Remote Fetch: Ball chasing is very good exercise for pooches, even if it can cause obsession and anti-social tendencies that will result in thousands of dollars in dog therapy. Capable of being remote triggered at 7- or 15-second intervals, or just automatically throwing balls your dog drops in the bucket, it might be worth the trouble. Think of it as the equivalent of a video game for a dog. $299 from godog.com.au [GoDogGo!]

Hotdoll:Ugh! Someone actually went and turned the hotdoll dog sex-doll concept into an actual product. The doll has a silicon… nevermind. We had one at Gizmodo Gallery and one owner brought one in to see if their dog – that loves humping – would hump it. He did not. I guess just like real people, it takes a flexible sexual orientation to find comfort in inanimate figurines. Price TBD [Hotdoll on Giz]

Indiana Jones and Star Wars Dog Costumes: Remember when Indiana Jones shot that guy with the swords in Temple of Doom? What if, no, listen, wait, what if Harrison Ford was a dog and in that scene and, instead of shooting the assassin, he used teeth! And, like in Star Wars, instead of light sabres, they had swords made of bones. Oh man, hilarious! Earnestly, these costumes are the only items on this list you should legitimately buy for your dogs. Roughly $US14 each. [SpoiledRottenDoggies]

Autofetch Motion Pet Ball: It looks like the famous Super Happy Fun Ball* from Saturday Night Live sketches in the ’90s, and although not radioactive, the Autofetch ball acts freakishly similar. The motorised dog toy takes a cookie and then spins around, wildly, until the batteries go out, or your dog goes insane and crushes the life out of it. Recommended! *Do not taunt! $US27 for two. [Autofetch]

Bissell SpotBot Pet: Puppy training is basically like potty training a kid, except your whole apartment is the nappy. Here we have a steam cleaner that sprays cleaning solution to the mess on your carpet, a rotating brush that scrubs while the vacuuming action drinks – sorry, that may have not been the best choice of word – up the dirty water, storing it in a reservoir for disposal later. Basically, it’s an automatic poop/vomit/pee cleaner. $US140 [Bissell]

Catgenie: Look, I know I said this whole list is a bunch of things you shouldn’t buy, but this is the one you should especially not buy: CatGenie is basically an automatic litterbox that takes 45 minute to cycle out the poop. Until humans engineer smarter pets that can be potty trained, there is no tech that can avoid domestic animal excrement handling. $US329 [Catgenie review]

Sleepypod Air: This is a travel bag for little animals. What makes it different from other bags is that it has special deceptive fold-in panels that squash your animal while going through security checkpoints, so no-one can tell you your bag is too big. (Don’t worry, I don’t think it’ll kill your cat.) Then, after you board, it expands a few inches but fits under a chair. It also has a slot for slipping through a rolling luggage handle, so the bag can rest on top, and has seatbelt clips for placing it in car seats. $US150 [Sleepypod Air]

The Hydroglass: For those who believe fish are pets, even though you can’t hug them, I’d find it hard to believe you could do better than this fish tank, which has a seven-head horizontal shower on top. $US14,500 [Hydroglass]

Don’t forget to recommend your own favourite pet gifts in the comments.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favourite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We’ll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

This started when Microsoft and Google paid for access to Twitter’s millions of tweets and Bing paid Facebook and Twitter for access to their pages. Think about this perspective, if you ran Fox the WSJ and other major content makers, wouldn’t you think that your content is worth more than all those 140 character posts? Right, you would. And if those sites are charging hundreds of millions for their content, wouldn’t you ask for a lot more? You probably would, and if you’re Murdoch, the most powerful man in media, you’d probably get what you want and then set a nasty precedent for the rest of the short tail of mega media companies to get a lot of Google’s cash. Maybe a lot of these companies value Google’s help in promoting their stuff, but it never hurts to ask for money, especially when media and publishing are super duper hard up on cash these days, in general. I’m not an investor in big media or any tech companies, so its not a problem for me necessarily in that way. But it is a problem for me as a guy who lives and works through search engines.

