Pure rumour and speculation, but Silicon Alley Insider is reporting a tip they've received stating that Apple will be adding "QuickTime encoding/decoding chips built into their products." Just like MPEG2 decoders that specifically deal with DVD playback, these chips would presumably handle MPEG4 only, the H.264 codec behind Apple's core video technologies. Does it make sense? Well, yes and no.

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Dustin Waller was a happy guy with a loving fiancee who was kind enough to buy him a PlayStation 3. But one day police knocked on his door and informed Waller that they'd tracked his stolen PS3 through the internet. That bitch! (OK, she actually didn't steal the console).

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Woz's devotion to the Segway is well-documented, so it's no surprise he'd blend love and Segway into a frothy mix of...something. Woz got married over the weekend at SegwayFesT 2008--to someone who is not Kathy Griffin. I think a double congratulations is in order! Oh, and today is his 58th birthday. Congrats and happy birthday, Woz! [TUAW]

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Elmo Live, the rapping, dancing, storytelling furball is now up for pre-order from all of the major online retailers. It doesn't ship until October 14th, but you should get one before they are impossible to find and your kids hate you forever. The cuddly robot is on sale for US$60 at Wal-Mart, Toys-R-Us (limit 5) and K-Mart, but if they all run out you can try your luck at Amazon.com for US$65. Jazz Hands! [i4u]

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We've seen them for CF cards--now, there's an SSD enclosure that will take up to six of the SDHC cards you have lying around and tie them into a single 2.5-inch SATA SSD. While it won't match speeds of dedicated SSDs (especially if the cards you're using aren't near the high end), the boys at Impress managed 111.4 MB/s read and 55.2 MB/s write times using six 8GB cards--not too shabby for a DIY solution that will save you some money (the adaptor is US$90 in Japan), especially if you're already swimming in big SDHC cards. [Impress]

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This clip doesn't look like any old clip. No no, my friends, it looks to be a leaked clip. Ooohhh. And many believe this leaked clip to be the upcoming HTC Dream running the Android OS. You'll notice the Dream's been tweaked a bit from the last time we saw it, still retaining a QWERTY keyboard, but now packing a (slightly buggy) touchscreen with (very responsive) landscape to portrait rotational sensitivity. For some, it'll be the stuff that "dreams" are made of. But for those with dreams like ours, it's lacking the first grade teacher dressed up like the Statue of Liberty while speaking Japanese vibe. [BGR]

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The Best Buy vending machine at Dallas/Fort Worth airport will be just one of a series of "Best Buy Express" machines, according to new info from Best Buy itself. In partnership with ZoomSystems, Best Buy will install similar machines at Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and San Francisco. So from September 1st you'll be able to buy mobile phones, cameras and other digital goodness when you fly from one of these 9 locations. Be careful though: For some reason these machines are really good at tempting you. Maybe it's all the excitement of flying, but I so very nearly bought an iPod from a similar machine last year, and I didn't even need one. [AP News]

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As part of The New Xbox "can we please get a shorter name yet" Experience, players will be able to install any Xbox 360 game in its entirety to the console's hard drive--decreasing load times dramatically. Here's the first clip of that process. You'll notice that yes, it's easy to do, yes, it takes a long time to install and yes, you need the game disc to load the game. So it's pretty much just as we expected, which is actually pretty good. [Kotaku]

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The Smoon Ombrella is a lamp which is a sunshade which is a "shining sculpture," according to designer Beau & Bien. I don't know if it could be classified as an sculpture, but it's beautiful and useful: a ten-hour charge will allow you to illuminate any place in your home, outside or inside, for six days, without any cables.

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Lenovo got to design the Olympic torch for this year's Games, and to celebrate they released a bunch of different USB flash drives, each one with an Olympic theme. Over at EverythingUSB they've detailed all of them: perhaps the sleekest being the one that looks like the torch itself, and is made from the same material, which is why it costs US$142 for 4GB. The cheesiest have to be the Mascot and Medallion series: they're printed with a Fuwa image, and though the Medallions have sold out, the Mascots cost US$29. Top of the range are the swiveling titanium drives. They come in a set of five 1GB drives, and though the price is unclear it's likely to be big: the set comes in a mahogany box. [EverythingUSB]

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At Palm Addicts they've somehow got hold of a leaked advert that looks like it's for Palm's update to the Centro, the Centro2 smartphone. Take a peek—it's pretty convincing. There's of course no way to know whether this is real or a piece of Photoshopped fakery and it's difficult to glean much info on the device from the photos, though the advert is pushing the phone's PDA organiser aspects. The big difference is the missing keyboard, but whether that implies a touchscreen or some sort of slide-out pad is unclear. It also seems to have media controls at the top, and Palm Addicts thinks it's running Windows Mobile. Update: Sadly this is a fake, created for a marketing class. Sorry, Palm fans. [Palm Addict. Thanks, Sammual!]

