PSP Fanboy just learned that Sony’s discontinuing their 2200mAh PSP battery pack, an official aftermarket addon that would allow you to game for up to 12 hours or so. What’s the deal? We’re not sure, but someone from Sony said they’re looking at other ways to “service the consumer,” which might say to us that they’re looking at ways to extend battery life without making the back of the PSP bulge out in an unseemly manner. And just when we learned how to hack your PSP for homebrew apps too. [PSP Fanboy]
Are you curious about exactly how drunk that guy screaming Livin’ on a Prayer at your local karaoke jaunt is? Sneak a breathalyser into the microphone and you’ll soon determine whether his BAC has anything to do with his preference for off-key Bon Jovi. Randy at the fffffatlab has posted a cool little Instructables for a microphone with a “system for the inconspicuous collection of blood-alcohol content level data sets.” Despite the great number of steps involved, Randy insists that it’s one of the easiest projects he’s ever undertaken. I can see this also being useful for producers who need to know when to actually start recording the ramblings of reality show contestants. [Instructables via Technabob]
The latest version of the iPhone jailbreak/unlock utility PwnageTool is available now, and includes both Cydia and Installer 4 beta. You still can’t unlock your iPhone 3G with this, but you can jailbreak it to use apps that aren’t purchased from the official iTunes Store. Yeah, you know what to do by now. Go grab it. [iPhone Dev]
Watching videos of NES enthusiasts playing the Super Mario Bros. theme on weird stuff is always fun, and here’s one of musician Randy George on the theremin. What’s a theremin? It’s a Russian invention that’s also one of the earliest electronic musical instruments ever created. Players move their hands around the Theremin’s antennas, controlling the sound’s frequency and amplitude (pitch and volume). Randy’s working on recording a classical Theremin album–I wonder if it’ll include his version of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy as bonus material. [Laughing Squid]
So for those of you who caught the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony last night–Holy crap, right? The synchronisation, the music, the timed fireworks; it was a spectacle so awesome that for entire stretches of it, I couldn’t really think of anything to say but “woah.” The show owes a lot of its splendor to the absolutely amazing amount of technology that went into it and Chinese news sources now have a breakdown of what was employed to create something that’d make a billion nationals proud. Some crazy stats:
