Yes, it’s funny, but it’s also a very good idea. Remote controls are among the worst-designed pieces of technology we have to deal with these days. They’re being replaced, somehow, but even more complicated controllers, but one of these days we’ll get it right.

Anyone over the age of 30 may fondly remember Earl Weaver Baseball for Amiga, DOS, and the Apple II. I myself had an Apple IIc and split most of my time between Earl Weaver Baseball and Hardball! during my formative elementary school years. Now we’re hearing that one of Earl Weaver Baseball’s original designers, Eddie Dombrower, is porting the game to the iPhone.

If you’re moving to a two- or three-display setup, one of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether you want two “equal” displays or a “primary-secondary” setup. A smaller monitor like this Westinghouse is a good option for a secondary, being cheaper and smaller yet still reasonably sharp and bright. Whether this particular Westinghouse is for you depends on a few things.

Last we saw of this thing, it was also being called the Galaxy 7, but all of the specs were already in place. Well, Asus has finally granted the P835’s wish and made it a real boy. Wait, no — they’ve just made an official announcement.

The Wii Cordless Keyboard from Logitech is eligible for a $20 mail-in rebate until March 7th. Amazon carries the keyboard for $39.99 before the rebate, although it’s currently out of stock. If you don’t mind waiting a bit, though, you can buy it now and Amazon will ship it to you when it’s back in stock.

And here we go again. After Dell (and later Intel) petitioned to have Psion’s “netbook” trademark canceled, claiming it was a generic term and that Psion wasn’t even selling anything called a “netbook” any more, Psion responded by saying it’s been actively selling the “Netbook Pro” (above photo) even though the machine is no longer manufactured.

We last wrote about the upcoming Jimmy Fallon show quite some time ago, noting that NBC would be using THE INTERNET to create “buzz” and a “following,” so that when the show launched—the first episode of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon airs this Monday night—there would already be some sort of audience. We’ll see how that turns out; NBC and Conan O’Brien look to be fairly confident he’ll succeed.

A disheartening report in the Orlando Sentinel finds that some people are switching from broadband to dial-up in order to save money. Sad but true, it seems. Those who are switching are “not the iPod crowd,” according to NetZero CEO Mark Goldstein, but mostly people from older generations who use the internet for very basic e-mail and light web surfing.

“World of Warcraft is the crack cocaine of the computer gaming world. Some people can’t drag themselves away and will play it till they drop.” This chilling warning comes from the Swedish Youth Care Foundation, which swooped into action after a 15-year-old boy “collapsed” (says The Sun, which is quite sensational) after playing the game for 24 hours straight.

Well done to the Authors Guild! Amazon revealed last night that the text-to-speech feature in the Kindle 2 will now be optional for publishers. The guild had been tenaciously fighting this feature, arguing that it had the potential to turn the Kindle 2 into a de-facto audiobook player. Right or wrong, Amazon has caved, and now publishers will be able to dictate wether or not the Kindle 2 is able to read aloud their books.

Japanese company sells remote control brick with built-in mini speaker
Review: JimmyJane Form 6 Massager
Just weird: A semi-NSFW gadget from Japan for the weekend

Remember BigDog? And its diminutive friend, LittleDog? Here’s a little more footage and testimony from the soldiers at Fort Benning in Alabama. There’s not a lot of new info but it’s nice to see it’s actually in real trials and not sitting in a lab somewhere. I think they’re going to need to do something about that buzzing noise, though.

The iPhone is like the bacon-wrapped scallop of the mobile world. Both are quite visually pleasing relative to their peers, easy to use, and generally liked by the masses. Spend a little too much time with either, however, and you start to see the flaws. With the scallops, the grease and animal fat that was oh-so delicious on the way down begins to clog your arteries and slow your saunter. With the iPhone, the interface that seemed oh-so-polished when it first met your fingertips begins to show signs of oversight and imperfection.