Microsoft is just being evil again. Now, this isn’t typical Microsoft bashing – someone has to fight Google. And in a way, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They’re the underdog here fighting a Google that grows in power every day, and their Facebook content deal won’t likely be matched by Google any time soon. But this is so typically Bad Microsoft, because they’ve cleverly shortcut the straightforward fight for market share by features and gone for a deal-based solution to the problem. Like the PC and OS fight in the ’80s they’re competing with business tactics instead of quality. (And Bing is great, so I’m not making a complete 1:1 comparison to Windows.) We’re sort of left with – instead of a David and Goliath – a Clash of the Titans situation with pieces of rock and lighting falling from the sky and crushing us. Microsoft fails to see/care that the fragmentation that Microsoft is trying to achieve is not only going to hurt Google – it is going to hurt YOU AND ME.

This is the Microsoft we know from the last century, before great underdog products like Xbox and Zune. This is from a company whose CEO recently told us that sales are more important than critical acclaim, preferring profit over better product. And this is a company that gets in its anticompetitive digs when it can: For example, in Internet Explorer, it’s really hard to set Google as your default browser, not being listed in the alternative choices to Bing. Yet, in Google Chrome, it’s easy to set Bing as the default search.

Again, imagine that half of the top 500 media companies are delisted from Google. And imagine that Google stoops to this strategy and buys out the other half of that 500. Now imagine you have to search for something and now have to type it in twice because who the f—k is going to remember (no-one) which search engine covers which content?

People, I’m telling you, this is bad news. People talk about net neutrality like it’s only about the data’s prioritisation over the pipes. But what good is equivalence in data speed and prioritisation if you can’t find it in the first place?

But Mike notes that AT&T is already OK with setting up Windows and Blackberry phones with data only plans (but not iPhones) and that a data/VoIP-only phone is what Google proposed to the FCC when bidding on wireless spectrum back in the day.

The initial post that there would be a Google phone — an in-house, top-to-bottom Google developed handset running android — was met with scepticism by the press. Most people quoted previous statements from Google’s Andy Rubin stating that they would not “compete with their own customers” by releasing a handset of their own. That mimes Microsoft’s strategy with PCs and Phones, versus their in-house designed Xbox and Zune hardware.

But there is a difference here, despite the quote from Rubin: Google does not charge for Android, so are these people customers or beneficiaries of the only real modern mobile operating system that they can licence. And Free. I mean, WinMo is currently terrible and costs money and Symbian is a joke. Blackberry isn’t up for grabs. And does Google care if they lose a few points of market share? I don’t think so.

This isn’t even close to their core business, except that whenever someone gets on the internet, Google stands to make money. In this case, Google wins not by licensing more OSes to be used on phones, but in the very act of getting more phones in the world, no matter what the OS or platform. Now that’s scary power. [Techcrunch]

Oxford defines the verb as: “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” I think they should include offline usage, too, like when you stop calling people back entirely or leave people at rest stops on road trips. What, you guys don’t do that? [CNN]

GoPro Hero HD cam: HD video, mounts for helmets, chests, boards — even cars — make it pretty easy to share high-def versions of your adventures back home or on the internet. $US270 [Review; GoPro]

The cheapest MP3 player you can find: Everyone has a nice one. But if you’re roughing it up outside, you want to bring a crappy one and you want it to be somewhat disposable. SanDisk has some on Amazon. I used to use an iPod shuffle ’til they removed the buttons. For sports involving gloves, things with big buttons are best. A good stocking-stuffer, but explain it as such so you don’t look like a cheap arse. [Amazon]

Nike + iPod Sport Kit: If you like running, the Nike Plus informatics system will track and log and compare your mileage with that of your friends. (I hate running.) $48 at the Australian Apple store [Review; Nike + iPod Sport Kit]

