I spent many (many, many) a lazy summer day in my youth playing Punch Out on the Nintendo. There seemed to have been a Punch Out underground at the time. Everyone knew someone, who knew someone that knew a trick to beating the various fighters in the game, but no one knew the person who found the tricks directly.
Punch Out for the Nintendo Wii launched officially yesterday, and the game sounds like a workout. Like Wii Sports boxing, the game uses the Nunchuck and Wii remote to allow players to actually punch. The game can also utilize the balance board to let players duck and weave. If you are the type of gamer who likes to be slovenly, the game can be played with a classic controller as well.
Netbooks are great for many reasons, they are cheap and lightweight. These points are both important when you are looking at notebooks for use in schools. The machines have to be cheap enough for schools and parents to afford and light enough that kids can handle the machines.
Dell has announced the first 10.1-inch netbook designed for the education market. The machine is called the Latitude 2100 and featured a rubberized exterior to protect it from bumps and drops that are associated with life around kids.
Tired of digging your cellphone out of your pocket only to find it’s a call from someone you didn’t want to talk to? The Citizen AIBATO M is another bluetooth watch that can connect to a select number of cellphones and provide information about who’s calling, emails and even news tickers right on the watch’s display. The LCD will glow when there’s an incoming call or email, and if that’s not enough to get your attention the watch can also be set to vibrate so you won’t miss a call ever again. Unless you’re not wearing the watch of course. Furthermore, when used with various phones from Sharp or Softbank the AIBATO M can even remotely trigger the camera’s shutter which actually seems a bit more creepy than useful to me.
There’s no pricing info on the AIBATO M at this point, even though it’s set for a July 1 release in Japan.
I have nothing but fond memories of my Transformers toys when I was growing up, but even with impressive additions like the Dinobots or SkyLynx, my hands down favorite transformer of all time was Ravage. Why? Because he folded up into an innocent looking micro-cassette that allowed him to be smuggled anywhere. Sadly Ravage’s stealth was also his downfall because one day he went missing, and was never seen again. But my memories of Ravage will now live on thanks to this transforming USB flash drive. It’s available for pre-order from the BigBadToyStore for $42.99 (eta September 2009) which is actually pretty expensive for a 2GB flash drive. Still, even if it only came with 128Mb on board I bet it would still fly off the shelves.
The faster a laptop is, the hotter it tends to be, making it noisy and sucking down power running fans and (eventually) rendering you sterile. We’ve heard about some promising new cooling technologies like steam cooling, but something called ionic cooling looks like it could really take the cake ice cream. Ionic cooling is a pretty simple concept: a 3,000 volt electrode ionizes molecules like nitrogen in the air. A second electrode attracts the ionized molecules, and as they move toward the electrode, they push neutral air molecules along with them. This flow of air is channeled over a conventional heat pipe, cooling it.
The ionic cooling system uses no moving parts (making it completely silent), is very compact, and has the potential to use only half as much power as a conventional fan. The best part, though, is that it cools up to 30% more effectively than fans do. The biggest hurdle at the moment is making the ionic cooling system as reliable as the rest of your laptop is, but the technology may be commercialized as early as next year. The cost? It’s supposed to be in the “ballpark of where it needs to be.” Who knows what that means, but personally, I’d certainly be willing to pay a premium for a silent (and more efficient) laptop.
Since smoke detectors are designed to detect smoke, they’re damn annoying when you’re burning something on purpose. You know, like dinner. You have to either stand on a chair and wave something in front of the detector forever or just give up and take out the batteries, which you’ll inevitably forget to replace, and your house will burn down. Yep, it will, for sure.
A better solution is Smokey the Silencer, a friendly little plastic dude with no legs who sticks to your fridge and can be used to remotely shut your smoke detector up until you’ve finished toasting marshmallows. The rest of the time, Smokey is a handy kitchen timer. You’ll have to get a detector with an XBee wireless communication chip in it, so the minimal convenience that Smokey offers may not ultimately be cost effective, unless (like me) you rely entirely on your smoke detector to tell you when dinner is ready.
This one’s definitely an oldie (we’re talking the year 2000) but it’s a clever idea that’s new to me. Football Tape was designed by Martí Guixé and it’s basically just a roll of adhesive packing tape with a football or ‘soccer’ ball hexagon pattern on it, so when you use it to create a giant tape ball in order to play soccer/football around the office, it will at least look the part.
Sadly it isn’t available for sale, and given the concept was created 9 years ago it seems it’s probably never going to see the light of day. So you’ll just have to be content with your inferior clear or brown-tinted tape balls. Suck it up!
In exactly two weeks, E3 2009 will be opening its doors. Sure, for the last couple of years it has been something of a lackluster show, but this year promises to be better. The ESA has moved back to the LA Convention Center. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (along with plenty of other big names) have all announced that they will be putting on good show at the event. Oh yeah, and we’re going to be there.
This is going to be the first year that OhGizmo will have a presence at the show, and my first year going as well. I’ve already got a bunch of meetings set up with various publishers and such, but I thought I’d give you guys an opportunity to tell me what you want to see. I probably won’t be able to get around to see everything, but if there’s something you want to see I’ll do my best to get my hands on it.
Also, it’s my first trip out to LA so I could use a few pointers on food, sights, etc. Who knows when I’ll be going back, so I want to make the most of it.
I’ve had a few dogs over the years, and not a single one has been very fun to wash. Usually I ended up just as wet as the dog, and somehow always ended up smelling worse. I’m sure it’s a lot easier to do with smaller pups, but I’m sure even those little guys put up a fight. So what’s the solution? Just pop your pooch into a doggie washing machine.
Yes, this is a real device, and no, it’s not meant as a punishment. Apparently the inventor has had such success with the Dog-o-Matic in France that she’s going to start distributing these all across Europe. Now I’m sure that in reality your dog isn’t having quite as bad of a time as we might think, but it still looks like you’re just popping them into a giant front-loading washing machine. If you’re ever in France and you really want your dog to hate you, just insert $47 and toss your dog in.
Related Tags: Nintendo, Punch Out, Wii
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By Andrew Liszewski
