Gadgets

Bill Nye’s paper recycling factory toy (right) looks like a promising way to teach kids environmental friendliness while they’re ripe and impressionable. The kit includes an assortment of colorful, plastic tools to mash, dye, hydrate and mold old paper into new stuff like notebooks and post cards. Potentially gives the word "greenwashing" new meaning, doesn’t it?

Photo: Discover This

More details have surfaced about Apple’s new iMac rumored for release next month.

Economic Daily News, a Chinese publication that reported the iMac rumor last week, says the new all-in-one desktops will sport magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis. Further backing the rumor of new iMacs, the publication also cited the suppliers of the machine’s cooling module.

The publication says component providers Foxconn and Catcher Technology are supplying the aluminum chassis.

The handheld emWave claims to reduce your stress, give you a personal performance boost and even ‘balance your emotions.’

As one currently experiencing rattling-teeth nervousness as a result of trying to find last minute Christmas gifts, this could be really useful it I didn’t have such a hard time trusting it.

Developed by the founder of the Institute of HeartMath (IHM), the emWave is a tiny gadget that measures the ‘rhythm coherence’ of the nervous system and in particular, the pace of the heart.

Imagine, if you will, taking a post Christmas lunch walk. The day is dark and cloudy, but you feel full of festive cheer. Until, that is, a strange figure stumbles towards you through the gloom.

As the man approaches, his words whipped away on the biting winter wind, you notice his strange attire. His mouth and nose are covered by a dust mask, his eyes are hidden beneath the peak of a white baseball cap and his shambling form is obscured by a plastic poncho.

BlackBerry users can soon join the Sling fold. SlingMedia is set to make the SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry smartphones available for public beta starting Dec. 30.

SlingPlayer Mobile lets users with Wi-Fi or 3G watch TV programming and access on-demand content from TiVo or their media players such as Apple TV on their phones.

For now, the beta will be a free download to users in U.S., Canada and U.K. Though Sling hasn’t said how much the software will ultimately cost, expect it to be around $30.

Research In Motion’s latest touchscreen phone Storm won’t be supported but the Bold, Curve 8900 and the Pearl phones will be compatible with the new player.

One of the maxims of the electronics business is that content is king and often drives the buying of hardware. Another says that for big-ticket items, their price is the most important.

This week, we’ll have a great test of these competing theories with the release of The Dark Knight, the second highest-grossing domestic movie of all time, and definitely the most badass.

The video was released in Blu-ray and DVD formats less than 24 hours ago, and it is already setting records. Taking into account all purchases from the U.S., Canada and the U.K., about 3 million copies of The Dark Knight have already been sold.

Warner Brothers is anticipating the movie will reach total sales of 13.5 million worldwide by the end of the first week.

For the first day, Blu-ray disks account for 600,000 of the total, or a bit less than 21%.

Rumors are flying that Apple will announce a new, smaller version of the iPhone at MacWorld, the company’s big annual conference Jan. 5 to 9, 2009.

MacWorld is traditionally where Apple CEO Steve Jobs makes his biggest product announcements — including, two years ago, the announcement of the first iPhone. And it does make sense that the iPhone will receive some kind of upgrade.

But the "Nano iPhone" that iDealsChina is so excited about is probably a fake.

A woman’s clothing company in Hollola, Finland, is embedding RFID tags all over its stores. They’re sewn into the clothes, placed on the shelves, and laced in the screens of the dressing rooms.

But the company’s CEO says it has very little to do with any control-freak Big Brother paranoid tendency the company might have.

One of the risks of writing about future tech is that the predictions are often just plain wrong. In the modern-day, fast paced world of gadget-blogging, these mistakes are quickly forgotten. But in slower times, when we got our news weekly from the TV, or monthly from paper magazines, things stuck in the collective memory for a lot longer.

The following list of erroneous predictions seems hilarious to us now, but over and over we were promised all kinds of electronic magic which failed to appear, or simply went hilariously wrong.

Photography can be an expensive hobby. While it’s entirely possible to live your photographic life with one camera, one lens and one computer, it’s pretty unlikely. After a while you’ll want to play with strobes, check out wideangle shooting, and on. All this will require new kit.

With that in mind, take a look at the DIY Photography’s Six Photography Projects You Can Print Or Fold, a list of easy and at times quite advanced projects. Most have to do with lighting and require you to have a flashgun already, but you can save big bucks on accessories (and a manual strobe can be had for only a few dollars anyway).