremer's efforts, and believe firmly in the performance of our products, we prefer that he simply use his own reference cables in his proposed test."

They then say the test will be a fake, bla bla bla. What a bunch of chickens. It tells you one thing, if nothing else: some of the people that make ultra-expensive audiophile gear are under no illusions about what they do for a living.

Source [JREF]

Intel's latest developer forum saw no Viiv action. It is, in the Inquirer's words, "one of the Intel 'disappeared.'" Perhaps Viiv will eventually be found in a barrel of creosote in the sewers under the Plaza de Mayo.

Me, I can't even remember what this branding sticker was supposed to mean. Wasn't it about trying to sell DRM as a lifestyle choice?

Continue reading "Is Viiv Dead Yet? Good." »

Oobject's compilation of 21 minimalist gadgets not made by Apple is an off-the shelf lifestyle for people who do not have lives, but would very much like to have a minimalist one when they get around to it. As it entirely apt for such an undertaking, half the stuff on the list exists only as mockup or prototype.

Pictured is Joey Roth's design for a small PC with a colossal heatsink, which won a Red Dot award and looks like another object of vaporous utility, the Quad 405 Amp.

The Exidéal, a panel of 280 old-fashioned LED sparklies, claims to permeate your skin's vitamins and collagen to make you beautiful. It isn't quite clear what it permeates them with apart from the standard offering of electromagnetic radiation—a sense of growing despair, perhaps?

This useless piece of junk is $900 in Japan. Video follows, depicting strange, mesmerized women bathed in purple light, listening to instrumental Yanni. See also: Unicorns.

Product Page [via Boing Boing Gadgets and OhGizmo!]

This graphic — NSFW at full size — is doing the rounds on Digg, and does the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC..." for every decent platform that's ever existed.

It's so tempting to deconstruct everything here, but it suffices to say that Vista could go a long way on sheer enthusiasm, and that one should never look too closely at an Amstrad.

Source [via Digg]

Let's face it, gadget-fans. Our particular hobby can render us particularly unprivate people. These days, you can't so much as turn on a telephone without telling a half-dozen corporations everything from your birthday to your blood type. Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace is a somewhat wild-eyed journey into the bloody-minded near-impossibility of doing exactly that, even for the most diligent and privacy-minded citizen.

Continue reading "How To Disappear From the Corporate Databases: Abandon Everything You Love" »

Newly-proposed energy-generation systems often lack a certain credibility. They're either gussied-up perpetual motion machines, the mischievous work of data collection elves, or outright fraud. But the "solar machine" published in a 1932 edition of Modern Mechanix is something else entirely. I want to believe.

Continue reading "Ultimate True Solar Power: Water-Cooled Tungsten Wires" »

Tech Support, as a commercial and social institution, is just plan broken, says Lance Ulanoff.

"No one is really getting it right," he says, singling out Velocity Micro and Apple as the best of a bad bunch. The problem? Good tech support is, in fact, impossible to deliver thanks to the myriad of differences between each and every users' hardware, software, configuration and real-life usage behaviors. In practice, a tech has to have physical access to get the job done expeditiously and without error.

Continue reading "Avoid Tech Support Woes: Learn To Configure Computers (Or Demand Better Ones)" »

My Hype Pod turns out on close inspection to be a mirror. It's a cutting joke, see? See?

Available in grey, red and green, the 22x27" objet d'snark was created by Joséphine Repetto for her Manjaca design firm. Naturally, it's priceless: if you want one, they'll send you a quote.

Product Page [Majaca via MocoLoco]

When professor Scott E. Fahlman typed that three-character sigil — which surely made it look, to others, as if an apple had rolled over his keyboard — he knew exactly what he was doing: "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

What he didn't know is that it would become the pearl in the oyster of sub-English internet drivel, a hat and cane for every goon to ever punctuate a forum post or email with "LOL" or to write it in the illiterate argot of instant messaging.

"Today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics," says the Associated Press, attributing the thought to Ryan Stansifer, which it also alleges to be a professor of computer science. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."

:-) :-) :-) !!!!!

Digital Smiley Face Turns 25 [AP]

Continue reading "The Smiley is 25 Years Old" »

Take a look at the CoolBrands list of, well, the coolest brands. The relevant ones have been bolded.

