anon mouse-cow-aard writes to tell us the Register is reporting that the Nokia 770, originally scoffed at by many as useless, is doing quite well. There is even an open source platform development site, maemo, that offers quite a bit. It uses wlan for connectivity and has 'cpu transparency' so you can build apps for normal Debian (albeit with a custom set of libraries) and then run a sort of 'checkout' for the ARM processor, and it will run on the handheld. There is ssh and VOIP coming soon. Overall it is shaping up to be pretty cool.

JorgeDeLaCancha writes "Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and MGM Home Entertainment have recently announced the release of the first titles on the Blu-Ray media coinciding with the Blu-Ray hardware release in the spring. Some of the films to be released include classics such as "The Fifth Element" and "Robocop" to more modern films such as "Black Hawk Down." Other corporations, such as Fox, have announced similar plans."

Aviran Mordo writes to tell us that the Governor of New York is pushing hard for the widespread availability of both ethanol and biodiesel on the New York State Thruway and 100 more locations around the state. From the article: "Costs and further details of the plan, which Pataki first sketched out in his State of the State address on Wednesday, will not be disclosed until he makes his budget proposal later this month. If the plan is approved by the Legislature, it will give New Yorkers one of the nation's most diverse ranges of fuel choices. Only Minnesota offers an ethanol-rich blend known as E85 at more than 100 stations. Likewise, biodiesel is offered at only a few hundred of the nation's roughly 180,000 stations."

PontifexPrimus writes "A new P2P / media player project could allow mobile music devices to automatically transfer media files from other players running the same software. While there seems to be a certain risk (mislabeling files, creating intentionally corrupt songs) there also seems to be a huge potential to this idea (get on the subway to work and when you arrive there your available music has doubled). Of course, this also is a nightmarish scenario for the RIAA-like organizations, especially since such swapping occurs without active user participation, in a drive-by way."

Kijori writes "Motorola has announced plans to enable users of its mobile phones to access Google's internet search engine at the touch of a single handset button, the BBC is reporting. "The US mobile phone maker said it would introduce Google's software technology to many of its new handsets. The companies said they wanted to encourage more mobile users to access the internet using their phones." While mobile-phone internet use is currently low, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is optimistic: "People are going to spend all their time on it eventually," he said."

ooglek asks: "FM radio seems to be falling out of favor, with many stations putting their streams online. Unfortunately, many choose bad codecs and low bandwidth feeds, which make them practically unappealing. There seem to be a fair number of PCI-based TV Tuner cards that come with a built in FM receiver, and I'm interested in what it might take to stream my local FM stations to the Windows, Unix and Mac boxes in my house over my LAN, as well as my TiVo and Slim Devices SqueezeBox. Is this merely a pipe-dream?"

uglysad writes "The Age has a piece discussing the fact that, from the home entertainment industry's standpoint, the DVD is dead. So what is next? From the article 'It will come as a shock to film fans who have spent their Christmases stocking up on their movie collections, but the technology industry is in agreement: the DVD is dead. Consumer electronics companies have begun to show off what they believe will be the next generation of home video technologies. But despite the common belief that the DVD is history, the industry is split over what the next step should be.'"

Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Gazette has a new filesystem benchmarking article, this time using the 2.6 kernel and showing ReiserFS v4. The second round of benchmarks include both the metrics from the first filesystem benchmark and the second in two matrices." From the article: "Instead of a Western Digital 250GB and Promise ATA/100 controller, I am now using a Seagate 400GB and Maxtor ATA/133 Promise controller. The physical machine remains the same, there is an additional 664MB of swap and I am now running Debian Etch. In the previous article, I was running Slackware 9.1 with custom compiled filesystem utilities. I've added a small section in the beginning that shows the filesystem creation and mount time, I've also added a graph showing these new benchmarks." We reported on the original benchmarks in the first half of last year.

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has officially introduced their Centrino Duo platform. The new Centrino uses the Yonah processor which I guess is now called Core Duo. AnandTech has a review of notebooks based on it and the results are pretty impressive. They tested two identical notebooks, one based on Centrino Duo and one based on Centrino. The Duo notebook lasted 30 minutes longer on battery and was faster in the benchmarks. You can't beat longer battery life and better performance."

Ryan @ CES writes "Today at the Consumer Electronics Show, Dell and NVIDIA announced a new XPS system coming later this year that will sport not one, not two, but FOUR GeForce 7800 GTX 512 GPUs running in a quad-SLI configuration. There are two physical graphics cards in the system still, but each has two seperate PCBs with a GPU and 512 MB of memory on each. PC Perspective has some information including pictures of the cards and Dell system as well as specs and details on how NVIDIA handles the new SLI data configurations. No word yet on power consumption and heat levels, of course."