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We raved about the Sony Ericsson W760's whizzy Walkman interface when we first talked about this phone in January, and now over at Cellphone Signal they've got information suggesting the mobile phone is coming to the US with AT&T. The confirmation comes from this leaked photo of a W760 bearing a teeny tiny little AT&T Deathstar logo. The guys at Mobile Phone Signal think that means you'll be able to buy this 3.2-megapixel cam, GPS-enabled phone "within weeks," though that sounds a little too like speculation. [Cellphone Signal]

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Aiptek's last HD camcorder we showed you did 720p recording for a budget US$170. But time and technology waits for no man, so Aiptek's newest cam now records at 1080p. The AHD 300 actually manages 30 frames per second at this resolution, but if you're into slightly high-speed filming, it can even stretch to 60 fps if you drop the resolution to 720p. It can squeeze an hour of 1080p footage onto a 4GB SD card, accepts SDHC, shoots 8-megapixel stills and has 4x digital zoom and media player functions too. Not bad for just US$250. [TFTS]

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Graphene looks like it's going to be one of the "wonder materials" of the future, and a science team at Cornell University has just demonstrated the world's smallest balloon made of it. They stuck sheets of graphene over microscopic wells (1 to 100 square micrometers) cut into silica glass, trapping gas inside. By varying the pressure in the wells, they could make the graphene bulge inwards or outwards like a balloon, and the membranes proved pretty resilient: They could withstand several atmospheres of pressure. Though, like real birthday party balloons, the gas leaked out after a few days, it apparently did so through the glass, not the graphene. These tiny air pockets may have future uses as micro-sized weighing scales or even precise pressure sensors: It's another case of an invention waiting to find a use. [New Scientist]

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A local Beijing paper has revealed that some of the amazing fireworks in the Olympics opening show were digitally-crafted fakes, inserted into the live TV feed. The Beijing Times quotes the head of visual effects, who says that the 28 giant footprints that stomped through the air above the city, ending at the stadium, were advanced CGI. Though the pyrotechnics really were set off, the airborne camera view that the rest of the world watched was fake. Why go to these lengths? Apparently the Olympic committee decided that to follow the real trail of firework footprints was too dangerous for a helicopter camera. Instead a team spent almost a year crafting the fake segment, paying attention to even get the smog lighting effects correct. [The Telegraph]

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It's been a month since the iTunes App Store went live, and in an interview with the Wall St Journal, Steve Jobs has put the apps downloads figure at over 60 million. With the mix of free and paid apps, that brought Apple around US$30 million. That's obviously encouraged Steve: He's enthusiastic that maybe "it will be a US$1 billion marketplace at some point in time" adding that he's "never seen anything like this in my career for software."

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In light of this thrilling aviation story out of Ireland today, let's rethink this whole banning of the in-flight cell phone conversations, shall we? Sure, allowing for calls during that 6-hour red eye from San Francisco to Boston will bring out the jerkoff in a lot of people, but then again one of those jackasses could save your life! This was the case during a flight from Kerry to Jersey last Thursday, when a pilot lost all electrical power, radio and radar, and had to be guided in to land with nothing more than SMS and a quick-thinking air traffic controller. The plane landed safely, and the ATC is being heralded a hero, but mobile phones on planes still sucks, albeit slightly less so than before. [Irish Times via Slashdot]

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Here I was, moments from having red LEDs surgically implanted into my retinas, when this DIY Terminator sunglasses hack comes along and rescues me from a lifetime of pain, blindness--and utter coolness. GEARFUSE soldering meastro Vince Veneziani said he did this in about five minutes, but newbies might want to take their time and save themselves a melted eyeball or two.

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University of California scientists today announced that significant progress has been made toward developing "metamaterials" for use in a legitimate invisibility cloak. The researchers, led by mad scientist Xiang Zhang, were able to demonstrate for the first time that they could cloak 3-D objects with these materials. As the article notes, and as we've shown here on Gizmodo in the past, previous attempts at invisibility were successful only with tiny two-dimensional objects. Not anymore, as this heavily military-backed project is well on its way to producing superhero special abilities, today.

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I don't know if you guys have checked, but after the US team reviewed the NBC Olympics web player, I headed over to Yahoo!7 to see what was on offer locally. There's good news for people who just can't get enough of Mel and Kochy and the rest of the Channel 7 Olympic News Team, but bad news for anyone hoping for an immersive online video experience. Sure there's video there, but sorting through what you want isn't exactly what I'd describe as fun.

But now there's a bit of hope for some diversity, with Valleywag detailing how you can hack your way into YouTube's Olympic channel. As we discovered last week, the channel is geo-locked, but with this little hack, anyone can start watching.

