Volkswagen launches new Polo GTI
 VW continues its new model push with a performance version of its Polo. The company borrowed heavily from the Golf GTI to come up with its new Polo supermini, which hits selected markets this spring, after having debuted at the Tokyo Motor Show in late 2005. A significant step up from the last Polo GTI, which delivered 125 hp, the new GTI model pumps out 150 hp, good for 0-62 mph in 8.2 seconds. The baby GTI is powered by a turbocharged and intercooled 1.8-liter, 5-valve per cylinder, four cylinder engine. Other performance upgrades include 16-inch alloys sporting 205/45 rubber, and a lowered suspension with standard ESP. Oh, yes, and red brake calipers, too!
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Turn an NES cart into a USB HDD
 If you've got a leftover copy of The Legend of Zelda* lying around -- and you don't mind gutting it -- then you can follow this simple guide on how to mount a 2.5" HDD into a NES cart to make the nerdiest external hard drive case possible without blue LEDs. What you'll need is: proprietary bit to open the cartridge, Dremel (recommended), drill, 2.5" HDD, USB HDD adapter, and some free time. Read more..!
"Internet Renaissance Robot" shuns chores, entertains instead
 The ITR bot wants to present us with information by working with its very own "RTML" language to present an RSS type flow of info with motion, voice, and emotion. Of course, this means content developers will have to create RTML content to be displayed by the humanoid bot, but it's an interesting concept at least, and we look forward to seeing what happens. We can't say we're as optimistic as the Speecy Corporation, which dreams of the ITR being fifth major form of household media after radio, TV, PC, and mobile phone. The robot itself runs on a NetBSD-based OS, houses 168 LEDS, stereo speakers, a USB port, and a miniSD slot. Read more..!
MMOs and credit cards: everywhere you want to be
 Phillip Torrone has a forward-looking post up at Make, considering the future nexus of real currency, virtual currency, and boutique credit cards. The idea is simple, and analogous to any number of credit card incentive programs: buy things in the real world, to earn currency in your preferred virtual counterpart. But to sweeten the deal, credit card companies could offer unique cards adorned with your (much-labored-upon) avatar. Torrone writes, "With low(er) cost one-off printing and credit card companies looking to make their offerings more valuable, getting a credit card with your avatar on it is worth a lot. This isn't a new idea, personalized checks and license plates have been around for decades - in the last few years it's been possible to get custom photos on US postage stamps."Read more..!
Have Mario send your mail (via stamps from Japan)
 Mario will soon be able to power your mail through the postal service in the Far East. 10-stamp sheets of 80 Yen stamps are now available for pre-order in Japan, where gaming otakus will soon be able to adorn their snail mail with the likes of goombas, magic mushrooms, and mustachioed men. The set will be out next month. Read more..!
Final Fantasy XII under attack
 Despite Final Fantasy XII's critical and commercial success, haters have been flooding Internet forums with a variety of complaints. Next Generation's Tim Rogers decided to take on these criticisms, defending Square Enix's blockbuster RPG. Rogers addresses the following issues in his ambitious defense: Read more..!
Baby Couture from the Boom Boom Room
 At this year’s Golden Globes, vendors set up a Boom Boom Room that featured lots of stuff for kids and babies. Crib Rock Couture has updated nursery rhyme characters on fashionable logo-tees, reminiscent of vintage rocker tee’s and styled after classic tour shirts. The new 3 Blind Mice tee, from the “Carving Knife Tour” is $33. Diapees & Wipees makes fashionable bags for toting around the most important baby tools, diapers and wipes, without lugging a carrier that looks like a picnic cooler. The bags come in bright, vibrant colors and retail for $14.99. Snugglebug Baby makes jeweled pacifier clips, which keep fashion-forward parents from losing their baby’s favorite object and lets baby start collecting bling early in life. The clips are $25.00 and come in boys and girls styles, like the Swarovski clip pictured here, with additional customization available. Read more..!
Noble announced new M15 supercar
 According to Top Gear, the new Noble M15 that just debuted across the pond will take Noble’s recipe for fun to a new level. Featuring the same twin-turbo, 3.0L V6 producing 455 bhp that debuted in the M14 concept last year, the M15 might be crowned Britain’s baddest supercar. The engine is now mounted longitudinally and hooked up to a brand new gearbox packing six speeds for lunch. Pricing of the new M15 is set at £75,000 ($130,000 USD). Will we see the M15 in the States? There’s no official word either way, but the current Noble M12 GTO-3R and M400 are imported into the U.S. less an engine and transaxle by 1G Racing, so there’s hope we’ll see the M15 here, as well. Read more..!
Microsoft's malware fix: nuke your drive
 The latest major change to the Microsoft Anti-Spyware app, now called Windows Defender, has turned the tool into an invaluable one on my machine. So, MS has a real fix: wipe your drive, and reinstall. According to the story on eWeek, Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft. The choice quote from Mike is, "When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit." Mike goes on to explain some malware is just "way too hard" to remove, thus requiring a total wipe and reinstall. They had to do this with a certain unnamed government branch, wiping and restoring 2,000 machines. Read more..!
Microsoft Virtual Server now free
 Microsoft has taken the wraps off their new pricing scheme for Virtual Server 2005 R2 Enterprise Edition, and the new price is a surprise coming out of Redmond: Free! The Standard Edition of the same product has been terminated, and moving forward there will only be the Enterprise Edition. This move is being done due to pressure from Novell and Red Hat flavors of Linux which are both shipping with virtualization built in to the operating system. The Longhorn server class operating systems will ship with Windows hypervisor technology, which is a similar form of virtualization that will be based on the same virtual hard disk file format that Virtual Server uses, giving users an upgrade path. Read more..!
