How to Actually Make Coffee
Odds are, you’re doin’ it wrong. Here’s most of the major ways to make delicious coffee, with advice from our friends at Ninth St. Espresso, Intelligentsia Coffee and La Marzocco.

Bill Nye Explains Oleophobic Screens
Uh, Bill Nye. Explaining stuff. Do I need to say anymore?

How Electrocution Really Kills You (With Adam Savage)
Mythbuster Adam Savage tells us how electricity really kills you—surprisingly, it’s not by poaching your brains inside of your skull.

The Difference Between $US100 and $US100,000 Speakers
Well the title really says it all, don’t it?

Why Analogue Audio Cables Really Aren’t All the Same
Yes, there really is a difference between analogue cables. And you want there to be.

Why Lenses Are the Real Key to Stunning Photos
Despite what stupid spec wars would have you believe, a fancy slice of glass is just as important as silicon to taking a stunning photo.

Why More Megapixels Isn’t Always More Better
You want quality pixels, not just more of ‘em.

GPGPU Computing: How Your Graphics Card Is Gonna Make Your Computer Fly
Programmers are finally figuring out how to make it easy to use your graphics card to do awesome stuff besides render cool explosions, meaning your computer is going to scream.

How to Choose the Right Graphics Card
Do you really need the Nvidia GeForce Ultra Pro 295 GTX 2 OC Black Edition, or is it okay to play Crysis with some a little more cost effective?

How Cell Towers Work
Until Wilson explained how cell towers work, I always thought Stormtrooper fairies carried the signals from my phone to the Death Star and then to my mom’s mobile phone.

Why Mobile Phone Reception Still Sucks Speaking of cell towers, why does mobile phone reception still suck so hard sometimes?

How Apple Affects Your Tech World Through Standards (Even You, Windows Guy)
The easy way to have power over technology and people outside of your own little domain: Create tech standards. Here’s a few Apple’s been instrumental in getting out there.

FyreTV Porn Streamer: A quick jump over to AVN yielded juicy fruit: Jason “Roku What?” Chen’s favourite porno streamer now does it without wires. Discerning adult cinema fans need their AV centre CLEAN and CLUTTER FREE.

HDi Dune Blu-ray Players With BitTorrent : Toss your torrents into this Blu-ray deck’s client over the network, then play back your pirated catch with its crazy extensive codec support. Brilliant.

The Hunter Concert Breeze Ceiling Fan Experience: Speakers + ceiling fan. Sometimes, a headline says it all.

Dell Mini 10: A 720p screen and a TV tuner is a nice bump for one of our favourite netbook series.

Cell Mate Hands-Free Mobile Phone Holder: Bluetooth is for the moneyed d-bag elite; real mobile gangstas clamp their iPhones to their heads.

If you missed the early highlights from the majors, our Day One Roundup can help. And enjoy the rest of our CES coverage here: CES 2009

Palm Pre : Number one with a bullet. If we told you three months ago that Palm would own CES, would you have believed us? But this phone is for real, and from the looks of it right now, it very well could be the morale lift Palm so badly needed.

And the rest, in no particular order:

Samsung BD-4600 Blu-ray Player: Wall-mountable, networked, 3.8cm thick, and really, really nice looking.

Samsung Luxia LED TV Lineup: Samsung loosed a whole series of ultra-thin, LED-backlit, network-connected LCDs, winning the Battle of the TV Announcements hands down.

Vizio Connected HDTVs: These Vizios stream just about everything possible over wireless-N: Amazon, Blockbuster and Netflix VOD, Pandora, Flickr, Rhapsody, plus any other Yahoo web widget.

Sony Vaio P: Sony’s Vaio P is something we haven’t seen before: a 2.08:1 aspect ratio (1600×768) on a 2.5cm thick portable. Something different in the very, very generic netbook field.

Casio 1,000fps Point and Shoot Cameras: Both the EX-FC100 and the EX-FS10 bring the EX-F1’s slo-mo capture goodness to a point and shoot. Casio’s still the only folks in the super slow-mo field, and they’re continuing to kill.

LG’s GD910 Watch Phone: It was a non-working, behind-the-glass prototype last year, but one of every gadget head’s boyish dreams will come true later this year: A watch that’s a phone.

Eee Keyboard: Asus took the crazy cake with their still-shadowy home theatre keyboard. With an onboard processor (of some kind), a touchscreen and keyboard and wireless HDMI, it makes perfect sense as a unique home-theatre machine.

Sony Cyber-shot G3: We’re all about putting web browsers on as many things as possible, and Sony’s found another way to get one into our pants: A super-slim wi-fi-equipped Cyber-shot G3 that’s the world’s first to surf the web.

Panasonic Portable Blu-ray Player: Panasonic’s DMP-B15 is the world’s first portable Blu-ray deck. Your laptop probably doesn’t have a BD drive, but this will ensure you can watch hi-def 1080p on a tiny, tiny screen on your next flight.

And there you have it. Good stuff you may or may not be able to afford in ‘09? Disappointment of disappointments? Discuss. [CES 2009]

10. Australian Company Launches The World’s Smallest Pocket Projector – 21,066 Pageviews
Aussie FTW!

9. The Biggest Mo-Fo Of A Printer I’ve Ever Seen – 21,338 Pageviews
From my trip to HP’s regional launch earlier this year, this printer was huge – and expensive!

8. Micro Camera Shows the Workings of a Combustion Engine – 21,627 Pageviews
Looks like we’ve got some car enthusiasts or engineers for readers (or both).