Remember, though, that Nike doesn’t map your routes. If you’ve got an iPhone, I recommend Motion X GPS Sport app for tracking all sorts of outdoor activity routes. $4 [iTunes Store]

Rugged Cameras: The W80 Pentax is pretty compact, takes OK photos and videos, and is shockproof to a few metres, cold-proof to -10C and waterproof to 4.8m. I like it for winter sports. $US300 [Review; Pentax]

The larger Lumix DMC-TS1 is only cold-proof to 0C on paper and waterproof to 3m, but it takes superb images and videos. $US400 [Review; Panasonic]

Don’t forget to recommend your own favourite outdoor adventure gear in the comments.

[Wired]

Specifically, using his charts and mine, it wasn’t hard to recognise the jump in the multi-threaded, 64-bit results from geek bench in the categories of integer, floating point and memory-streaming tests, as well as the threaded tests. (Memory tests were slightly faster; the others were drastically so.) Interesting, as the Core i5 chip is clocked at 2.66GHz and the Core2Duo iMac I tested runs at 3.06GHz.

(The turbo boost function, which overclocks the Core i5 chip to up to 3.2GHz when running non-multi-threaded apps, should be kicking in performance here, too.)

Interesting, but two things to remember: Core i7 chips are coming out for the iMac shortly and will run at 2.8GHz and have hyperthreading so the four cores emulate eight. And there are still not many (if any at all) major OS X apps that can take advantage of Snow Leopard’s multicore support. [Electronista's tests, Gizmodo's iMac Review]

The call sounded painful from across the house. The first 10 minutes, it was clear she was talking to a robot. Then it was clear she was either talking to someone very stupid or someone very unfamiliar with English as she kept repeating, “No, I just want to know if I can swap out my 6-cell battery for a 3-cell battery.” She must have said it 50 times over 90 minutes. Someone even admitted to trying to make a commission off of her by selling her a new battery. That battery would have cost half of the price of a brand new netbook. In the end, customer service didn’t do anything to help her. It’s been years since I’ve needed customer service, so maybe every PC company is this bad now, but I hope not.

If you have any horror/pleasantly surprising stories of your own, please let me know in the comments. [BoingBoing, image from preemo at deviant art]

Besides processing power, price and battery life improvements, our preferences for gadgets and the direction of those desires point towards three things: Richer displays, more seamless inputs and smaller packages — the first two being in direct conflict with the last. Looking at where we’ve been and where we are, I don’t think we can keep pursuing these goals without going gadget prosthetic.

Now here’s a trip: For the first time this decade, design choices are being made to limit resolution in screens to show mercy to the human eye. Apple’s recent iMac revision increased the desktop monitor’s pixels per inch rating to about 110. That’s the equivalent of laptop levels of density, but on a big 27-inch screen, and it was so sharp it hurt. Any desk jockey can tell you that as displays get sharper, the strain goes up. On mobiles, which are already the most pixel dense of the gadget kingdom, designers are frequently bashing into conflicting goals of fitting lots of pixels onto pocketable devices. Resolution-independent operating systems (that rely on vector-based graphics) are important but if we don’t take displays inside the human body, gadgets can’t get much smaller — there’s no way for them to become as pixel-rich as desktops while continuing to get smaller than they already are.

The the idea for hybridised HUDs featuring reality and computed interfaces has been around for ages. Science fiction has already dreamed up what it is we want to see in animations like Ghost in the Shell. But the recent explosion of augmented reality apps — powered by smartphones with directional compasses, internet connections, location awareness, cameras and the power to draw data-driven overlays — are simply prototypes for real HUD and in-eye/mind displays. It’s not a conceptual problem as much as it is a question of how.

Keyboards and buttons are easier to understand as a limitation, as we type on increasingly baby-finger sized keyboards on smartphones with appendages that look like hot dogs. Keyboards just need to go away. Towards that trend, software keyboards may be error-prone but when used by the proficient, the typing is way faster and the devices are way smaller. Further away from traditional keyboards, Microsoft Research’s projects point towards gesture and voice commands. I don’t see how we could get full work days done that way though, and there’s the rub. There’s not even a good concept for controlling a PC to the level we need to without keyboards and pointers now. Mind control is a joke.

