If you're thinking about giving out any strange, or just plain wacky items, then here are some gift ideas that may inspire you to give your friend something that is more original than a shirt or necktie. Some of these items are not yet available in the market, but do check them out so you'd at least get an idea out of them.

• Black Sabbath - Iron Man
  
• Deep Purple - Smoke on the Water
• Motorhead - Ace of Spades
  
• Van Halen - You Really Got Me
  
• Boston - More Than a Feeling
  
• And 5 original Guitar Hero Air Guitar freestyle riffs

We're not sure whether the ZUSE toaster is already out in the market, or if/when it's going to be released if it isn't yet. We suggest keeping an eye out for it though, you don't always get to see household appliances that actually make day-to-day stuff a bit...happier.

Sweety

If you find yourself always stressed out and there's no one to talk to about it, or if you ran out of breakable things to help you cope with life's daily let downs then you may want to turn to Sweety, a cute, cuddly desktop shrink.

Sweety (designed by Haishu Zhang) actually listens as you let out your rants for the day, and analyzes your troubles in its sweet, colorful way by displaying graphic patterns depending on your problems.

If the problem proves to be too much and you need to get physical about it, you can feel free to squeeze or beat the stuffing (well, not really) out of Sweety. See, Sweety will do anything to help you ease the pain!

Once you've calmed down a bit this desktop shrink will let you play games, too. Yes, Sweety is a friend who's willing to listen to your every problem, even those sordid secrets gone awry that you couldn't talk about with just about anyone.

It's not known when this cute little friend will hit the market, but when or if it does, we're definitely going to get one for ourselves and our friends.



Mix Tape USB Stick

Several years ago the most popular method of showing someone that you care is by giving them a mixed tape, a cassette tape recording of all the songs that you'd like to dedicate to that one very special person.

Yes, its a tad too sappy, but that's the way things were done back then. It's a good thing that the guys from SUCK UK Studio is bringing this sentimental custom back, with a little twist in the form of the Mix Tape USB Stick.

The Mix Tape USB Stick is a USB flash drive that snugly fits into a retro cassette tape-style casing. It's fitted with all sorts of accoutrements that you'd expect from a blank cassette, such as cover and the cassette tape labels where you can doodle all sorts of cheesy notes and declarations of love (if applicable). Even the USB stick has a retro cassette-style label slapped on it, which is nice.

FROM APPLETELL - Cube, a first-person shooter for desktops, has been ported to the iPhone.  The best news of all is that it drops at a very attractive price…free.  But, as you might suspect, it’s not perfect. MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

I’m a fan of Top 10 lists, especially gadget related ones but I found this unusual list of the top 10 greatest geeks of all time. I’m a bit surprised that names like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn’t make it to the geek list but it’s still worth a quick look.

The top 10 greatest geeks of all time [itnews.com.au]

Filed under: Desktops

Continue reading Duct tape server II gets proudly introduced

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

The Chicago Tribune gives us an update on the two young men featured in Hoop Dreams, the award-winning documentary about high school basketball stars trying to make their way through life and, hopefully, to the NBA.

Gates, the reserved one, has become an authoritative force who leads a church in the Cabrini area. He is married with four kids. Agee, a spirited charmer, doesn't have a regular job but is launching a line of "Hoop Dreams" apparel. He has five kids by five different women.

Agee also spends time working on his non-profit foundation that works with underprivileged kids. Hoop Dreams is available in its entirety for US viewing on Hulu.

A daily feed from the Telegraph took me into a dilemma whether to post this news or not, mainly due to the OPEC Oil Cartels reducing the oil output by at least 1 million barrels a day, which works to about 2% of their output. What it means to the economy is that petrol , a by-product of Crude Oil will go up, from the roller coaster price of USD147 last year to USD69.50 this week. What they want is to raise the prices to USD90 and above so they can sustain more income, but costing more dent into the world economy.

Quoted from a reliable Financial Analyst, the world will suffer a far worse fate than of the 1930 great depression.Said to be that the economy will only start to recover in 2011 and thus…these three years will be absolutely painful. I just wonder, since Najib and Pak Lah said we are not in recession, does that mean when they declare it after the UMNO elections, that we only will recover in 2013 when everyone else is already having happy hour?

In retrospective approach, Cartel action will drive up our petrol prices by at least 30 sen and this will be in a matter of days or even hours when they start to cut the pipes. Iranian and Venezuelan governments stopped their taps dry this morning to protest of the cheap prices.

I’m sticking to my guns and cut my costs!

Filed under: Handsets, Pantech

Pantech shows off latest round of concept phones originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Tue, 28 Oct 2008 13:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The Chair of the FCC has been offering hot words about Comcast's response to a channel pricing inquiry. Now everybody is trying to cool off.

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AT&T, the nation's largest network operator, has come together with Korean cell phone manufacturer to launch the LG Incite.