SJasperson writes "At last, you don't need to mess around with Dremel tools and Lexan (and destroy your valuable data) to get a clear window in your hard drive. Western Digital has released the Raptor X 150GB SATA hard drive. 10,000 RPM, 4.6ms seek time, 16MB buffer, and, yes, a clear window so you can see what's going on inside. Made out of a special polycarbonate lens with an ESD-dissipative coating, the lens is designed to let case modders and their groupies see the drive platters and heads without sacrificing data integrity."

Road Warrior writes "The road warrior will appreciate the Mogo MouseBT. The Bluetooth-enabled mouse is a business-card sized mouse that stores and recharges inside your laptop's PC card slot. It will recharge in less than an hour and it will sell for $69.99. It will be interesting to see how the ergonomic of the mouse feels. The product will be introduced at CES."

JorgeDeLaCancha writes "Microsoft has recently confirmed plans to bring an external HD-DVD drive to the Xbox 360. This has been previously speculated numerous times, with Bill Gates himself stating 'future versions of Xbox 360 will incorporate an additional capacity of an HD-DVD player.' Do consumers even want another format war?"

Enigma50 writes "From the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) comes the world's first USB flash wristband. The uniquely designed Imation Flash Wristband provides an easy way to transport your precious digital files, such as photos, music or videos, securely around your wrist or attached to a backpack. Sure to be a hit with the kids!"

Sterling D. Allan writes "Sea Solar Power Inc., run by three generations of James Hilbert Andersons, has developed a solar power technology that does not fluctuate with the weather, but is available constantly. Their solution is to harness the solar energy stored in the sea by tapping the thermal gradient that exists naturally between the surface and deep waters, using a reverse refrigeration cycle. The modeling and testing done by the Anderson family over three generations since 1962 predicts that the cost of energy generation through this method will be within a price range comparable to nuclear, coal, natural gas, and other contemporary grid power plants. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, or OTEC, was invented in 1881 by a French scientist, Jacques Arsene D'Arsonval. SSP should be ready to build their first full prototype 2-3 years from now."

AdamBLang writes "Previously covered on Slashdot, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle today signed legislation that "will require the software of touch-screen voting machines used in elections to be open-source. Municipalities that use electronic voting machines are responsible for providing to the public, on request, the code used." Madison's Capital Times reports "the bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.""

JamesO writes to tell us that Infinium Labs has announced the release of their "Phantom Lapboard" for later this year. From the article: "Infinium Labs' Phantom game service is still to launch, despite claims years ago that it would appear at Christmas 2004, but this hasn't stopped the company from continuing with the system's development. One of the most talked about aspects of the system is its wireless keyboard and mouse combo called the Lapboard. Infinium Labs has decided that the Lapboard is so good that it will be released as a peripheral for PC users in quarter-two 2006. What makes the Lapboard unique is that the keyboard can be angled upwards to create a surface for the mouse to operate on underneath. The device is also wireless and can operate at a distance of up to 30 feet."

Michael writes to tell us TheTechLounge is reporting that Fuji Film has announced the release of Blu-Ray and HD DVD media by mid 2006. From the article: "Consumers are driving demand for interactive gaming and entertainment applications that require enormous storage capacity," noted Steve Solomon, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Recording Media Division, Fuji Photo Film U.S.A. "Fujifilm coating technology will ensure the precision and quality of signal strength in these new media formats. The success of new recording technologies depends on the availability of affordable, reliable media and our scientists are already working to perfect next-generation storage solutions, long before they hit the market."

An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has done it once again. They have an article running down the process of water cooling an Xbox 360, and with surprising effectiveness and remarkable styling." From the article: "We had plans to water cool an Xbox 360 for over a year now. Little did we know that not only will this water cooling project be more fun than the original, but it may even be practical. Imagine that. With reports of heat related issues and a heat sink that can get almost too hot to touch after marathon gaming sessions, the Xbox 360 water cooling project now had a sense of purpose. We bought a retail Xbox 360 specifically for this project. The minute we got it back to the [H] labs we tore into it and, with a little help from the fine folks at Koolance, we have put together a water cooling solution that will handle anything the Xbox 360 can throw at it and literally knock your socks off." Actual implimentation with hand-holding. Hexus.net was discussing a kit to do this a few days ago.

inventgeek writes "Inventgeek.com has an interesting article on force feedback controllers. Their how-to instructions explain how to build a force feedback simulator on the cheep! While this mod is for the PC, it is possible to do something like it for console systems also!" From the article: "This project, just by its nature, will be presented a little differently than our other projects. The scale of this project presented some difficulty to properly report using our normal format and delayed us while we made a more flexible framework. So what we have done (Microsoft take note) is take the entire project and broken it down to a bunch of subsystems, and basically produced a mini segment for each section with full documentation and pics and plans. This overview of systems is in essence the master plan."