In case you’re tired of the Wii’s slim, understated style, now is your change to add a 3D mario busting out of it along with all the garish color the flying plumber is associated with. Be aware, this isn’t like a henna tattoo for your Wii, it appears to be permanent. I like the part of the instructions where Mario appears to be encased in a Carbonite Wii.

Super Mario Bros. Inspired Wii Casemod With USB Base [Instructables, via BoingBoing]

ShareThis

Oh wow, I guess I’m getting old. Did anyone else own this player — the Eiger Labs MPMan?

This is the 64-megabyte F20 shown here but I had the 32-megabyte F10. Remember how it hooked up to your computer via Parallel port and took forever to transfer songs?

Apparently the prototype for this device was shown at CeBIT back in March of 1998 before going on sale in May of the same year.

My MPMan is long gone but I’ve held on to a few relics from the very early days of the portable MP3 movement. Hit the jump to see some photos.

Genica Portable MP3/CD Player

Here’s what may have been the first portable CD player that also played MP3 discs. It was made by Genica back in 2000. If I recall, it was on preorder for $99 (which was a downright steal) from ComputerGeeks.com for like six months. I was a junior in college at the time and I distinctly remember the UPS man ringing the doorbell really early on a Friday morning.

The next night, someone broke into my car and stole it. I cried — big, heaping sobs — because I knew it’d take forever to get another one. Also, it was four in the morning and I’d been drinking all night so I was (needless to say) a bit emotional. The cops couldn’t understand what was so special about the device because they couldn’t grasp how a CD could hold 150 songs.

Try explaining MP3 compression to a cop when you’re blotto.

Neo Player

Ah, the Neo Player. Remember this one? It was a bring-your-own hard drive affair. Just load it up with a 2.5-inch laptop drive and you’re set. I also had the car version, which used a dock that slid into a 3.5-inch drive bay on your tower and then slid into a similar dock that you kept on the dashboard of your car. I wish I still had photos of it somewhere. It was awesome.

Pocket mStation (Neo II)

Then there’s the successor to the Neo, the Pocket mStation — also known as the Neo II and probably a bunch of other names. I never really fell in love with this one but the ridiculously huge buttons made it easy to use in the car.

Here’s a nice family photo of all these old-timers. I even have the box for the Genica.

Anyone else have some old photos of your early MP3 players? Send ‘em to Doug at CrunchGear dot com and I’ll add them to this post.

Ten years old: the world’s first MP3 player [Reg Hardware]

ShareThis

Here’s a project I wouldnt’ touch in a million years due to my shameful fear of small shocks. What, they’re painful! If you’re not as much of a chicken as me, and have some skill with electrical engineering, you ought to give it a shot. Then bring it over to my house because my shaver is dying.

Fast NiMH/NiCd Battery charger [via MAKE:blog]

ShareThis

Say it ain’t so, Steven! Mr. “Hackers” Levy believes his wife threw Apple’s loaner MacBook Air into the recycling chute with all the other paper, leading him to believe that no, he’s the only stupid one and that everyone else with little expectation that a featherlight computer will end up in a pile of other office detritus would do the same thing. This, friends, is why I’m going to wear mine around my neck like Flava.

Gone, Without a Trace [NewsWeek]

ShareThis

And the winner is #6! Congrats, LOLMark!

ShareThis

Do you need a speaker that looks like a mouse? How about a speaker that looks like a pair of lips? The mouse speaker, at $14, connects to your iPod and lets you “share” your music with throngs of people who probably want to kill you. The lips, ummm, also cost $14 and do the same thing. Purchase a your own risk.

Mouse
Lips
Technology addiction… there is help.

ShareThis

Good news for HTC Mogul owners on the Sprint network — there’s a new update available that’ll allow your phone to connect to the higher speed EVDO Rev. A network where you could very well enjoy double the data speeds.

The current EVDO Rev. 0 protocol features download speeds of 400- to 700-kbps and upload speeds of 50- to 70-kbps. EVDO Rev. A bumps the download speeds to between 600- and 1400-kbps and the upload speeds to a much, much faster 350- to 500-kbps. The update is available here on HTC’s site.

Sprint phone first to use fast network [AP/Yahoo! News]

ShareThis

We first saw Nyko’s Zero controller at CES and now it’s in stores. The $60 controller is the first PS3 controller to hit the market with rumble capabilities (dual vibration motors). But it’s not a one trick pony. The Zero boasts up to 25 hours of continuous play and can be recharged via USB. Range on the Zero is up to 30 feet thanks to the utilization of the 2.4GHz wireless network and it’s packed with an accelerometer that can detect six different directions of motion. Its unique metal polymer hybrid design keeps things cool via aluminum panels that help dissipate heat. The Zero comes in silver, white and black.

Product Page

ShareThis

What is really small, holds 500 gigabytes, and costs $329? The 500GB Buffalo MiniStation. Can I go back to bed now?

Product Page

ShareThis

The entire walk-through

Landon Dyer’s story of joining Atari after creating a Centipede clone was excellent but here’s a telling detail from the end of the first video game age.

There were some distant purges in marketing. The little “conversion” group of 8 programmers I was in had been moved to a satellite location far away from any of Atari’s major buildings, so we were pretty isolated from what was going on, but even from a distance it was clear that things weren’t going well. The game industry had essentially crashed, and Atari was putting millions of unsold cartridges into landfills. All of the mistakes that wild success had covered up were coming around to bite hard.

My office-mate had finally finished Robotron. By request, she made three versions of the ROM image, located at different ROM addresses. Unfortunately, the Q/A staff was only able to test two of the images. Guess which image Atari sent to be manufactured? Guess which image had a fatal bug? I saw a hardware engineer struggle to come up with a cheap gate-or-two fix that would make the game work; only a few bytes of it were wrong. In the end, Atari threw $200,000 worth of ROMs away.

The 2600 basically defined gaming for a generation and it wasn’t until games like Final Fantasty that the console RPG took off, bringing MMORPG’s with it (MOO and MUDs not included, obviously).

UPDATE - Bloops! Sorry. Stuffed the port after the jump. TURN DOWN YOUR SPEAKERS!

Old Arcade Games

ShareThis