The first MW2 Xbox 360 I got came with a broken face plate so it took me a couple days to get a replacement.  If you haven’t heard of this version before it’s actually a really great deal if your are in the market for a new Xbox 360. 

It comes with this limited edition gun metal colored Xbox with appropriate military markings (sorry no Oscar Mike), a 250 Gb Hard Drive, two black wireless controllers, a new headset communicator (the older ones are better),  a copy of the standard version of MW2, and hook up cables.  Note that this edition does NOT come with an HDMI cable.

If you do the math, the $400 price tag actually works in your favor.  You have to speculate the price on the 250GB HD given the fact that Microsoft sells the 120GB HD for $150.  Awesome deal.

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There something nice about operating a spigot.  It just makes you feel like you’re really doing something old world like.  The BrewTender Tabletop Beer & Beverage Dispenser holds 80 ounces of your favorite chilled beverage and allows people to serve themselves.

Featuring built in lights to illuminate the beverage of choice the Brewtender also has a Lazy Susan style swiveling base for those hard of reach.  This well designed gadget also has a separate ice chamber so your precious liquids go undiluted.

Guaranteed to make you cooler that you were (pun intended), the BrewTender is on sale now for $60.

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None Found

Last I checked Carhartt was in the tough man clothing business.  But it turns out they’re getting trendy, really trendy.   They’ve now teamed up with Vestax to produce a portable turntable, you know, the thing that plays those vinyl discs.

They claim that it can operate at a 90 degree angle, which means flush to a wall…I’m skeptical.   Skepticism aside, it’s got a line in and out jack as well as a USB input for converting your records to a digital medium.  And for all your DJs out there you’ll be pleased to hear that it can run on batteries and includes pitch control and master level fader.

I’ve got no clue where you can buy it, but it will supposedly be out this December.

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I gotta hand it to Skullcandy, they’re masters of marketing.  Instead of inventing new products, they just rebrand them in a trendy and attractive lifestyle manner, thus cutting their costs and increasing their sales.

Case in point: the NBA Headphone series.  Choose your favorite team and you can now represent any where you go without having to wear one of those ridiculous looking jerseys, though I’m not sure if these are any better.  I feel like question such as, “Really? You really spent money on those?” would be elicited.  The good news is that they sport an inline mic, so they make good use of your iPhone’s headphone jack, or whatever handset your sporting.

You can preorder them now for $50 and expect them to ship December 11th.

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7-inches isn’t enough to get me excited (that sounds so wrong), but the Camangi WebStation ain’t looking to shabby.  The touchscreen, which has an 800×480 resolution, looks to be capacitive based on how sensitive it is, and according to the presenter in the video that’s a glass surface (hello fingerprints).   Currently the tablet like computer is running Android OS 1.5, while the remaining specs include WiFi b/g, 2 megapixel camera, microSD card slot, a second VGA webcam and a USB port.

There’s no official word on the release date, but word on the street is that it’ll carry a price tag of about $400.  For now, I’ll hold off on purchasing anything Android, but based on my limited experience with Motorola’s Droid it’s a super solid OS.  And as previously mentioned, 7-inches is still a bit small for my taste, but for those of you looking for an oversized media player, here you go.

Video after the ‘leap’

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Hand this mug to someone, fill it with hot cider/tea/eggnog and Pacman, his enemies and tasty fruit treats will reveal themselves, that is until the beverage cools.  This mug has Urban Outfitter written all over it, but nonetheless, it could make the perfect holiday gift for the die retro gamer.

[via Gearfuse]

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Looking like something you might find on an alien planet, this humidifier slash aroma diffuser could be more of a gadget of want rather than need.  Designed by Hironao Tsuboi, this off world tear drop spouts a mist and has an ambient LED to keep your senses invigorated.

You can even add some of your favorite oils to pepper the room with a hopefully delightful fragrance(no patchouli).  Available now in an assortment of colors for $112.

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Today, Cloud Engines announced an updated version of their popular NAS networking device, the Pogoplug.  This version adds 4 USB ports to the mix, which means you can now share the content of even more hard drives or USB sticks over the Internet.