In user-interface design, we’ve always trended towards the invisible. Instead of seams, we want the seamless. Instead of four clicks, any given major task is better with three. Maybe one day, none — the blink of an eye. Funny enough, the only mentally controlled gadgets these days are toys. And usually the low-end QVC valley where high-end tech ends up after dripping down from the peak of military or space program development to gadget fiends, and finally their kids. I would guess the sloppy capabilities of such toys, like the Mindflex Brainwave, make it inappropriate, unsafe and unusable for anything but hovering a ball in mid air.

It’s funny looking back at attempts of strap-on computing. We always thought these clunky setups — “wearable” PCs Velcro’d to our arms or slung over our backs — were the predecessors to in-body computing. I’ve long assumed that getting to prosthetic gadgets was an issue of micronisation. “When we can fit a computer into the profile of a Bluetooth headset, people will use ‘em,” we thought. But it’s clear to me that it’s about the interface; the inputs and outputs.

Gadgets don’t have much more room for revolutionary improvement unless we bypass our own natural limitations of fingers meant to peel bananas and eyes designed to spot prey and predators, and get these damn things we love and depend on so much routed directly into our brains.

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It’s about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine.

Your heart can beat three billion times in your lifetime without maintenance — that’s a performance spec that no motor can match. Tens of trillions of cells inside you undergo constant death and regeneration. And your brain juggles countless autonomic and cognitive processes without so much as a status bar. But it was just eight years ago that we decoded our genome, seizing the blueprints for ourselves. We’re just starting to understand this machine enough to tinker with it. And Man being Man, we need to tinker.

Techie people like new toys. In the future that will mean everything from artificial limbs that perform better than the originals to benevolent viruses that recode the software of the human body. And as the gadget obsessed, we’d be the ones most likely to sign up first. And to go high end, cutting edge.

Last year I got LASIK and sprung for all the upgrades. Like the cornea mapping system to correct sector by sector aberrations on my eye, the same tech used to remap the flaws in Hubble telescope’s glass. And the laser cut instead of the scalpel, which reduces night halos. Everyone else attending the mandatory pre-surgery briefing went budget. But when it comes to our bodies and minds, the gadget-minded think of our flesh and soul as extensible and upgradable with only with the best.

For a far more interesting story, we are lucky to have an amazing guest editor with us this week named Aimee Mulllins — Aimee was born without fibulae in both legs and her doctors decided to amputate her legs below the knees to give her a chance to walk with artificial legs. Eventually, she became the first woman with a disability to compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) using carbon fibre equipment modelled after the hind legs of a cheetah. She’s also been voted as People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people in the world and, at 17, was the youngest person to hold top secret Pentagon security clearance. Some might classify Aimee as handicapped, but I’d call her enhanced. I hope she can share with us what its like to depend on her gear and have it change the way we live and the conditions we’re born with.

Through the week, we’ll hear from other experts too:

• Daniel H. Wilson, author of How To Survive a Robot Uprising, will be writing about his experiences searching for super-powered strength.

• Sexologist Debby Herbenick will discuss some of the upgrades going on below the belt.

• Our own Mark Wilson, who spent a week hearing about the outer edges and most pressing needs of health science at the TEDMED conference in San Diego, will share his encounters with the stars of organ growing, genome mapping, human body imaging and more.

• In a Q&A with The New Yorker’s Michael Specter, we’ll see why it’s more dangerous to not embark on the paths of genetic and viral manipulation than to follow them to their most unnerving ends.

This week, Gizmodo will be exploring the enhanced human future. We’re calling it This Cyborg Life. And its all about what happens when we treat our body less as a holy object and more as what it is: Nature’s ultimate machine. Even if we can’t replicate it — yet — we can make it better.