Hasta La Gadget!

Grab your Light Swords, it’s time to kill some Jedi to save the Empire from the Ewok menace! We know you already own seven Wiis, each one espousing a different sort of childhood memorabilia or cute-overload, but can’t you use the force to make room in your heart for one more? This Star Wars-themed Wii just hit the eBays, with a $500 starting price that includes the work of art you see before you, a red LED Wiimote and nunchuck, and a copy of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. You can’t usually put a pricetag on this sort of midi-chlorian concentration.

Filed under: Gaming

Star Wars Wii mod realizes very few of our childhood dreams originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Panasonic and the University of Tokyo have developed a robot capable of rinsing any dish and put it into the dishwasher. If you’re lazy enough to rejoice, you are probably too lazy to click

The dishwashing robot has three joints and enough sensitivity not to break your china. It moves on a rail, guided by TV cameras placed in the ceiling and sensors in the arm itself. According to the research team in charge, this is only the beginning. They are investigating the possibility of doing laundry robot too, as well as one capable of doing other household chores, like preparing cocktails and playing the bongos. OK, maybe that’s just me. [Thanks Kumiko]

No use messing around in this space, if you’re gonna build the umpteenth 3.5-inch DMB-capable PMP for the voracious Korean market, you might as well put some heart into it. MAXIAN‘s new M1T Pocket Multi TV shines with 8GB or 16GB of built-in storage, SDHC expansion and just about every codec imaginable, including the extra-sexy ones like OGG, AAC, DivX and XviD. The whole kit is running Windows CE 5.0, with what looks to be a resistive touchscreen (480 x 320) and a purty home-grown interface. No word on price, but it’s not like we’d have much use for that DMB antenna anyways. We’re not bitter.

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

MAXIAN M1T Pocket Multi TV does the PMP thing like it means it originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever found yourself with 70 decommissioned SCSI hard drives and an awful, awful lot of free time on your hands? If so, and you’re bursting with holiday spirit, perhaps you’ll choose to do the same as an apparent sys admin who goes by the name of Trigger. He took those drives from RAID arrays destined for the scrap heap and, rather than perform the DoD wipe that would have otherwise been required, chose to build this lovely — if somewhat askew (see below) — “tree” from the bevy of mirrored platters within. In fact the geeky holiday decor was made entirely from the bits and pieces within the drives, the lone exception being a nut purchased for $.39, making it a far more affordable project than yesterday’s OLED tree. It’s impressive to behold, but given the amount of personal data within, we think it’s probably more likely to spread lawsuits than cheer this season.

Continue reading Xmas tree made entirely of SCSI drives, offers lower CPU load than IDE alternatives

Filed under: Storage

Xmas tree made entirely of SCSI drives, offers lower CPU load than IDE alternatives originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rand McNally can’t be happy with everyone dropping their bulky atlases for GPS units and nav-enabled phones, so they’re fighting back. But they seem a little confused.

The company is releasing a series of atlases for the Kindle, which will be purchased, delivered and consumed like any other ebook on the platform. The first maps, for Northern California, Southern California, and Washington, will be available for $1.99 each, and like the Rand atlases of your childhood, will probably be exhaustive.

There’s nothing expressly wrong with the concept, and the price could well be worth the utility, but the fact remains that putting static map collections on an ebook reader only accentuates how outmoded they are, and how artificially limited the powerful Kindle is. Regardless, the Kindle’s search function and the carefully indexed maps will provide a workable map solution for that small Kindle-equipped, Google Maps-forswearing slice of the population. [eCoustics]