I’m about to write a review on the Seagate NAS that uses the Pogoplug software, and while it’s not bad it’s not stellar.  But from the sounds of it, Pogoplug might have updated some of the software, such as the ability to automatically sync your photos and other media with the NAS device.

The 2nd Pogoplug will ship sometime soon for $129.

Second Generation Pogoplug™ Unveiled Today
Next-generation Hardware Design and Software Provide Enhanced Storage, Multimedia and Social Media Capabilities

San Francisco, Calif. – November 20, 2009 – Cloud Engines, Inc. unveiled the second generation of the award winning Pogoplug multimedia sharing device today giving consumers more flexibility to store personal content safely in the home and access, manage, and share it from anywhere on the Internet. The new Pogoplug hardware sports a new design boasting multiple USB ports supporting up to 4 external drives for expanded data capacity. The new Pogoplug also gives users improved sharing capabilities, an easy drag-and-drop interface to create engaging multi-media slide shows, seamless media playback, and enhanced sharing with friends on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Pogoplug acts like a gateway from your home or office through the Internet. It allows you to access, share and even stream your personal digital media directly to anybody, anywhere in the world. Your content always remains physically in your home or office, making it secure, convenient and available on your terms. Pogoplug is perfect for those individuals with increasingly mobile lifestyles and small businesses in need of simple, inexpensive mobile data access solutions.

“The reaction to the Pogoplug has been incredible. By listening to user feedback and following our own product roadmap, we are bringing a great second-generation product that gives our customers access to a host of new features that both improve the function of the Pogoplug, and add to the fun of using it as well.” said Daniel Putterman, CEO of Cloud Engines, Inc.  “We are committed to giving our customers the best way to access their data from anywhere in the world, pushing the envelope with both product quality and design aesthetic. The result is what you see here today.”

NEW HARDWARE
The new Pogoplug design retains the simplicity and ease of use of the original while listening to consumer feedback and adding the ability to directly connect up to 4 external hard drives at once. The resulting product boasts an improved design with greatly improved functionality for users with multiple drives and an increasing need for easy synching and sharing of their digital libraries. This upgrade turns the Pogoplug into an even more prominent feature in the modern digital home or small business.

NEW FEATURES

Automatically Synchronize Photos, Videos, Music and Other Selected Content
Users can synchronize their Pogoplug with their PC or Mac to automatically import new content from popular applications such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, and iPhoto. This feature allows Pogoplug owners to “set it and forget it” and always have access to new photos, videos and music from anywhere on the Internet.

Drag-and-Drop Music and Photo Slideshows
Users can easily create and share fun and engaging slideshows using their stored photos, videos and music.  Creating a slideshow with Pogoplug is as simple as drag and drop, and sharing these slideshows is just as easy as ever. Once a user’s link is shared and viewed, their slideshow will immediately begin with the photos, videos and music they selected, playing seamlessly in the viewer’s browser.

Easier Sharing with Pogoplug Address Book
Pogoplug Address Book greatly improves the speed and ease of use of sharing with a user’s friends and family. Pogoplug automatically remembers all email addresses entered in a user’s previous shares – even if that share no longer exists – and makes them available in an easy to use address book to make sharing truly one click away.

Global Search Across Multiple Drives and Pogoplugs
With support for multiple drives on a single Pogoplug (and multiple Pogoplugs on the same account) Pogoplug has added “global” search support across all of a user’s Pogoplugs and drives.  Search filters are now a distinct feature, allowing users to view all of their photos, videos and music in a single organized view, or to search for a specific file across all Pogoplugs and drives.

Organize Your Music, Photos and Videos
Pogoplug automatically displays music by Album, Artist and Genre, and shows cover art for quick access to a user’s favorite music. Photos are now displayed by photo timeline and videos are only a click away, including the ability to watch a preview in the thumbnail itself.

Play movies directly from my.pogoplug.com, or even to the iPhone
Pogoplug now supports the playback of videos directly from a Pogoplug, with support for the most popular cameras, video cameras and mobile phones.  Movies can be shared and viewed directly from the Pogoplug website – or even from an iPhone!

