Supreme Commander

Though we don’t believe this to be one of those “mind-controlled tech toys” Sega Toys was working on, it’s pretty evident that it will give your mind a workout. From what we can tell, the Brain Checker is a standalone gizmo designed to stretch your mental muscles with a myriad puzzles, but most everything beyond that is lost in translation. We do know, however, that it can be had in Japan for around Â¥5,775 ($51), but who knows if it’ll make it’s way to any other corners of the globe.

[Via Technabob]

Looks like there may have been a possible leak of the next version of Apple’s iPhone firmware, 1.1.3. According to Gear Live, it can now handle SMS to multiple recipients, the springboard (home screen) supports reordered icons and pagination (as well as web bookmarks), and Google maps gets hybrid view and that nifty cell-based location system. If this is all Steve plans to announce iPhone-wise at Macworld next month, we think there will be more than a few disappointed iPhone users out there. Then again, home screen pagination would kind of imply an SDK to make use of all those slots, so maybe the real news is under the hood.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

The lull before the craptacular gadget storm that is CES continues this week, but nothing will ever stop our inbox from filling up with hastily-designed and poorly-implemented gadgets. That’s right, it’s another edition of our newest running series, Crapgadget, in which tedium is lightly battered and fried to a crisp, delicious rage. Enjoy the crap out of this, okay? We nearly gouged our eyes out in the making.

Read - Strawberry Donut USB flash drive: Direct quote from the website: “everything you desire in the ear of customized flash storage solutions.” Yep, anyone who pays $50 for this thing is definitely getting something in the ear.
Read - Tiny USB cube speaker: How else to annoy everyone around you, while still remaining unable to hear anything? [Via Technabob]
Read - Venus JXD305 PMP: Take one part iPhone, two parts HTC, and one part miniSD-only storage and stir — voila, not quite KIRF enough. [Via PMP Today]
Read - Rose USB Microphone: Too cheap to spring for a Jawbone and real roses? Why not go for the rare combined epic fail?
Read - AMV-format only PMP: Finally, a generic Chinese PMP that allows us to watch all of our AMV-format video on the go. Our dreams are now reality. [Via PMP Today]

Marantz is jumping back into the display pool for 2008, announcing the new VP-11S2 model 1080p DLP projector. Compared to last year’s VP-11S1H, this model adds a second HDMI 1.3 input, and Texas Instrument’s DarkChip4 chipset, boosting it up to 800 lumens of brightness and a 12,000:1 contrast ratio. No price was released, but considering the previous models hover in the $15,000 price range, we expect no less quality — or cost — from this one either.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about the much-hated Real ID unified RFID national identification card, but that doesn’t mean the Department of Homeland Security has been sitting still: New York, Arizona, Washington, and Vermont all agreed earlier this month to beef up the security of driver’s licenses to comply with DHS’ new Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. WHTI is the same fun law that requires US citizens carry a passport to travel to Canada and Mexico, and while it’s not clear if it requires RFID licenses for states to comply, eWeek is reporting that both New York and Washington are headed towards including the tags anyway. Given the immense backlash Real ID came under for similar schemes, it’ll be interesting to see how WHTI plays out — but you can bet we’re holding onto the janky laminated driver’s license we got in college as long as we can.

[Via Autoblog]

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Don’t adjust your screens folks, as this actually isn’t a year-end case of déjà vu. Rather, we’re looking to give you an(other) imaginary shot at tweaking the OLPC XO now that it has moved beyond the initiative phase and been productized for the general consumer. In case you’ve been parked squarely under a rock for the last few months, you should know that the XO’s journey through production has been quite a lengthy one, and while a few countries have made substantial bulk purchases to inject these machines into their respective school systems, we’re interested in seeing how the average joe / jane located in a developed nation sees things.

Needless to say, One Laptop Per Child’s “Give One, Get One” program has been quite the success, and by now, we’re confident that some of you have already received your own. ‘Course, we’re sure there’s at least a few of you that chose this over that other low-cost laptop (and many that chose it over this), and we’re curious to know how you’d improve the newly commercialized XO now that it actually has a rival. Yeah, we too would love an even skimpier price tag, but beyond that, what hardware / software changes would you like to see on the next version? Could you stand to have a few more megabytes of RAM? Still yearning for dual-boot capability out of the box? How’s about a design scheme that doesn’t involve opaque white and bright green? As stated, we’re well aware that these things weren’t designed with LAN partiers in mind, but now that NickNeg is offering ‘em up to these very citizens — not to mention every other type of user in North America — why not toss out a few suggestions for making it more suitable for you?

We’re not sure what else there is to know about the WiBrain B1 UMPC — we’ve seen it hands-on, unboxed, and even slightly redesigned — but true gadget pr0n connoisseurs crave only the sweet nectar of FCC reports, and it looks like today is your special Friday. Yep, there it is, and there’s not much of the way in details we didn’t already have — except now you can tear up over both the beautifully ugly lines of this thing and the massively boring RF test results.

You may remember the lovable yet rascally ioDrive PCIe card from Fusion which we told you about back in the sun-drenched, salad days of September. Well, we’ve gotten a few more details on the “SAN in the palm of your hand,” and we thought we’d share. As you’ll recall, the card is meant to deliver very high, sustained read / write speeds, allowing the ioDrive to perform “nearly a thousand times faster than any existing disk drive.” Well, the good folks at Fusion have now given the system a price — the card starts at $2,400 — and offered up some fresh info, like that the ioDrive is NAND flash-based, will support multiple terabytes of virtual memory, and has access rates on par with DRAM. Which is real fast. Hit the link for a lot more info, and don’t be afraid to peruse the company’s .pdf data sheet.

The homebrew scene hasn’t gotten a whole lot accomplished with this latest round of home consoles — which isn’t surprising given the difficulty of the task and lack of incentives to succeed. Especially with the PS3 shipping with Linux compatibility, the Wii boasting VLC, and the 360 being such a chore to hack and keep hacked, there’s really not much of a point. The Wii was compromised pretty early on to be able to play burned discs and GameCube homebrew such as Linux, but until now Nintendo has managed to isolate Wii hardware such as the extra horsepower of the console and wireless connectivity from hackers. But the walls are coming down. Some hackers from Germany have just showed off their fully hacked Wii at the 24th Annual Chaos Communication Congress. Nothing fancy is running yet, all they’ve achieved so far is a proof of concept that they’ve bypassed the Wii’s protection with some encryption codes they swiped from the Wii’s memory. Apparently a bootable Linux DVD is on the way, and we can’t wait to see what homebrew coders manage to pull off with that Wiimote pointed where it belongs.

[Via WiiNintendo]