Hasta La Gadget!

One of Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secrets is that a large percentage of technology consumers are actually cats.

Have you ever wondered why there is so much cat content on the internet? That wouldn’t make sense if the web boasted a purely human user base, now would it? In fact, the majority of people reading this post right now are probably cats. And all you commenters–you’re all cats, too.

Only now has the tech industry begun to embrace (snuggle?) its overwhelmingly feline demographic by releasing apps specifically tailored for the cat community. All you aspiring app developers would be wise to follow the lead of the creators of Cat Toys (iTunes link), an app which allow cats to explore a frustrating virtual world full of small edible creatures that they will never ever be able to catch.

There’s also the aptly-named Apps for Cats (iTunes link). It’s basically the exact same thing as Cat Toys. I didn’t say cats were discerning consumers. I just said they were out there.

And who could forget Expensive Cat Toy (iTunes link), which at $0.99 teaches cats the importance of sarcasm.

As we herald in this new generation of
touch-screen interfaces, the web has been transformed into a virtual squeaky yarn pit full of little bells that jingle when you bat them around. Let us not delude ourselves, people. The dawn of the golden age of the cat-ernet is upon us!

One adorable satisfied customer after the jump. 

You know how the old saying goes–you can’t keep a good file sharing service down. Surely no one really expected LimeWire to stay dead for too long after an on-going battle with the RIAA finally led to the service’s shutdown, late last month.

Since then, we’ve seen plenty of smaller services attempt to step into the void, in order to take up the file sharing mantle, and now it seems that the service itself is set to be reborn, thanks to “a horde of piratical monkeys.”

TorrentFreak has the story, courtesy of “a source” with the apparent knowledge of “a secret dev team” tasked with resurrecting the service,

On October 26 the remaining LimeWire developers were forced to shut down the company’s servers and modify remote settings in the filesharing client to try to harm the Gnutella network. They were then laid off,” a source told TorrentFreak.

Shortly after, a horde of piratical monkeys climbed aboard the abandoned ship, mended its sails, polished its cannons, and released it free to the community.

The result is LimeWire Pirate Edition, which was born on the back of a beta of LimeWire 5.6. The version, according to the site is an improvement “in many ways,” including the disabling of remote settings, the removal of an Ask toolbar, and the freeing of LimeWire Pro.

This week, some of the best YouTube videos we could find featured some of the best personalities, games, and TV shows we’ve ever seen. If you love William Shatner as much as we do, or perhaps you’ve lost as many hours to Angry Birds as we have, or are just nostalgic for the days of decent Saturday morning cartoons, there are videos in this week’s roundup for you. Click the jump to see everything.
 

If you’ve ever wanted a way to make your XBox Live Avatar or your Mii into a real figure that can sit on your desk and keep you company while you work, reminding you of the fun you could be having at home on your console, 3D printing company Sculpteo wants to help. The service launched at the end of October and allows customers to provide 3D files via the Web for the company to carve into real world objects using its 3D printers and ship back to the customer.

Now, Sculpteo is offering customers the ability to upload a photo of themselves to the site, and based on that photo the company will build a personalized Sculpteo Avatar that the customer can tweak with custom clothing and accessories. When your avatar looks the way you want it to, Sculpteo will print a 3D figure based on the avatar and send it to you.

Sculpteo offers the new avatars in 7 cm (2.7 inch) and 10 cm (3.9 inch) models for $74.90 and $129.90 US respectively.
 

I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. Is Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell a bedbug? A bedbug expert/exterminator, perhaps? I hope it’s not the former. I realize that we just had another heated election, earlier this week, but that’s no excuse for partisan name-calling–and as someone who has lived through bedbugs, I can tell you that there are few worse names someone can use.

My guess is that it’s just a little glitch in Google’s usually quite good News algorithms–a hilarious glitch, mind you, that’s gives us all of us a little much needed post-election levity.

The link goes to an electoral map and the image is of McConnell’s soon-to-be fellow Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul. No bedbugs to see here–though, for the record, they are really good at hiding.