Pricing and Availability
We are currently taking Pre-Orders for Pogoplug at HYPERLINK “http://www.pogoplug.com”www.pogoplug.com Units will ship before the end of the year – just in time for the Holiday Season. The Pogoplug has a suggested retail price of $129, with no additional service fees.

USEFUL LINKS
Pogoplug web site:  HYPERLINK “http://www.pogoplug.com/”www.pogoplug.com
Product photos:  HYPERLINK “http://www.flickr.com/photos/pogoplug”www.flickr.com/photos/pogoplug
Twitter feed:  HYPERLINK “http://www.twitter.com/pogoplug”www.twitter.com/pogoplug
Pogoplug online community:  HYPERLINK “http://www.pogoplugged.com” www.pogoplugged.com

ABOUT THE POGOPLUG
The Pogoplug is a device that connects up to 4 external hard drives to the Internet. It is designed for consumers who have an external hard drive and have high speed Internet. Consumers can securely access and share all of their content [Files, Photos, and Video] from any Web browser or enabled mobile device with no additional monthly fees.  Free your inner drive.

ABOUT CLOUD ENGINES, INC.
Founded in 2007 by experienced entrepreneurs from the digital media and security industries, Cloud Engines is located in San Francisco, California.  The company was formed with a mission to change the way personal content is stored and distributed over the Internet.  The Cloud Engines philosophy is that by making a product simple, open and affordable, the community will participate in making it better.  For more information, please visit our Web site,  HYPERLINK “http://www.cloudengines.com/”www.cloudengines.com.

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Wall docks can be pretty convenient placed around the house or used for travel purposes.  Today’s wall dock is from DLO and it sports a clutter free design compatible with the full range of iPods and iPhones.

The wall charger also has a higher output so it effectively takes less time to charge your device.  On sale now for $25

[via TheGadgeteer]

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You may remember reading here, back in March, about the D3O protective plasticine goo being used in soldiers’ helmets, but now it’s got a more mundane use–as a gadget protector.

Parent company Tech21 recently launched a wide array of smartphone and laptop cases that offer between, get this, “140 and 221 percent more protection for a mobile device or laptop than existing cases can”.

See, D3O is a strange sort of chemically engineered, enhanced Silly Putty of sorts that, when you pull it apart slowly, stretches much like Silly Putty would.  But if you jolt it abruptly, it hardens and becomes rigid, offering a shock absorption capability for relatively low space.

D3O cases are now available, and cost between twenty eight and fifty bucks depending on where you shop and what sizes you get.

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Don’t forget Crutchfield’s $20 coupon: 3A825 (expires: on going)

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When GlideTV arrived on the scene last month it garnered all sorts of press thanks to its cool design and what appeared to be ease of use factor.  If you haven’t heard, it’s a remote/mouse targeted at the home theater PC crowd, you know, the folks that prefer to watch their media on their computer rather than pay the money hungry cable companies.  Or you could be like me and do both.

Right out of the box I noticed how light weight the GlideTV remote is.  Front and center is your standard mouse touchpad – similar to those found on laptops – which is surrounded by 8 buttons.  Beyond that there is a designated GlideTV button that fires up their custom software, a power button (it controls the PC power), volume control, search button (opens up GlideTV’s search which can be designated to Hulu, Google, etc) and media player controls (play, pause, etc).   The 8 surrounding buttons each do something different in their respective applications, so a little trial and error will help you figure that out.

But, before you get started with the GlideTV you’ll first need to designate a profile for either Mac, PC or PS3.  In my case I selected Mac, which increased its functionally exponentially – before that I was struggling to even get it to work.

After that, you’ll need to determine if you want the touchpad to be in Absolute mode or Relative Mode.  Absolute Mode places the mouse cursor in correspondence with where you place your finger on the touch pad.  So if you touch the top left corner of the touch pad the mouse will appear there.  Personally, I prefer Relative Mode since this is more analogous to my laptop and as I discovered much easier to use out of the box.

