The Range Rover Sport HST uses the Supercharged Range Rover Sport as its canvas and adds a host of additional exterior and interior improvements, including: electric sunroof, an electronic active locking rear differential and privacy glass. The interior is distinguished by a unique hand polished lined oak trim.
The exterior design is the work of the same Land Rover team that created the original Range Stormer. It includes new flush-fitting front and rear bumpers and a new larger open-mouth grille. The front lower air intake is deeper and new front fog lamps are mounted in the spoiler.
The lower doors and lower rear boot are body-coloured, making the body sides appear deeper, accentuating the vehicles road-hugging qualities. A new tail spoiler is also fitted, and the special rectangular tail-pipes are close to those used on the original Range Stormer concept vehicle.
Further visual impact is provided by the 20inch 'Stormer' alloy wheels, chromed aluminium side vents and body-coloured door mirror cappings, unique to this derivative.
Tenchu Dark Shadow makes you think you could be even the deadliest assassin, employing beartraps to thwart your enemies through your sexy, sleek DS Lite, opening it and slamming it shut with the deadly conviction only a master ninja possesses. That, and we just get a kick out of the hilarious face the pursuer makes as he's butt-shoved back-kicked into the water.
If your xbox360 is overheating and you don't want to send it back to Redmond (or can't because of certain "modifications"), check out Nyko's Intercooler. Yup, basically it's just a fan system for better ventilating your Xbox, but the $20 you spend here could very well extend the life of your console.
Desktop Earth allows you to display a globe or map on your desktop that moves according to the time, either keeping your location centered with light changing to show the relative position of the sun, or showing from the sun's perspective with the earth rotating or moving by.
The new version has been released, dubbed appropriately Desktop Earth 2.0. In the new version, the imagery is based on NASA's Blue Marble Next and Earth's City Lights, and is generated from very high-resolution textures (2560x1280).
You can say this one is for the ladies, SissyFight 2000 has been around for a while now, but still enjoys a moderate amount of success. You play a little girl on the playground, and your goal is to tease, scratch, grab, and in general humiliate and attack other little girls for fame, glory, and some sort of sick sense of satisfaction. Political incorrectness aside, this can be a very fun game, and it integrates a social aspect. You can totally gang up on one girl with your little friends! SissyFight 2000 requires the Shockwave plugin, and is made by Gamelab, who will be relaunching themselves soon as they morph into a game publisher. You can read more about Gamelab's cool new direction in their press release.
Designer Suzanne Felsen has created a gold locket that is contemporary and stylish, available in either yellow or white gold. Felsen opened a new store (designed by Koning Eizenberg & Associates, the same architects who did the Standard hotel) on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles last fall, while her pieces can also be ordered off her web site. The version shown here has a .48 carat amethyst in the center of the one-inch pendant with a border of pave set rubies. It sells for $4800.
If you're a ping pong addict, this is another opportunity for you to deepen your involvement with a hobby you already love. This game will satisfy you because it feels authentic.
That authenticity comes from Rockstar's choice to embrace realism rather than a stylized or simplified arcade style. The company is calling Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis the "first true sports simulation title" that they've ever done.
The realism is manifested in the actual movement of the ball across the table: smashing the ping pong ball doesn't make flames shoot out from it, and ping pong paddles never glow with heat or special power. The environments are carefully rendered, high-polygon rooms full of authentic detail from premiere Ping Pong brands that brand the tournament arenas to the way in which multiple light sources cause multiple player shadows.
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis will hit North American retail shelves on May 22nd at a price of $39.99. Four days later (May 26), European customers can pick it up for €39.99 (£29.99 in the UK).
Kodak has filed with the FCC for a Bluetooth camera module that "is to be installed only by the professionals and used only with any product produced by Kodak." Yes, this thing's internal -- normally they'd just file for a camera with the radio, but this isn't the camera, this is the component. So unless Kodak's going to start offering Bluetooth upgrades for their point-and-shoot cameras (which would arguably cost in parts and labor more than the camera itself), it's dubious this is anything more than a proof-of-concept for future, yet unearthed-in-the-FCC cameras.
The Wattson is a juice-monitoring solution that definitely takes the cake for style and simplicity, showing a running total of wattage output represented in a digital readout or ambient light -- it can also connect to your PC and record usage patterns. Unfortunately you're going to have to spend £350 ($600 US) to get one, and that's if you're lucky enough to snag one of the limited run of 250 they manufactured.
The above image was an April Fool's joke that was printed in a 2003 version of Super PLAY, a Swedish game magazine. From Flickr: "Reality Pak, an accessory to the Nintendo GameCube makes it possible to smell a game! Insert the cartridge containing a dozen of odors into one of the exuding stations and connect them to one of the consoles controller ports. Then just insert a Reality Pak supported game, play and snort your way to gaming bliss!"
Windows XP has a stupendously aggravating behavior when first installed where it only searches files that match a certain set of file extensions instead of all the files. In the Windows GUI, there is a way to turn the filtering "feature" off, but we want it to be even easier! So download this .reg file from Chris Sells, a very well-known Windows developer, and run it on your system. Voila - file searching works as you would expect it would.
Sony has a new series of flash-based players, though for now, it looks like it's only in China (where it was apparently designed). The CE-P series includes a 1.5-inch color OLED display, MP3 and WMA playback (no word on PlaysForSure), FM tuner and voice recorder. Capacities and prices include the 256MB CE-P13 for about $100, 512MB CE-P15 for about $125, and the 1GB CE-P15 for about $150. No word on if or when they'll be available on a continent near you.
The good folks at TUAW pointed out a tool that makes rapid-fire conversion of WMA files into iTunes-friendly MP3 a snap. Called EasyWMA, this piece of $10 shareware lets you queue up a batch of WMAs to convert while you pour yourself a cup of coffee or play World of Warcraft. One small bit of caution, though--the program might not support the latest WMA 10 format. Check it out here.
VisiCalc is the first ever computer spreadsheet. Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, received permission from Lotus who now owns the copyright for VisiCalc to allow him to offer it for free on his website. The actual executable weighs in at a paltry 27 kilobytes, and would run on a PC from 1981 - in fact it is virtually identical to the one that shipped for DOS 1.0. The only difference is that the copy protection has been removed.
Directv has quietly announced a new HD DVR, indicating the reason is because this is not a consumer device. It will have 750GB of capacity and run between $1500 and $2000. And will run similar software to their new MPEG4 HD DVR due this fall, plus a cool display right on the front of the rack mountable.
Wall Street Journal has a story by Phred Dvorak on the subject of corporate culture and the ways in which companies that straddle multiple continents must decide how much of their home company's culture to bring into non-native markets where they also conduct operations.
The meat of the article is about Koei's insistence that Canadian employees follow Japanese rituals in the workplace, from a thrice-weekly "Good Morning" call-and-response chant with the boss, to a tendency to ask female employees "to serve tea to top executives' guests," to an annual cleaning ritual in which everyone must scrub office equipment clean, regardless of his or her rank.
Game companies mentioned in the article include Koei, Sega, Konami, Electronic Arts, Activision, and Microsoft.
South Korea wants 100% robot market integration by 2020
South Korea's got 14 years, to make good on the promise of 100% market integration for robots in the home some time between 2015 and 2020. The Ministry of Information and Communication has been spouting off about how the goal is to put a robot in every home by 2020.
-Lytir1
