If recently you’ve found yourself at a loss for activities to do, or just felt like being plain weird and jumping around your house like a lunatic, whilst standing on a flimsy plastic skateboard, kicking an imaginary football (soccer-ball for all your Americans) and headbutting your doorframe, then have we got news for you! Nintendo’s Wii Fit (for the Wii… go figure) launches on December 1st, with a Japanese retail price of 8,800 yen, or approximately… Uh… Um… Ah… Hm. Round-about $75, I think. Whether you’re hell-bent on ski-jumping through your 50″ HDTV (lawsuit, anyone?) or just some quiet yoga, there’s a bit of fun for everyone in the Nintendo Wii.

Now I’ve stopped sounding like an advert, I’ll voice my concerns… These flimsy plastic skate-board ‘balance-board’ things that supposedly help increase accuracy. What’s the chance of one smashing my TV? What about some confirmation the game will ship outside of Japan, too? Something… Anything!?!

UPDATE: Oooh. Spiffy. The board doesn’t actually look all that life-threatening, in comparison to a gun-bearing nunchuck.

The Sony XEL-1 OLED TV. Some of you may have heard or read about it on the likes of Engadget, others amongst you perhaps heard elsewhere of the super-thin OLED TVs… The XEL-1 from Sony, weighing in at two kilograms and strutting its stuff at just 3mm thin, takes the size 0 debate to a whole new level, on geeky grounds of course. Whilst only 11″ wide, the screen packs in a not too shabby contrast ratio of 1,000,000 to 1, and features a resolution of 940×540.

The XEL-1 measures an impressive 287×253×140mm and ships as-is on a pedestal with a flexible arm. Whilst certainly not something that’d fit nice ‘n’ swish in my living room (Heck! Where’s my 52-incher!?!?), the size and portability of the XEL-1 allow for it to be used in a wide range of situations. A desktop auxillary display, or a side-along RSS reader. Perhaps a weather reporting tool, or a place for me to drag my extra desktop widgets (whether they be Mac OS X, Vista, Yahoo or Google powered) and run all manner of fancy gadgets without cluttering up my workspace. Perhaps even just a display for me to run iTunes in… Touchscreen ‘n’ I’m sold!

Shipping on December 1st, early adopters are left with sore-behinds, being forced to shell out 200,000 Yen ($1,740) for the tiny 11″ display. With Sony refusing to promise anything more than 30,000 hours - even on the longetivity span, adopters are getting the raw end of the stick, with Sony’s current (much, MUCH cheaper) LCD screens promising twice as much display time. All that said, if you’re looking for an HDMI, USB and headphone port equppied TV, with S-Force sound, a nice shiny Lan interface, and a whole load of bragging rights - the XEL-1 works out quite nicely.

And, yeah… This is a sponsored review for Sony. Makes a change from YouTube videos.

The news about the iPod Touch has been out for whoever knows how long and I’m still finding hilarious little ‘fanboy ads’ popping up here there and everywhere. Check out this hilarious one of a nose-picking Mr Bean, courtsey of YouTube.

And, following on from our iPhone/iPod Touch debate (which is still ironically tied at 9/9), a fellow confused would-be buyer has created a very clever, suspiciously familiar Mac Vs. PC advert…

Very clever indeed.

Apologies for not posting yesterday. Sad as it sounds, 259 concurrent connections brought the site down on it’s knees. Stupid Digg. Not exactly cruise control for the cool-o-plane, but the Caps key (ya know, the one you keep accidently pressing) just took a serious beating from Apple and was pushed one step down the ladder into submission. Whilst the all hallowed (all hated?) capital-bringer-of-doom has seen it’s fair share of enemies off (curse you FORTAN programmers!), the question remains, how long will it last?

Though only, in reality, a small change, Apple’s decision to change the function of the Caps-Lock key ever so slightly has caused uproar in the blogging community. Though undocumented, “Anti-jab protection” (or so it’s been dubbed) has been added, to cancel out any short, presumingly accidental keystrokes and to get the Caps key to light up, you’ll need to press and hold for a good few seconds to let your creative 419-scamming juices run wild (yeah, I’m talkin’ to you Dr. Bryan McDonald)!

Here’s a quick video which crashed friefox ‘supposedly shows the delay in action.

Don’t ask me how it works, who invented it or if it even does really work, but the X-Ray bag displays the contents for the world to see. That big wad of cash, the once discreet gold bar, the stack of iPhones you were trying to hide and a felt satchet of diamonds. Or maybe all you’ve got is a pack of gum, a ball of twine, a rubber-band, and a large caliber handgun. Talk about intrusive…

ThinkGeek (as always, here-ye, here-ye) has the perfect bag to suit your needs. Whodathunk that an X-Ray bag would be all the rage? (No comment.) All the same, the “X-Ray tote and shoulder bags, made of a space-age woven plastic fiber, appear to have been bombarded by X-rays, and have magically made your eyes sensitive to their reflection.” w00t! “It appears as though your stuff has gone through the security check at the airport (although, we highly recommend AGAINST carrying these through such a checkpoint as the NTSB, as a rule, has no sense of humor).”

