Gadgetstronics

I have a bizarre, infantile obsession with cotton candy, and I won’t buy the kind that comes in bags at the video rental store. It has to be “fresh,” meaning recently transformed from that artificial pink syrup the color of Pepto Bismol into fluffly stuff on a stick.

If you want a cotton candy machine for home use (because you just don’t get out often enough to carnivals, circuses, and state fairs to get your fill), you either have to get the industrial kind that professional cotton candy makers use or buy a flimsy toy-like model that might produce, with lots of effort, something the size of a cottonball.

But here’s something a little bit different - a machine that makes cotton candy at home, not from sugar syrup but from hard candies. You can use any kind of candy you like, though I’d probably stick with flavors that come close to authentic cotton candy flavor. But it would be fun to experiment with Jolly Ranchers, Japanese grapefruit flavored hard candies, and maybe coffee candy. Who would resist if you served it for dessert; it’s less fatty than cupcakes.

The machine is available at the Japan Trend Shop for $159.

PBS has always had kids’ education in mind by offering programs that makes kids’ learning entertaining and fun. Starting this week, PBS launched a new site that will aid in educating kids, while allowing their parents to follow along and see how they are doing.

Called PBS Kids Play, it is a virtual learning environment that is designed for children 3-6 years old and offers personalized preschool and kindergarten curricula for kids. The site makes it fun for kids by giving them games to play with their favorite PBS Kids characters like The Berenstain Bears and Curious George just to name a few. Each game has three levels, which increases in difficulty as children complete them. This keeps kids challenged as they are taught fundamental learning skills and their parents can monitor their progress with special personalized learning reports.

PBS Kids Play is in beta testing, and the service is currently free for kids and parents alike to take a look around. Once the service goes live, it will cost US$9.95 a month or $79 a year. Currently, however, there is a special deal where the first three months are only $4.95 a month, if you sign up now.

Read more at DMW Daily.

We have already shown you the new Skullcandy SD card headphones, but these new earbud style headphones deserve some attention as well. Skullcandy, from personal experience make good quality headphones at good prices.

Their latest are the iPhoneFMJ headphones, which were first announced at CES 2008. They are earbud style headphones that are designed for the iPhone, or perhaps more important they are made to work with music phones so they will work equally well with other phones such as the Blackberry Curve. The iPhone FMJ headphones feature a solid feeling “tightly-wrapped, coiled metal cable” and an in-line microphone. They are available in black, silver or chrome and retail for $79.95, they can be found online at Skullcandy.com. I had an opportunity to see these headphones first hand on the show floor during CES and can say they appear to be very nice, based on experience with other models I can imagine they will sound equally well.

Product [Skullcandy]

The Best of Make book is out and it’s a fun read. If you’re an obsessive geek head with a compulsion to create useful artifacts which wobble, vibrate, glow and…well…geek at you all day long. Many of the 75 projects may not be that useful, but they’re definitely F.U.N. and they’ll earn you credit down at the next LAN party all right, no question. You’ll need a good understanding of electronics to cope with the more advanced projects, so be prepared to brush up on your diodes and voltages before you start.

The book does really well to deliver graphical, clear and well thought out instruction on the how-tos, and there are one or two projects in there, like the pinball restoration which are dear to my heart (I used to own a full sized Bally pinball, and loved every second of it, even though it was LOUD!) This would make a great gift for the engineer in your life, just remember to gift wrap a soldering iron in there with it too. $34.99/£21.99.

 After two years, MAKE has become one of most celebrated new magazines to hit the newsstands, and certainly one of the hottest reads. If you’re just catching on to the MAKE phenomenon and wonder what you’ve missed, this book contains the best DIY projects from the magazine’s first ten volumes — a surefire collection of fun and challenging activities going back to MAKE’s launch in early 2005.

Sharp’s looked, er, sharp at CES 2008 with its wireless PDA phone known as the PV250. You get a cool swiveling LCD display, a 1.8cm-thin QWERTY keyboard for thumb-typists, a 1.3 megapixel camera (meh) and a microSD memory card slot. What do you think of the design?

