For fans of the Chrysler 300 who need a big back seat (for various reasons), Chrysler has just the thing -- the Chrysler 300 Extended Wheelbase. Announced recently and to be shown at the New York Auto Show, the stretched version of the popular sedan offers up an additional six inches in length, for 10.2 extra cubic feet of interior space. The Chrysler 300 Touring Long Wheelbase model will be equipped with a 3.5-liter V-6 engine, providing 250 hp, more than some domestic V-8 competitors. The 300C Long Wheelbase will have the 5.7-liter V-8 HEMI® engine, generating 340 hp, and the Multi-Displacement System (MDS), which seamlessly reduces the number of cylinders from eight to four when less power is required, improving fuel economy.
The 300 Long Wheelbase will be modified by Accubuilt, a leading custom specialty vehicle manufacturer with more than 128 years of experience, based in Lima, Ohio, and will be sold through Chrysler dealerships.
Pricing and production information will be provided closer to launch this fall.
iDJ manufacturer Numark is already back with an updated version of their original useful iPod mixer. iLounge is reporting that the iDJ2 will only require scratchers to use one 'Pod compared to the iDJ's two, from which it can not only play two songs simultaneously but also record your performance as well. Other niceties include an LCD screen for track-profiling and waveform display, scratch, pitch, loop, and cue controls, and USB and auxiliary inputs for hooking up nearly any audio source. We do know that this model will support MP3, OGG, and AAC tracks, but have no idea when it will be released, nor how much it will cost compared to its $250 predecessor.
The RAYERD-X may have raised some eyebrows and spurred some Transformer reminiscence at the Ninth annual Robo-One competition in Tokyo this week, but according to Robots Dreams the title (at least in the Technical Competition) went to OMNIZERO.2, with its dashing nuvo-like good looks and QRIO-like running, posing, object tracking, and even the ability to jump in place.
Watch The Legend of Zelda: Hero of Time and dazzle at the thrilling spectacle of "a boy from a mysterious forest" in "a legend as infinite as time." There's an evil threatening him and a princess summoning him, so there's only one thing to do: put the tights on, grab the Master Sword, and mess up some Gannon.
Alright, it's a fan film but I'd honestly pay more to see this than oh, I don't know... anything by Uwe Boll. They're saying that principal photography is in the can, with post-production work on animations and CGI left to complete. The Zelda fanboys in the house can read more about the production here.
This admittedly blurry shot of what looks sort of like an Apple Xserve on steroids it's in fact a PlayStation 3 dev kit spotted at Sony's booth on the GDC expo floor. The question is, why show off the humble dev unit under an enticing plexiglass lid? You'd think they'd have kept it hidden, lest some brain dead superfan mistakes this for a system redesign.
Here's the back of the unit. Those are ethernet ports in the lower middle.
How to score a 2nd-shipment DS Lite in Japan: wait & run
Nintendo's dual-screened portable is in high demand over in Japan right now, and this video goes to show what lengths must be taken to obtain the redesigned DS in its Lite form overseas.
360 launch veterans are well aware of how many frigid hours might be required to get a taste of the next generation this fall (sans pre-orders), but how would you deal if the only unit left in stock were pink--if pink's not the way you swing? We eagerly await the day(s) when we can pre-order the next gen and be done with this retail-rushing nonsense.
The PimpStar wheels incorporate a microprocessor and wireless modem so you can configure your picture, logo, or message from your laptop while you're driving. Expressing yourself in full-color with a set of Dub's new "PimpStar" rims (other Dub models: Big Homie, Dirty Dog, Ganja Floater, and C.R.E.A.M. -- Cash Rules Everything Around Me), which sport a strip of LEDs down each spoke that display the message of your choice while you're rollin'. We'll agree that $19,500 is a lot for a set of wheels and tires, but we'd also argue that nothing impresses both the homies and the hunnies quite like twenty-six-inch rims blazing a bright logo.
Sociable is a plugin for Wordpress that adds cute link icons to each of your blog posts that users can click on to quickly add the post to their favorite social bookmark service like del.icio.us or news sites like Digg, Newsvine, or Fark. The plugin can be configured to show icons for any of the 24 (and counting) supported services, and installing it is, as with most Wordpress plugins, a snap.
Mitsubishi R&D rocks WarCraft3 with DiamondTouch table
This new DiamondTouch touch panel table interface has one thing other tables lacked: game. IGN has video of the DiamondTouch panel in action, and it really appears to be a glorified top-down projection system -- which it is. The image is projected onto a white table, which contains the actual magic. By touching the table you complete a circuit that sends a signal through your body with the X/Y position of your touch. This means the table can handle multiple simultaneous touches, so you and your friends can all gather around and do gaming as it was meant to be done, tabletop style. Mitsubishi's system also includes voice control, and they show it all off with a fairly impressive demo of WarCraft III.
Global Electric Motorcars (GEM), a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler that has produced over 30,000 electric vehicles that are silently traversing America as we speak, has inked a deal with Matra Manufacturing and Services to market its EVs in France. GEM produces two-, four- and six-seater partly enclosed EV vehicles in both consumer and light utility versions that are in use by universities, parks, military bases and other facilities. The vehicles will be outfitted to meet European Union regulations for light and heavy quadricycles and be sold in the Light Electric Vehicle market in France. Mantra MS will be the exclusive distributor and plans to establish a platform in Romorantin, France from which it will service these decidedly on-the-grid go-karts for the French.