We’ve been using the iPhone for just a few months shy of two years now, and a few things that once seemed trivial have come to drive us up the wall. You’ll find no mention of the glaring faults (The lack of MMS, Copy and Paste, etc) in this list – we’re talking about the stuff that we just can’t believe made it through Apple’s user experience team.

Carrying around a little screen at all times means — what else? — that you can read comics all over the place while looking as if you’re checking your email. The iVerse app, for both iPhone and Android, lets you read comics that have been customized for viewing on a small screen. Instead of having you zoom around a full-sized page, they’ve cut the pages into smaller, screen-size chunks. Not the best for full-page art and the like, but much more convenient and natural to read.

All I have to say to Hearst is “Good luck, bro.” The flatlining publisher, which produces magazines such as Popular Mechanics, Esquire and Cosmopolitan, has revealed that it’s working on an e-reader. The idea, of course, is to cut down the cost of creating a magazine—all that paper, ink, storage, delivery, gas, etc. adds up, especially in an environment when ad sales are way down—without sacrificing that “magazine” feel. Too bad it’s doomed, and does, indeed, sacrifice that “feel.”

There’s an episode of Seinfeld (“The Slicer”) where George and Jerry discuss the merits of skin care and the skin care industry. Neither of them think very highly of either—at one point, George tells Jerry that all you need to do to take care of your skin is “wash it, dry it, move on!” That’s how I’ve always felt about remote controls: there’s no need to complicate the celebrated procession of turning on and off the TV and DirecTV receiver, of opening and closing the DVD or Blu-ray player; there’s sure as hell no need to shell out hundreds of dollars merely to lower the volume of your sound system with a shinier piece of plastic than the one that came in the box. So I’ve always believed, at least; and to an extent, still do. But you know what, gosh darn it, after using the Philips Prestigo SRT 9320, I’ve come this close to reconsidering my anti-fancy remote position. (I know for a fact that, broadly speaking, I have a problem with “luxury,” wether it be fancy remotes or fancy restaurants; it’s the peasant in me.) If I had never heard of the remote my life wouldn’t be all that different; but, I don’t know, as a piece of consumer electronics, as example of what can be engineered, well done to the crazy Dutchies at Philips.

It’s no secret that I love old NES games, and of course Contra is among my favorites. You can imagine my delight, then, on finding that some utterly insane NeoGAF forum members had put together a start-to-finish remake inside LittleBigPlanet on the PS3. Using the toolset they’ve been able to sort of jury-rig the guns, turrets, bosses, and even the rear-perspective base battles.

Hats off, my friends. Hats off.

BG just dropped a bomb about the 8230 that’s actually the 9630, but has the codename Niagara. It’s still going to be a World Edition, which means it will support CDMA 1x, EV-DO Rev. A, GSM, GPRS, EDGE and UMTS. No Wi-Fi, but that’s what you should expect from Verizon by now. The 9630 may or may not have a camera, but if it does it’ll be a 3.2-megapixel shooter. And the browser will support JavaScript 1.6. There’s no launch date, but BG thinks May or June.

I’d be skeptical of this Wii knockoff by a reputable hardware company, except that Asus has already gone down this road, so why not Acer? The Hornet, as reported on this Turkish site, appears to be an Atom-powered supercompact nettop meant to be clippped to the back of your monitor or HDTV, and has what appears to be a camera on the top corner. The camera will, I’m assuming, track the motion of your little Acer Wiimote and let you “enjoy in various kinds of PC games!”

Some women are getting creative trying to make some quick cash in these troubled times: they’re trying to sell their eggs to fertility clinics. Inquiries to one fertility clinic in Illinois, for example, were up 40% in 2008. It sure beats stripping, but according to one clinic only 5-7% of potential egg donors are actually accepted. Egg donations may seem like an easy way to mak big bucks, but t actual payouts are often far less than the rumored $10,000, averaging $4,200 nationwide. Plus you need to go through a full background check, as well as medical, psychological and genetic tests.