7. Slime Turns Into Sex Toy, Childhood Memories Shattered Forever – 34,311 Pageviews
You’re all sick and twisted (and we love you for it).

6. Update: Optus iPhone Pricing Details ‘Wrong’ – 39,527 Pageviews
In the pre iPhone 3G hype period, our exclusive (and incorrect) pricing for Optus’s Jesus phone certainly gained some attention.

5. Audiophile Deathmatch: Monster Cables vs. a Coat Hanger – 44,440 Pageviews
Verdict: Don’t buy Monster Cables.

4. Vodafone Puts iPhone Pricing Online, Then Pulls It Down – 45,986 Pageviews
Seems you guys were hungry for iPhone pricing stories last year. In retrospect, it was one area that all the local networks screwed up royally…

3. Bacon iPhone Case Is Most Savoury Gadget Protector Yet – 57,101 Pageviews
Guess you guys like bacon.

2. A Visual Look at the Nokia Damage Test Labs – 65,868 Pageviews
This was a personal favourite of mine as well.

1. Sprint’s HTC Touch Diamond Gets Photographed By Digital Camera From 1998 – 167,774 Pageviews
Not what you expected, right? Us neither.

And there you have it. And now that 2009 is well under way, stay tuned for even more stories about terrible spyshots of unreleased bacon iPhone cases being dropped in Nokia’s testing facility. Because we cater to the people.

I still think Android, and its openness toward developers, can do some magical things and give iPhone a run for its money. But as we stated before, a lot needs to happen first–Android devices need to be a lot more numerous in consumers’ hands, numerous enough for third-party developers (along with Google’s first-party talent as well) to have a major incentive to drive the platform forward. It also has some major network power-management issues to overcome; the G1’s battery never makes it through the day for me, and while that may just be because it’s a shitty battery, Android’s always-on approach to network access and background processes surely plays a part.

The Android Market is not yet the iPhone App Store, but here is a taste of what is, hopefully, a lot more to come.

Anycut: Anycut takes advantage of one of Android’s fundamental strengths–the distillation of every possible event your phone can do–send a text message, go to a specific URL in a browser, etc–into a system-wide Intent, which any app can in turn access. Anycut allows you to take any intent and create a desktop shortcut for it–say, opening all of your Gmail messages labelled with a specific tag, or sending an SMS message to your most-texted contact.

Compare Everywhere: Like a hybrid of Japan’s QR codes and Google SMS’s UPC price check feature, Compare Everywhere reads barcodes (of just about everything, from a Criterion Blu-ray of The Man Who Fell to Earth I just watched to the stick of Right Guard sitting on my desk) and gives you a list of best prices–from online sources as well as physical brick-and-mortar shops near your GPS coordinates. The haptic buzz indicating a successful scan is unbelievably satisfying, and saves you money.

Shazam: Shazam’s same great song identification skills–able to snatch notes from the barroom’s speakers and pick the song in seconds–here on Android, co-existing with its identical iPhone version and similar ones for dumbphones. It’s an amazing trick, regardless of the platform, and good to see one of the bigger hits on the iPhone quickly and smoothly ported over.

TuneWiki: Still jailbreak-only for the iPhone since apps can’t access your iPod music, TuneWiki can show its full potential on Android, grabbing lyrics (that scroll karaoke style) and videos for all of your music as it plays.

Video Player: Video player plays H.264 MPEG4 clips, making up for a glaring hole left open in Android’s first release: no video player. It gets the job done, and is a prime candidate for something to get sucked back up into the core Android distribution, as is an open source project’s frequent wont.

Power Manager: Another necessity that’s both a blessing and a curse, Power Manager lets you take limited control over the things that influence how long your battery will live–turning on/off all the radios, GPS, adjusting screen brightness, etc according to your current power level. It shouldn’t be a necessary app for G1 owners, but it is; on the other hand, it shows how easy it is for a developer to fill a need and access hardware directly without having to ask permission. System-level functions like this, in large part, are not available to iPhone developers, and that’s notable.

WikiTude: One of the apps we were most excited about at launch, WikiTude could still use some polishing, but it shows just how cool augmented reality apps can be. Overlaying link to geo-tagged Wikipedia articles on your camera’s live view image utilising the G1’s built-in compass and accelerometer, it’s an amazing thing to fire up on my roof in Brooklyn. Not so useful in the living room, but it’s a great proof of William Gibson’s classic notion—overlaying data from the web onto our live view of the world.

PhoneFusion Visual Voicemail: Solid visual voicemail support for Android. Another example of something other platform/carrier combos make you pay for (ahem, Verizon) or don’t let you access at all.

Chomp SMS: Well, what do we have here. This looks familiar. Chomp is a replacement SMS app that mimics the iPhone’s iChat-inspired text interface, and also happens to include a great soft keyboard looking exactly like the iPhone’s, but adding haptic feedback–something coming to future Android distros. It also ties into Android’s system-wide notification services, so if you want to drop the default SMS app altogether, you can.

Locale: In early versions, Locale was cool: it changed your ringtone or a few other phone settings based on your GPS location. Then, the features started coming, like the ability to send Tweets or use several other of Android’s Intents, and it became clear exactly what Locale is–a framework (like Applescript, essentially) for triggering anything on your phone according to your location. When I’m at the office, set Facebook status to frowny face. When I get home and it’s before 4PM, tweet “meet me at the bar” and start playing “O Happy Day.”