1. Aston Martin
2. iPod
3. YouTube
4. Bang and Olufsen
5. Google
6. Playstation
7. Apple
8. Agent Provocateur
9. Nintendo
10. Virgin Atlantic
11. Ferrari
12. Ducati
13. eBay
14. Rolex
15. Tate Modern
16. Prada
17. Lamborghini
18. Green & Blacks
19. iTunes
20. Amazon

Some of these geeky brands have got to the point of such omnipresent background noise that we don't realize we're doing geeky things like carrying a computer in our pocket or buying crap on the internet. Or is this very observation itself obsolete?

Want a beer cooler? OK, go to Target or something. Want a beer cooler that actually makes the bottle cold enough to frost over? Summit Appliance's Cold Cavern sets out to do just that.

Containing 5 cubic feet of space, enough for 5 cases of 24 twelve-ounce bottles, the unit weighs 100 lbs and will set you back about $1,050. That's expensive for a fancy fridge, yes, but you're really paying for a digital thermostat precise enough to freeze a bottle without freezing the beer. Prosit!

Product Page [Summit Appliance]

Continue reading "Cold Cavern Beer Froster Has 24F Sweet Spot" »

Attention, subjectivist audiophiles who like to indulge the belief that tube amp "warmth" is anything other than a reproduction flaw! The Avon Sunfire is here to serve as a beautiful crutch for your religious fantasies.

A single-ended triode amplifier featuring an Ayon 62B power tube, it is said to offer zero decibel feedback, "pure class A" operation for "3D holographic sound," a reproduction that amounts to "space illuminated by music."

Horrifyingly, the knobs appear to not be made of hand-polished beech. How can you expect to reproduce an uncannily authentic audiomimetic neuropicture of the original event without a beech knob? Cheapskates.

Product Page [Ayon via Crave]

Local government in Lambeth, London, is to use a proven-ineffective technology to try and identify benefit frauds: voice recognition. People calling up to talk welfare turkey will get "Voice Risk Analysis" software applied to their utterances, with those who exhibit audible signs of deception being identified over the course of 19 questions.

Continue reading "Britain To Deploy Useless "Lie Detectors" To ID Benefit Frauds" »

An ingenious deployment of the mundane in pursuit of the sublime. But, for heaven's sake, man: Stella Artois?

And in Offices Around the World, Paper Sales Skyrocketed [Dethroner]

The righteous but slow legal buggeration of SCO continued today with Judge Kimball deciding to force the company to face a law panel in its vs. Novell tussle, rather then get a time-consuming trial by confusion-prone jury. The upshot for you is that the cloud of fear, uncertainty and doubt that mists over linux's adoption (one of the main successful thrusts of which is now as a lightweight, gadget-happy operating system) is just a little clearer. The upshot for me is that I win a $5 bet with a paranoid nerd convinced this epic battle would go on in perpetuity.

Well, it's now clear that it won't. See ya, SCO.

Judge Kimball rules: There will be no jury in  SCO v. Novell [Groklaw]

That the internet can accomodate yet another "most pricey" gadgets roundup illustrates just how thilly the web is. That it mostly contains new items, despite the most recent roundup being barely weeks old, illustrates how dithpicable capitalism is.

Pictured here is the $14k  ELP Laser Turntable, an oldy but a goodie, designed to part only the most extravagantly stupid audiophiles from their money, however on Earth it came to be in their possession.

Most Expensive Gadgets [PC World]

This ad, for QSOL server appliances, is a neatly-condensed illustration of women's place in technology, as regarded by technologically-placed men. It's to be found in the pages of—shocker—Linux Journal, which promised not to run the ad again after its first appearance in 2000.

"We've all known disappointment. And few things are more disappointing than undependable, expensive servers that don't satisfy your needs."

Leaves a bad taste in the mouth; advertising sucks; not fit for human consumption; insert quip to continue.

Linux Journal Publishes 7-Year-Old Sexist Ad [Valleywag]

A teenager, charged after recording 20 seconds of a movie to show her brother, faces up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.

Jhannet Sejas, 19, admitted to grabbing part of the Transformers movie, but says she had no intention of selling the clip. Naturally, the police turned up, prosecutors charged her, and the theater chain, Regal Entertainment Group, wants the book thrown at her.

As stupid as the girl was to break the law (debatable — could 20 seconds of reproduction qualify as fair use?), the circumstances of the incident, the potential punishment, and the general jackbootery surrounding such a minor and inadvertant offense, all beggar belief.

In other news today, a man who raped a 15-year-old girl got 15 months, a fraudster who bilked someone for $1,800 got 7 months, another child-abuser gets 9 months, and a woman who tried to have sex with a two-year-old boy sentenced to 12 weeks.

