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.
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).
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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.
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]