Razor Horizon Home Theater. We’re trying to work out why you’d want to stick a big black rectangular lump of wood underneath your expensive LCD television screen to power your audio, but we’re failing. Badly. Maybe it’s because the integrated CD/DVD will play ‘the whole gambit of other file formats like DVD-R/RW, CD-R/RW, MP3, VCD, SVCD, WMA, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, MPEG 4, JPEG, and more’? Or perhaps you just need more black in your life? Whatever. $399.95.

 The Razor sharp design fits perfectly with your plasma or LCD wall mounted television. You’ll be amazed by the sheer class and functionality of the Razor Sound System with built in DVD player. Stop your friends and family in their tracks when they see this beauty as the centerpiece of your new entertainment system. Watch their jaws drop when they hear the power of the premium sound. The Razor Sound System is the perfect way to experience the power of theater sound in the comfort of your home theater.

Movie rentals from iTunes 7.6? Awesome. That pesky 24-hour viewing window once you’ve started the film? Not so much. And even if you get a little trigger-happy and click play only two MB into the download, the self-destruct timer activates. What if you need just a little bit more time? Or maybe a whole lot more time. We’d heard you could extend the doomsday clock by toying around with your system’s date/time. We tested it and it’s true. There is, of course, a catch or two.

Yesterday we rented 300 and started playing it only 5MB into the download—it was fast and smooth. Very nice. But now I’ve only got 9 hours left to experience the magic. With time running out, I closed iTunes, set my clock back and restarted the program to see if it does bestow a Lazarus effect. Sure enough, it did. I even got a little mad with power here, turning the clock back to 2003 to see just how potent this elixir is. iTunes yelled at me:
But when it started back up, check it out: That’s right. iTunes knows I was playing God and messing with time on a massive scale. But I got three years to watch my movie anyway! Unfortunately, this trick does not work to revive already dead flicks—once they expire, they’re automatically dumped. I know, because I launched my computer forward in time by a day and got this:
So, this is a great way to extend the life of movie rentals by a couple of hours if you’re running late on finishing it, but it’s not really a practical way to steal movies, since your would have to live in the past every time you fired up iTunes.

Another idea was to set the computer’s time up before we rented, thinking you could then set it back to normal and have as much time as you wanted. Being adventurous, we tried to set the clock ahead 50 years. The homemade XP Pro computer we used in testing wasn’t built for serious time travel, however. The 50-year shift made everything go kablooey.

One last trick we tried was to set the clock a year ahead before we rented the movie, and then start watching it as it downloaded, activating the 24-hour countdown. We then brought our computer back to the present and resumed downloading. The timer was totally reset, like we’d never clicked play.

With automatic system-time updates, there’s a chance any time you set will be corrected. In that case, you’d wake up to a long list of expired flicks. Frankly, don’t count on this hack working for too long anyway since Hollywood is uberprotective of its content and someone’s bound to lock this hole down tight within days. We don’t know of a similar trick for Movielink or CinemaNow rentals—maybe you do—but our guess is that it’s not doable.

We’re still playing with it, so we’ll let you know what other tricks we come up with as we confirm them. For now, feel free to go and play Jobs with time for yourself, and by all means report back. [Apple iTunes]

Posted Jan 17th 2008 11:06AM by Joshua Topolsky
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
Dell must be doing something right, because according to recent sales figures, the PC maker has topped HP as the number one computer supplier in the States. The Texas-based computer-maker saw sales hit 5.35-million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 (a jump of 15.2-percent over the previous year), while HP came in second with a paltry and embarrassing 4.5-million units shipped. The increase in numbers seems to stem from Dell’s shift out of direct sales to the sale of systems at retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart, though internationally HP still rules the roost, garnering a 19-percent market share worldwide. Of course, if they can overtake in America, Dell can certainly turn it around elsewhere. Watch your back, HP.

You can now access your business email on your iPod touch thanks to Intermedia who will be hosting Exchange customers, enabling them to access their business email via secure IMAP. Just make sure your iPod touch is up-to-date in the first place. Guess business executives now have another excuse to badger their bosses to purchase a bunch of iPod touch (or is it iPod touches?) for them to stay updated on the road at all times.

Sonance IW2 IPORT iPort In Wall iPod Docking Station

The Sonance IW2 in-wall iPort dock blends in seamlessly with your decor. Music and video is ported from the IW2 to your AV receiver via a standard CAT 5 (ethernet) cable, so you get the ultimate convenience, design, and high performance.

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