Copyright infringement is clearly the new child rape.

Teen faces charges for recording 20-second movie clip [AP]

An update on Uganda's "Miracle Machine" case, in which a self-modeled preacher used an magician's trick device to deliver electric shocks to parishoners, who readily accepted them as the force of God:

Police have turned the preacher's "Electric Touch" gizmo over to explosives experts for examination. And while they're still upset with the would-be holy man for using it to fleece the flock, they offer some grudging respect for manufacturer Yigal Mesika Company. Literature accompanying the device, they note, clearly states that it should not be used around computers or people wearing jewelery or other metal items. "It is also not supposed to be used in areas with explosives."

Explosives Experts to Examine Pastor’s Gadget [ReligionNews]

News flash: It just got a whole lot easier to be an Elmer Gantry-like religious entrepreneur.

That would be thanks to the Yigal Mesika Company of Los Angeles, a vendor of magic supplies. Ther new "Electric Touch" is an electric system you can strap on your body, conveniently hidden under street clothes or religious vestments, for the purpose of supplying a supposedly "pleasant" 12V electric shock to someone just by touching them.

Recent clients include an African self-proclaimed pastor who used the machine to convince supplicants they were having a major (and highly recompensable) religious experience. He's in jail for fraud and the like now, but there's no reason you couldn't use the "miracle machine" to liven up an otherwise dull staff meeting or press conference.

Pastor Arrested With Miracle Machine [ReligionNews]

Market vicissitudes maks for a rollercoaster ride when it comes to rich people's character sheets, and the big news this week is a surge in Mexican telco Movil's worth, which sees owner Carlos Slim fly past Bill Gates to become the world's richest person.

Mashable.com presents the top 10 most moneyladen men in tech — yes, they are all men — which includes a few you've heard of, such as Michael Dell and Lawrence Ellison, and some you probably have not, like Naguib Sawiris and Sunil Mittal.

10 Richest People in Tech [Mashable]

Filling schools with technology improves attainment, according to a $65m study conducted in the U.K. — but only for kids in the 11 year-old group.

The experiment used "test beds," 23 low-performing schools saturated head-to-foot in computers and related curricula, to see if the resulting electromagnetic fields would fill children's brains with smart cancers that could do their trigonometry and Chaucer for them.

Despite the bump in pre-pubescent scores, it seems to have trailed off by 14, at which age kids have discovered the true purpose of 'puters: playing games. The results (detailed at the following BBC story) scream "statistical noise" to me, and in any case show that for the majority of youngsters, putting an LCD between them and teach doesn't help an awful lot when it comes to passing standardized tests.

Computers 'can raise attainment' [BBC]

It turns out that there is a difference between a HDMI pipe from Monster Cable and random nasty junk. At least when they're being tested over epic 10m runs at a Monster Cable PR gig.

Continue reading "Should You Pay $120 For A 2 Meter HDMI Cable?" »

The mind plays tricks. Dirty, filthy tricks that helps marketing propagate. What the frack is GT/s? If I ever knew, I'd forgotten by the time it came to remember that odd little abbreviation: memory had rearranged it as Gbps.

Exactly like the bastards planned. At least, that's what I tell myself.

Continue reading "New PCIe Standard Cheats You Of A Gigabit Of Bandwidth" »

Take something useful, coat it in diamonds, and it's a luxury gadget. Take a human body part, cover it in diamonds, and it's high art. On the other hand, Vodun practitioners, disco pirates and executive necrophiles might derive enormous utility from Damien Hirst's $98m human skull.

The head once belonged to a 35-year old man of the 18th century, and was trasmogrified from crummy remnant to plummy crown jewel at a cost about $28 million, using 8,601 diamonds. It's titled, "For the Love of God, Laugh!" suggesting the creator does not expect anyone to be stupid enough to buy it.

Watch out for cheap knockoffs that use Swarovski crystals. You have been warned!

Artist unveils $98M diamond skull [CNN via BornRich]

Apologies to Richard Dawkins, but maybe God realy is everywhere, including Samsung's flash memory fabrication plants.

How else to explain a pattern that looks quite like the grizzled visage of Jesus Himself, clearly seen in the jumble of silicon particles revealed in an electron microscope analysis of a 4GB Samsung flash memory chip?