Hit the link for the full instructions and fill the comments with comparisons between the YouTube effort and Yahoo!7's attempts. Which is better?

[Valleywag] 

Those upcoming crazy fast Intel Nahalem chips we've profiled a bunch of times this year got an official name today, and in typical Intel fashion the subdued moniker does little to betray the speedy goodness housed within. The chip set will be called Core i7 in its first generation of products, and is also the first of Intel's processors to sport all four cores on a single piece of silicon. A black label version called the Extreme Edition will arrive alongside the standard i7, and will be geared more toward the high end market. [CNET]

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Finding money for gadgets can be hard. It seems that every week there's something new that screams at you (generally from these very pages) to open your wallet and spend what little cash you can find on that all-important new phone, MP3 player, TV or PVR (or anything else for that matter).

So what's a man to do? Well, let's look to the government. It appears that they're giving away $5K just for having a baby. That's a brand new plasma screen, right  there! Have twins and you're well on your way to a whole home theatre setup.

Of course, the down other side of this is that after nine months, you'll have a little baby that you'll need to raise, training them to love gadgets just as much as you do. Fortunately, to help you come to terms with being a new parent, Giz AU's publisher Allure Media has just given birth to a new parenting site - Babblebaby. It's an online magazine that covers all aspects of parenting, which is good, because you'll need all the help you can get.

If you don't like the idea of having kids just so you can buy gadgets, then check out Babblebaby anyway - you never know what kind of cool baby gadgets they'll be covering - you might even find something that will make you want to have children.

[Babblebaby]

If you've spent any time this weekend watching the Olympics (and seeing as how you're probably Australian, you must have), then you definitely would have seen or heard the countless ads proclaiming the ability to watch the Games on Telstra's NextG handsets.

What the ads don't mention is that the one phone best suited to watching the Olympic Games on the go - the iPhone 3G - isn't compatible with their Olympic streaming services.

The ads say that the service is available on a wide range of NextG handsets, and the fineprint does say that not all NextG handsets will work with the service. While it doesn't specifically single out the iPhone (and really, why would it?), this is a huge opportunity gone begging for Telstra. There's a heap of reasons why people are queueing up to buy iPhones from Optus, not Telstra, and this is yet another one.

[via Digital Media]

PSP modder jube808 has added a working touchscreen to his PSP, as part of his efforts to add features he feels Sony dropped the ball on with his beloved handheld. The on-screen keyboard looks pretty responsive, and can be used with fingers or a stylus. Such a mod is probably making PSP homebrewers salivate with PSP/DS hybrid potential. Another video has a closer look at the whole rig.

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Apparently not satisfied with keeping Bobble Steve confined to an app inside the phone, an intrepid bobblehead sculptor has constructed this mighty fine looking iPhone dock, complete with a super-detailed Steve-o frozen in "keynote reveal" stance. No word on whether Bobble Jobs's focused product announcement energies will interfere with any radio or magnetic fields on your desk, but just looking at this I'm having to fight back the urge to liveblog something...anything!. See a couple more shots of this masterpiece in progress after the jump.

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New Material Stretches While Conducting Electricity
And no, they aren't calling it "Flubber".

Confirmed: Eight Morons Bought the US$999 I Am Rich iPhone Application
This does little to restore my faith in humanity on a Monday morning.

How To Hack Your PSP Slim For Homebrew Apps
Breath some fresh life into that old PSP of yours.

Home Theatre Hunting Sim Offers Duck Hunt Without The Damn Dog
I guess some people really like hunting.

Moving Lego Donkey Kong People, Lego Donkey F*cking Kong
Wow.

Since it came about in the 1930s as NASA's rocket research lab, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been a part of just about every major unmanned U.S. space mission to date. JPL also has a somewhat surprising history of running major missions out of modular trailers scattered around their Pasadena HQ, which are packed with all of the stuff you need to, oh, I don't know, monitor a spacecraft on its way to Mars. Photographer Richard Harrington stumbled upon one of these trailers, abandoned on a dusty lot somewhere between L.A. and Las Vegas, which as you would expect is retro space-tech dream inside.

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If you're like me, you probably have an old, broken down NES somewhere in your house, gathering dust while you try to decide whether you should keep it for nostalgia's sake. How about turning it into a lunchbox, which will allow you to bring those warm early gaming memories with you to work or school every day? Instructables contributor fluctifragus has posted a pretty easy do-it-yourself for making your console useful (and deliciously so!) again. All you need is your NES, a rotary tool, two small hinges, some glue and... a Canadian superhero? [Instructables]

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Play Wii with man's best friend if you have to. But please, please, never ever play with a dog behind you. Seriously. Don't. Biff. Don't do that, Biff! Stop it! DON'T! BIFF! BAD DOG! BAD! (NSFMH* video ahead, probably illegal in some states.)

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