There are myriad of controls for each respective function, so I suggest firing up their online User Guide to figure out what you need or as I suggested before just go ‘trial and error’, though you might miss out on some functionality, such as the ability to scroll up/down in web pages by sliding your finger up and down in the right most section of the touchpad (left and right scrolling is accomplished by sliding your finger left and right at the bottom most portion).

What makes the GlideTV remote unique, beyond it’s design, is the included software.  It’s currently in an Alpha mode, but for someone like me who doesn’t really use their PC as a home theater PC all that much it was a God send.  You’ll need to download it from GlideTV.com as they want you to have the latest version – it’s not included in the box.  Functionality wise it’s very straightforward.  As previously mentioned, you just need to hit the GlideTV button on the remote to activate the software, but you will need to launch the program first, by ‘hand’, for this to work.

Within the application you’re presented with four options: Applications, Website, Search the Internet and Settings.  The application section can be modified to add more applications, but by default the popular ones exist such as Boxee, Safari, iTunes, Front Row, Desktop Hulu and some others.  If you don’t have the applications, such as Desktop Hulu, the app will download it for you upon initial launch.  Accessing the application is equivalent to pointing and clicking with your touchpad, but once it is fired up the GlideTV does it stuff.  In the event you decided to search the net or surf the web, the GlideTV does include a virtual keyboard.  I don’t recommend this activity since typing in words one mouse point at a time can be beyond cumbersome.

I’m into Hulu so I tested that out.  While I won’t go into all the controls I can say that they’re all intuitive and worked perfectly.  I also launched Front Row, Apple’s proprietary media program and the control were intuitive as ever, but nothing leaps and bounds over Apple’s Remote; in other words don’t get the GlideTV to replace just the Apple Remote Front Row experience.

Battery life is a bit tough to gauge since the GlideTV remote shuts off automatically after one hour of use.  Additionally, it will go into standby mode after 10 seconds of inactivity which lessens its power consumption.  The remote indicates that it is powered up by flashing the power button about every 2 seconds.  If you’re concerned about accidentally waking the remote from off mode by hitting a button, you can lock the remote’s keys by holding down the Power and Search buttons for 3 seconds – you do the same to unlock the device.  This is ideal when you’ll traveling with the GlideTV, or at least that’s what the manufacturer says.

I ran into very few problems with the GlideTV.  It is a bit difficult to tell when the device is powered down, but since it includes a no brainer charging base you just need replace it after use.  Surprisingly, the charging base does not double as a receiver.  Instead a USB dongle is provided and required for use.  I suppose this is convenient if you’d like to charge your GlideTV via an AC outlet (you can also plug the charger in via USB), especially since many people today set their computers to sleep mode when not in use, which doesn’t provide any power to the USB ports.  Nonetheless, I would have liked to have the charging dock do double duty as a receiver as well.

I should note that I did test the GlideTV out on a last generation Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.6.1 with 1GB of RAM and it was riddled with problems.  The mouse was unresponsive and would often lag, only receiving commands 1 or 2 seconds after entering them.  The distance was no more than 12 feet to the Mac Mini and since I subsequently did an equitable distance test on my Macbook Pro (non Unibody), I can negate that as an issue.  Nonetheless, the GlideTV did work flawlessly on my computer, which runs a 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of DDR2 RAM.  What the problem was I don’t know, but if you have a Mac Mini and don’t have any problems we’d love to hear.

So at this point I can’t really say anything overwhelming bad, or anything bad for that matter about the GlideTV.  But in this day and age, especially with the economy in the slump that it is, it does come down to bang for you buck.  Sure, you can use this thing with your PS3 or Home Theater PC, but at $149, that’s asking an awful lot, especially when for half that money the same can be accomplished by purchasing a wireless keyboard/mouse combo.  Of course, you won’t have the same slick design, small form factor and ease of use.  So if GlideTV can drop the price well below $100 it could be the must have remote for the Hulu watching, Boxee using web TV crowd.

You can purchase the GlideTV for $149 here

Pros:

• Slick design
• Ease of use (software and device)
• One handed operation
• Decent battery life

Cons:

• Expensive
• No keyboard

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