Virtually all current XP drivers on one CD
 Driverpacks has a project to try to amalgamate the latest version of every known software driver all onto one CD to create an unattended Windows XP setup disk that would work on literally any PC. And it looks like he's making extremely good headway on this project! So far there are 8 driver packs that make up the entire project, supporting: Chipset, CPU, Graphics, LAN, MassStorage, Sound, and WLAN. The final file, Driverpacks BASE contains all the required documentation and batch files to slipstream the drivers onto a Windows XP setup CD, and even includes an UpdateChecker to ensure everything is as up-to-date as it can be. Read more..!
Very large freeware guide
 SWC from Seetips has a list of what he considers to be the best freeware software available, focusing on Windows although he does touch on multi-platform software as well. SWC has helpfully broken up this list into 6 categories: Internet, Security, Digital Imaging, Multimedia, Computer Tools, and Desktop. Have a look if you're interested in upgrading your arsenal of free applications. Read more..!
Capture arbitrary parts of the screen with ScreenJot
 A crafty AOL developer has created a little app called ScreenJot, which pretty successfully imitates the behavior for taking screenshots in OS X. With ScreenJot, you can hit Ctrl-Shift-5 and get a little crop tool, so you can grab just a section of the screen. This will drop a BMP into a folder called "scraps" on your desktop. While I wish it would save something more useful (like a JPEG), but that problem is easily solved with any of the dozens of batch conversion tools out there. Read more..!
Pioneer launches PDP-5000EX for June
 Pioneer's launching their PDP-5000EX 1080p Pure Vision Black 1080p set in June with component, composite, HDMI, and HDCP DVI inputs. Of course there's no telling what it's going to set you back, but they just better hope Fujitsu & Hitachi don't swoop in for the kill and release theirs first. Read more..!
 ajaxSketch is a browser-based drawing tool, with a few kinks in the system. Bringing in a JPG, I wasn't allowed to add text. For basic shapes and drawings, this works OK. As expected, nowhere near the functionality of GIMP or even Paint for that matter, but an interesting tech demo. One interesting bit is that your docs are saved as SVG's. Read more..!
Alienware's Sentia m3200 business-minded laptop reviewed
 ArsTechnica has a thorough look at this new ultraportable, and seem to come out generally impressed though not overly enthusiastic, as this model does have a few severe drawbacks. Overall, the system's 2.0GHz Pentium M fares decently for most non-cycle hungry tasks such as web browsing, basic multimedia, and Photoshop, but the built-in Intel graphics chip means that 3D CAD work or post-2004 games are pretty much out of the question. Also getting knocks were the ~3 hour battery life, limited vertical viewing angle on the LCD, and sub-par Media Center replacement, the bootless, Linux-based PowerCinema multimedia suite. Still, if you want a light notebook and won't be straying too far from a power outlet, the m3200 seems like a pretty good option, and is also one of the cheapest ways to sport that attention-getting, blazing-blue alien head. Read more..!
 InterfaceLIFT is a site full of mods for OS X, Windows and Linux a raft of customizations for your PC, from wallpaper to icons, Mac OS X themes, and Windows visual styles. Pretty much everything is covered, and done with a good dollop of style. The sheer number of possible downloads are mind boggling, and the consistently high quality makes for a very pleasant browsing experience. Read more..!
LCD glasses might replace bifoacls
 The LCD glasses, developed by researchers at the University of Arizona, use electrodes that can alter the configuration of the LCDs, automatically refocusing based on what the wearer is looking at. However, other researchers scoff that the lenses would end up being too heavy and thick (and the prototype pictured here does look kind of goofy). The other downside: if the batteries give out, you're left with plain glass. Read more..!
Re-Mission, blast away cancer Serious Games style
 Re-Mission is a video game designed to help young cancer patients cope with their illness while educating them, and "increas[ing] players' sense of control over their circumstances." You play a nanobot named Roxxi sent into a cancer patient's body -- think Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace -- to blast away at "rapidly multiplying rogue cells." When James Paul Gee mentioned at GDC that he wanted to see "Serious Games" like Full Spectrum Virus, he was probably envisioning something just like Re-Mission. The game, created by HopeLab, was conceived by Pam Omidyar (wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar) as a way to help kids dealing with cancer. Pat Christen, the current president of HopeLab, writes in this month's Wired, "In April, [we'll] begin distributing Re-Mission for free in treatment centers and over the Web. We hope this game will be our first effort in a series of unusual approaches to helping sick kids - and a good excuse for teens with cancer to grab the game controller and start blasting away." Read more..!
Hitachi's DV-DH-1000D 1TB HDD/DVD recorder
 Hitachi’s new 1TB, DV-DH1000D HDD/DVD video recorder, yeah, 1,000GB of freakin' storage to fix that high-def recording jones. The rest of the details are sketchy. The best we can make out from the translation is that the device sports HDMI and includes both terrestrial analog and digital Hi-Vision (HDTV) tuners for simultaneous recording and/or playback. But hey, it's only available in Japan. Read more..!
Microsoft "HD" w/ WiFi Notebook Optical Mouse 3000
 Microsoft has upgraded its Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse with "High Definition Optical Technology" tracking technology, which the company boasts puts its mice "two generations ahead" of other pointing devices. According to Microsoft, the Wireless Notebook Optical Mouse works at 1,000 dpi, captures 6,000 frames per second, uses a low-powered chip to conserve battery power, and offers smoother tracking on any surface. Not bad for a $30 mouse that doesn't even use a laser. A desktop version, the Wireless Optical Mouse 2000 will also be available for $30, while the Laser Mouse 5000 will be priced at $50. Read more..!
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-Lytir1