Here?s an update to the story about the FCC versus Comcast that we posted on Wednesday. The FCC has officially ruled today and it turns out that Comcast will not be fined for throttling peer-to-peer network traffic, but it will have to stop discriminating against certain internet traffic until the company comes up with a compliance plan ?to fully disclose its practices? to customers.

Bloomberg reports that the five-member FCC panel voted 3-2 against Comcast. Critics of Comcast?s traffic-regulating activities are calling the ruling a ?bellwether case?. It?s important to note that although Comcast has been ordered to stop throttling traffic, it appears that the reasoning behind the ruling has more to do with the fact that the throttling wasn?t being disclosed to customers, not that the throttling was actually taken place. So it appears that bandwidth management can and will continue, it?ll just have to be more transparent.

The Sony DR-BT160AS Bluetooth Active Style Headphones popped up on Giz a few months back, and they looked promising if a bit odd, streaming stereo A2DP audio while packing a rechargeable lithium ion battery and a microphone for calls. But we had no pricing or availability information. Now, through the magic of press releases, we know that the headphones are available now for "approximately $130." That's not the most reassuring pricing announcement we've ever seen, but we'll take what we can get. [Sony]

While I try to avoid comparing every touchscreen phone to the iPhone, it’s a bit challenging when they throw them on the same carrier for the exact same price. Coming in at $199 on a two-year contract with AT&T (after $100 dollar rebate), it was all of about a half second before the first “ZOHNOES iPHONE CLONE!!!” remarks started pouring in.

So, what does it bring to the table? Windows 6.1, 3G, aGPS, WiFi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth 2.0, and a 3.0″ touchscreen. Oh, and a massive bezel. In the ever crowding touchscreen smartphone market, I fail to see what the draw here would be; any Incite fans want to tell me what I’m missing?

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The Wall Street Journal reports today that “Sprint Will Kick Off a Series of Eight Football Phone-Casts”:

For the first time Thursday, a National Football League game — the Cleveland Browns vs. the Denver Broncos — will be broadcast on Sprint mobile phones as part of the wireless company’s exclusive partnership with the league. That partnership deal is valued at about $500 million over five years.

Over the next seven weeks, Sprint will phone-cast the eight games that are televised solely on the NFL Network, the league’s cable channel. For the past three seasons, the NFL has struggled to persuade major cable operators to include its channel in their basic programming packages.

With the NFL Network is available in only about 40% of American households, Sprint executives hope the NFL games can do for their company what the league’s Sunday Ticket package has done for satellite-television provider DirecTV Group. Sunday Ticket, which is exclusive to DirecTV, allows dedicated fans to see every NFL game on Sunday afternoons, and has been crucial to DirectTV’s growth.

Is blogging really dying?  Is TechCrunch headed to the dead pool? That seems to be a vibe that has been circulating lately.
According to my feed reader, NewsGator?s awesome FeedDemon, I am certainly seeing what appears to be less activity and a bunch of repetition in my subscriptions.  So, does that mean blogging is going into the can or is something else going on here?

I decided to do some investigation on my own to get to the bottom of this… I think one of the strongest indicators of blogging?s health is the amount of comments that are posted. So, I went Geraldo style and wrote a script (see script at bottom) to scrape the number of comments from the popular tech blog, TechCrunch, over the last three years.

As you can see from the chart below (piped the script output -> Excel), the number of comments on TC is steadily increasing. TechCrunch is definitely not headed underground; it is doing very well!  Blogging is not dying… yippee, but it is most definitely changing.

So, what is going on? Well, I think blogging is just turning into another channel for the same type of media it was supposed to replace. Blogs are rolling up, trusted authorities are rising to the top, and the rest is just noise or repetition or gone bye bye. We already have too much going on in our lives, so it is only natural that this organic filtering would occur.

Here is the Ruby script if you want to see for yourself:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘open-uri’
require ‘hpricot’

@url_base = “http://www.techcrunch.com/”
@response = ‘’

begin
File.open(”comments.txt”, “w”) do |file|
2008.downto(2005) do |year|
12.downto(1) do |month|
url = “#{@url_base}#{year}/#{month}”
begin
open(url) { |f|
@response = f.read
doc = Hpricot(@response)
(doc/”div/div/div[3]/ul/li/div”).each do |comment|
post = comment.innerHTML.split(’,')
file.write “#{post[0].strip},#{post[1].strip}\t#{post[2].split(” “)[0].strip.sub(”No”, “0″)}\r\n”
end
}
rescue Exception => e
print e, “\n”
end
end
end
end
rescue Exception => e
print e, “\n”
end

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Sustainability in Uncertain Times  —  Today we are posting our audited financial statements and tax form for 2007.  As in past years, I'll use this event as an opportunity to review both our financial status and our overall effectiveness in moving the mission forward.  —  Financial