Explains Dick James of semiconductor analysis firm Chipworks:

We often get dark fringe lines in the silicon, and in this case it looks like there was some holy influence.

Update: Religion isn't always a cut-and-dried business. Note that the divine tentacles of Flying Spaghetti Monster are also clearly visible in the corner of the image.

Jesus appears in Samsung Flash memory chip [The Register]

Who needs modern telecommunications, devastating weapons and other military gizmos, when you can hire psychics to win wars for you? Britain's Ministry of Defense spent $35,000 on a study to test the "remote viewing" abilities of volunteers—perhaps those missing WMDs still haunt the nightmares of some of the more feeble-minded brass in the U.K.'s armed forces.

The best part of the story, I think, is that it seems the MoD was completely oblivious to how this stuff has always played out: they approached "professional psychics" to take part in the research with complete sincerity, not realizing that such people are well aware of what their own game is, and would decline to be tested as a matter of course.

UK forces tested, rejected psychic techniques [The Register]

And it isn't even the real thing! A mere simulacrum, dissasembled, impertinently awaiting construction by us, its new slaves, the MITS Altair 8800 replica kit fetches lofty prices on eBay. Power cord and shipping not included, but you do get a nigh-perfect reincarnation of a machine with a certain interesting position in Microsoft history.

The seller also maintains a list of the deviations from the original he's been forced to make, for one reason or another. It's a lot of money, but the end result is fully functional, and it's not like you can find the original for sale, in good condition, at a reasonable price.

eBay auction [Via The Register]

Get your skates on, 'cause the deals wont last long: tomorrow is the much ballyhooed Black Friday, the day of the deals that evokes 2004's athletic remake of Dawn of the Dead.

It's also Buy Nothing Day, though with Black Friday circular scoops seing a massive increase in traffic this year, it's not going to make a dent. We've tried to resist the charms of this craven monument to consumerism, but who wouldn't succumb to a $100 laptop?

For those yet to plan their assault, however, it isn't over until the fat lady falls over in Wal Mart's lobby and is trampled half to death sings:

• bfads.net
• blackfridayads.com
• blackfriday.info

Of course, the deals might be real, but as Reuters notes, the day itself is a load of hype.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday not as busy as most think [Reuters]

SHOJI, the Symbiotic Hosting Online Jog Instrument, knows how you feel. Capable of ascertaining the currents of despair and hatred in any given assemblage of people, it transmits this "mood data" to terminals, where it is realized as beautiful waves of LED-generated color. That is to say, it is a lava lamp.

Created by the University of Tokyo and GS Yuasa, the system is said to sample light, temperature, humidity, infrared and ultrasonic waves, changes in air pressure (i.e. movement) and, somehow, "the nature of the activity in the room." The lamps themselves comprise 10 rows of bright LED lights, which shift in hue to represent different aggregate emotional states.

The SHOJI will soon be "field tested" at Tokyo-area companies, hospitals and in residential settings, suggesting that the creators are serious about this psuedoscientific hogwash. Even so, it's still far better than the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which is just as silly but doesn't have the benefit of making your office look like a 1980s strip club.

Out in April 2007 for ~$3,300. Alas, no pre-orders. SHOJI: Symbiotic Hosting Online Jog Instrument [PinkTentacle]

At my last job, nigh-imperceptible Bluetooth phone headsets were introduced. For a few days, it was a charming innovation, increasing the wearers' productivity and liberating them from the confined of their desks. There was humor, even laughter, in talking to someone for three minutes only to see them turn their head, revealing both the headset and the fact they remained completely oblivious to every uttered word. Mystical convergences occured as conversations merged and parted, speakers floating around offices, shifting between the real world and the false one, glued to their ear.

It wasn't funny for long, and there's a certain epicaricacy in knowing that others share my frustration — yes, I know I'm late to this party — but this fellow has done something about it. Here's my favorite suggestion:

5. Throw piping hot coffee in their face.

... the guy four people behind you is yapping away like he's talking to everyone in the store and you've finally had it. Quickly change your order to a regular coffee and throw it right into his face. Keep in mind though, if you're caught you'll probably be facing legal charges. But, if you get away clean you'll be satisfied for life. Next time you have a bad day you can think about the time you threw hot liquid in that yuppies face.

The whole post has a raw, unedited quality to it that helps preserve the author's vicious hatred of these devices. Just a few pleasant thoughts to begin the morning.

How to Deal with Obnoxious Bluetooth Users 7 Ways to Vent Your Frustration [AssociatedContent]