Life Without Mouse is probably the most comprehensive guide to ditching your mouse entirely. The author starts us off with some shortcut key tips, gets a little more advanced with some apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux that let you create your own time-saving shortcuts, and then goes into mouseless browsing. Even if you have no interest in ditching your mouse entirely, there are some good tips to be found.
Design blog Joey Interactive has a great round-up of web sites that has a slightly higher don't-suck wallpaper department. Especially unique is the high proportion of wallpapers for higher resolutions and widescreen and multi-monitor setups.
Information Week's Fred Langa's has a guide to building a complete terabyte file server for under $500. Langa's guide is comprehensive down to the last detail, from choosing your drives, motherboard, and case, to configuring the OS (he picks Puppy Linux but discusses over Windows as well), and there's plenty of photos, too. Highly recommended reading if you're feeling the drive space crunch.
You can now search for jobs using Google. Typing "jobs" into Google makes a "Refine your search for jobs" box appear, and entering your location and/or desired "job function" takes you to job listings scraped from CareerBuilder, Dice.com, and so on. Job listings are displayed in a manner similar to Google Local, with listings on the left and a map on the right showing their locations. Apart from the maps it's still fairly bare-bones and lacks some of Indeed's more advanced options. However, coming up as the first hit for "jobs" in Google is worth its weight bits in gold, and I'm guessing Monster.com and CareerBuilder are less than thrilled to be displaced.
David Nikdel (a.k.a. Violent Playground's Ogapo, a Level 60 Gnome Warlock) has developed a World of Warcraft UI mod that makes it possible to use the PC-compatible (wired) Xbox 360 controller. The mod utilizes a combo editor, so that users can store and execute spells using 1 to 4 button combinations. So does Nikdel's mod suggest WoW is possible on the Xbox 360? Perhaps. But don't count on Blizzard changing its no port policy.
Alertbear is described as "the free Windows RSS reader that doesn't think you should read feeds like email," agreed. Alertbear is a nice little free feed reader for Windows that lives in your system tray and pops up a "stack" of news reminiscent of IM notification boxes when new feed items come in. It has some nice features, like color-coded categories, mousewheel navigation, and feed auto-discovery, but otherwise keeps things simple.
I you're ever locked out of Windows, try Ophcrack. It's a Windows password cracker that claims to be able to crack 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds. Ophcrack is available for Windows and Linux, and the Linux version comes in a handy bootable LiveCD version for when you don't have access to any account. It's also open source software, so you can get cracking for free.
Xbox.com now lets you manage your Xbox Live friends list from the web. You can send, receive, or decline a friend request through the website. And of course, you can dump existing friends too.
Royal EZVue Vista LCD-sportin' flash drives now available
The Royal EZVue Vista flash drives that display their contents on a 2-line LCD are finally available. They range in capacity from 256MB ($50) to 1GB ($100) and incorporate Usov Labs' Allway Sync Pro software for transfer duty. Also available immediately, and perhaps most useful of the bunch, is that SD card reader/writer that helps you sort through your growing collection of little plastic chips, and retails for a reasonable $30.
US Gov't to launch investigation into Lenovo "spy" PCs
Over a year ago when Lenovo announced its intentions to buy IBM, congress stepped in to call for an investigation to make sure the Commie Chinese megacorp wasn't going to be getting access to anything sensitive or secret in IBM's labs or R&D facilities. Well, everything passed over kosher, but now the US State Department's placing an order for 15,000 Lenovo PCs, and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission wants a thorough look through the machines to ensure they're not rigged with bugs and spyware. Outside dismantling every single PC and freshly installing the OS themselves, we're not sure how they would guarantee they'd be clean, which just goes to show you've really got to trust your PC manufacturer, especially if you're the government. In all reality they're probably more likely to find a Sony backdoor than a Lenovo one, anyway.
Vique GPS with USB, DVD, DivX, DMB ... and directions
Here's the GPS unit that'll get you from Point A to Point Z and back again. But it'll also do music with support for MP3, WMA and OGG. Video, it'll play DVDs, DivX files, and tune in DMB broadcasts if you're in an area that supports them. It also has a USB port, so you can plug in your storage-mode device and use it to run videos and music.
Fujitsu's gearing up for a Q3 launch of the first 200GB 2.5-inch drive, the MHV2200BT. The Reg seems to think it'll take 1.6W of juice, have a 1.5ms seek time, and be SATA with NCQ.
RCA's Lyra line the RD2112/2115/2117 players are "splash proof" units with 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB of memory respectively. They all feature two-line LCDs, but at least they're fairly cheap at around $110 for the 512MB version. The real excitement begins with the RD2415 carabiner-styled unit. It's a 512MB offering for the same $110, and seems to mirror the rest of the functionality offered by its peers, other than that sweet carabiner action, of course.
Belkin has decided not to style their new Flip USB KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) switch after a Mac mini, and instead, the Flip features a little LED-sporting, puck-shaped switch. Sadly the Flip doesn't break past the usual VGA capabilities of its predecessors, so you won't be taking advantage of those DVI ports that are fairly common these days. At least the price is right; the Belkin Flip should cost around $60 and is due for shelves this April.
By painting their new ED-X10 projector a bright orange, Hitachi hopes they can dissuade a couple of Halo-hungry frat brothers from "repurposing" the unit. Hitachi has also packed in a transition detector that will lock the projector if moved, requiring a pin-code to use it again. If all else fails, the projector includes a steel security bar so you can just bolt the unit down and be done with it. Otherwise this orange thing sounds fairly average, with an XGA resolution, 2000 ANSI lumens, and a 500:1 contrast ratio. The ED-X10 is available now in the UK for around $1200 US.
-Lytir1
