By using cotton cloth and brasso you remove a layer of plastic (with the scratches) and it’ll work again long enough for you to copy the CD.

Homebuilt

I bought a Logitech digital pen once, and it turned out to be a total white elephant – you could only use it on special (and expensive) paper that seems to reflect the optical laser to itself. So you were stuck carrying around the pen, the noteblock and post-its because you couldn’t use it on anything else.

Aiptek has a digital tablet that can do the same thing, but at EUR. 113, it’s cheaper than the pen, and looks as though you can use any pen on. So no worries about renewables. Looks good to me!

Is Plasma the new Betamax? With LCD becoming bigger and cheaper, and not having the problems it used to (ghosting) or the problems of Plasma (burn-in, black degradation and lifecycle) it’s starting to look that way.

This little gadget affixes to your windsheild and gives you data through GPS information about your drifting performance, accelleration, etc. At $750,- it’s the cheapest alternative – it’ll give value for money, but the display is a little small.

This camera allows for 3D live motion pictures through per pixel rendering. Looks very cool.

Finally a new 3D VR display – it’s taken its time!
This unit stops ambient light from coming in entirely, sports a lightweight design and a tracker that works as a mouse, comes with a gun, allowing you to use it seamlessly in most FPS games. I think it’ll look great in the Flight Sim world as well, as long as there’s view with your mouse option too. Good reviews, but no figures (eg. resolution, weight, etc.). Price is not too bad at $329,-

It’s a pistol. And a mouse. Nuff said.

In the 2 – 4GB there seems to be alternatives for iPod’s rule – these tiny units play video, FM, and of course the music and playlists. This review takes the Meizu M6 and Oracom UB-890 and puts them through the paces.
They both look good, with the M6 coming out as favorite.

This scanner scans 3D objects and gives you that 3D object back on your PC. It’s handheld.

At GBP 19,95 this is an incredible gadget – each cube contains a person who does random things somewhat like Tamagochi. It has buttons on it to interact with the person. There are several personalities you can buy and when you place cubes next to each other the people in them will interact with each other randomly. As there are around 100 animations it won’t get boring quickly.

Repliee Q2 is a real doll with sensors, microphones, camera’s, recognition software and facial expressions allowing it to talk quite convincingly. There are quicktime move links to show her speaking and interacting on the site.

With enough magnets in it to float 900 kilograms it looks damn cool. For sale al EUR. 1.2 million (!). Has anyone thought what that kind of magnetic field does to your brain?

Japanese engineers have developed a machine that can capture and replay scents from foods or fragrances using an inventory of non toxic chemicals.

This is a device you attach to your mp3 player, either through a port or via the headphone output, which then allows you to select a frequency and transmits the music on FM on that frequency. This allows you to tune your radio to your mp3 player.
In the Netherlands they are finally legal (since about one month) so I decided to get one.
Walking through town I couldn’t find any, except iPod dedicated units (which use the port, so are only iPod compatible). There are 2 Apple versions: one which only works for a dedicated model (eg. only for the nano) and one which works with all iPods except the very first model (and presumably any model they release in the future). These both look slick and work with the ipod seamlessly. Unfortunately they are expensive and iPod only.

If I’d had time I would have gone for the Linex FM transmitter, which connects via the audio jack. It’s bigger than the iPod thing, but it’s around a third of the price.

CEC Corp in China specially made this wrist watch phone to one of the China’s most famous ping pong player, the GSM F88 Watch. It is available to the market at the price of 8,888Yuan which is about USD1,111. F88 is a watch with built-in mobile phone capabilities which have 26K colors CSTN display. It boasts a built-in microphone, speakerphone for conferencing, voice dialing, 4 minutes of voice recording, IrDA connectivity and organization tools such as schedule, alarm clock and reminder note. You can even play the pre-install world cup games on the phone. The keypad number is located on the strap. Video conferencing could be done by the watch because it has a built-in 3 megapixel 180-degree rotating camera

http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/f88_wrist_watch_mobile_phone.html

Here in the office we have a problem with people who work 32 hour work weeks – it basically means that one workstation is unuseable for one day per week per 32 hour employee. This means we have troo many computers. As space is at a premium, we need a solution that allows employees to sit down behind any PC, log in, and be faced with their own desktop, email settings, bookmarks, etc etc.
At first though one would go for roaming profiles, but as profiles here are around 1 GB large, It would take too long to copy the whole profile from the server in the morning and to the server at shutdown time. Also it’s not unheard of for one person to log into two computers at the same time, which brings problems when they log off the PCs in the “wrong” order. Also, reading the samba documentation and commentary, people who try to implement this all seem to think it’s a bitch to do.
Then there’s an Active Directory server. I don’t know Active Directory and I don’t feel like installing one of these things and administering it (hey, I like LINUX servers!). Apparently though this is supposed to be a viable option.
Then there’s thin client setups. Unfortunately we all need to run photoshop. A server running 8 concurrent copies of photoshop is going to cost me much more than I want to spend on this project.
So I started looking for ways to store your domain profile on USB flash drives. The XP user manager doesn’t allow you to edit or even acknowledge domain profiles, so I can’t just set the clients to read and write to a USB stick.
After a lot of looking around I found these alternatives:

IBM’s Soulpad technology, which saves the state of the OS as well as the rest, looks cool, but it’s only in technology demonstrator, ie. not available. In the article comments is an interesting description of how to emulate the technology using VMWare on an iPod.

U3 claims to be able to do this using USB drives from different manufacturers and some software they’ve created.

The U3 drives seem to be a virtual server type solution, and many of them come with Migo Data Synchronization, software that allows you to copy profile information to USB sticks or iPods.

This is a tiny connector kit that connects your PC to your car stereo. It comes with software which allows you to select and play music using the stereo’s buttons. Cheap too.

It costs a bit, but the reviews are all positive – the Axbo sleep phase alarm clock reads your body movements and wakes you up at the optimal time within 30 minutes of when you set the alarm to go off.

If you want to ‘feel’ electricity and magnetic fields, why not implant a magnet into your fingertips? The world will look different. Stay away from MRI scanners though!

with the HBBB – Heart Beat Bass Booster – plugs on to you and boosts your heartbeat to your car stereo.

These gloves are supposed to be for in extreme cold – and using some clever system they warm up as you blow into them acting like handwarmers with no batteries!
For $39,99 that’s a bit of a steal!

Of course, Gorgonz claims also to have created a t-shirt that makes the current t-shirts obsolete…

With the Head spa massager – look like you’re going to take over the world whilst alien invaders are burrowing into your brain

Acces who bought Palm OS have decided they will Garnet (Palm OS 5) and Cobalt (Palm OS 6 – which has never shipped on any device) and decided to revamp it all as the Access Linux Platform (ALP) which will look nothing like Linux but run Garnet apps as well as GTK apps. Expected on devices from 2007.

These suits are flexible but harden up on impact.