“Show everyone your iPod, stack-o-benjamins, eye-drops, nail clippers, lollipop, sunglasses, and prescriptions as well as your pepper-spray, switchblade, brass knuckles and revolver. Maybe you’ve really got that stuff in your bag, but then again, maybe you don’t! The indecision will make any potential thief pause in confusion long enough for you to be out of sight and long gone. Who knew personal security could be had through the power of suggestion?”

Speaking of which, a cardboard cut-out of PC Bob Molloy was just yesterday reported stol… But that’s a different story for you to chase up.

NOTE: Yes, yes, yes… This IS just a gag. No real X-Ray bag here I’m afraid. It is for sale however at ThinkGeek.

Boy oh boy, 10 years before my birth. Things at Apple sure look as hippy as they do today, besides the fact that in modern society a 12″ MacBook is considered cooler than a 30-foot brick . Admittedly, pitting a PC unfairly against a Mac can’t possibly work as well as ripping off a popular song from the pre-octogenerian era, could it? Apple advertising campaigns FTW!

This was a corporate song that was used during the Macintosh rollout in January, 1984. I heard it live, in Manhattan, before Steve Jobs took the stage to introduce the Macintosh and the new line of Lisa computer systems. The copy that’s been out on the Internet was pretty ratty looking, with dropouts in the video and the audio. I digitized and restored this version from a first generation VHS tape in my personal library. I also extracted the audio and enhanced it in my home studio to give it some more punch and reduce the noise.

So, if you are into technology, Apple corporate history, or computing, you will enjoy this. if you’re not, and you just like the videos of me and my family and my bad jokes — don’t watch it, because the song is really cheesy and is a blatant rip off of Irene Cara’s “Flashdance” song. T

Random Trivia: when I saw this ‘live’ at the Mac introduction, we, as Apple Dealers, all LAUGHED OUR ASSES OFF at time marker 02:47 - when the guy carried a 60 pound LISA computer under his arm like it was a laptop!

More Random Trivia: Some fellow Apple Dealers, who were watching the Macintosh introduction, got out of their seats to call their stock brokers from the pay phones to issue a ‘buy’ order! Smart. I wish I did the same. I was too involved in figuring out how I could afford to buy both a Mac and a Lisa.

via YouTube - Lovin’ it!

Holy schmokes! iPhone Extreme? Well, sorta… Bad naming? Without a doubt. Nevertheless, the Apple iPhone Feedback page clearly shows a ‘product’ meta-tag showing that the ‘iPhone Extreme’ is to be the name of (or is at least temporarily) Apple’s latest and greatest re-incarnation of the iPhone. If the price-drop sounded harsh, you can sure bet that early-adopters will be shrieking shrilly and blogging all night at the mere suggestion of a 16GB+ iPhone.

Back to the ‘Extreme’ naming. Whilst grossly over-used and rather ‘20th century wannabe cool’ suggesting, ‘Extreme’ has been used by Apple recently - to great success. The Airport Extreme. For those of you claiming a ’sloppy’ cut and paste feedback form error, 9-to-5 Mac assures us that both pages are nothing a like.

Thoughts? Comments? Rumors? Conspiracies? We want the dirt…

via iPhone Bug List.

UPDATE: I can confirm that the meta-tag is still there. You woulda thought that if this was a real leak and not just a mistake, the lawyerbots would have dealt with it by now. I’m still pretty sure that there’s an element of truth in here somewhere though.

The iPhone? The iPod Touch? Or Teh Uber Cheese Monsta? It was your votes, and yours alone which drove me to such despair.

In a vain attempt to gauge what you guys thought of Apple’s latest lineup (and in an attempt to cater to my fellow cheesey overlords), I ended up slipping up a poll.

iPod Touch w00t! - 7 votes.

iPhone FTW! - 7 votes.

Teh Uber Cheese Monsta - 7 votes.

So, seeing as when voting anonymously you all think different, it’ll be interesting to see how the comments work out. If you’re reading this now, don’t even think about chickening out. RSS readers, click through to the post and scroll down to comment. Everyone else hit the ‘comment’ button next to the lil’ yellow speech bubble below the title of this post. At the moment, it reads ‘No Comment’, but unless you’re seriously deluded - that’ll change soon. Hopefully.

Let’s settle this Apple fanboy-ism once and for all! Oo-rah!