Oh yeah, Nintendo has retrofitted a bunch of classic Super Famicom Controllers (SNES for some of us) to make them Wii Virtual Console compatible. These were meant to be exclusive for Club Nintendo Platinum members in Japan, but the people over at National Console Support Inc offers them on pre-order (starts shipping April 2008). Sweet.
Now, where’s the NES model?
As if the new iPod Shuffle isn’t tiny enough, designer Alexei Mikhailov has some ideas of his own for the iPod’s future. The appropriately-named iStick folds the aesthetic of the iPhone and iPod Touch into a finger-sized dongle. All four sides of this conceptual gadget are touchable, allowing for plenty of interface tinkering in a tiny package, at the expense of a little carpal tunnel from all the wrist-twisting. The silver cube on the end is a scroll wheel, which would presumably allow for easy volume adjustment without a glance at the interface, but I keep envisioning a USB cover instead. To complete the dream device, the earbuds are wireless — and just like the Shuffle, it would probably cost extra to buy compatible third-party headphones.
Scandyna celebrates 40 years in the audio business with a special and very limited 40th anniversary Minipod Jubilee edition. If you want one of these matte black speakers with gold plated speaker, spike stands and Scandyna badge you better hurry up – there’s only 200 of them made. Get one for £550.
What ongoing legal battle? Psystar is pumping out a brand-new hackintosh, running Mac OS X Leopard for considerably less money than the real deal. Open(3) features a minimum 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, a 500 GB hard drive and a GeForce 8400GS 256 MB graphics card. With those minimum specs, sans keyboard, mouse and monitor, the machine sells for $599. It’s more like $1,050 to deck it out with twice the RAM and storage, a Core2Quad processor and a top-tier graphics card, but that’s still about $1,000 less than Apple’s offerings. They must be fuming in Cuptertino, so order now before all hell breaks lose.
Here’s the Lamp Lamp by Tokyo-based 100%. It’s a 30 Watt E26/E27 bulb with an extra decoy base blown on it, fitting pretty much all sockets.
Got to get myself a couple of these and get rid of unnecessary lamp shades.