Time sure does fly. It’s been a whole year since Devin and I popped our E3 cherries and we find ourselves back in LA for what is expected to be a return to glory for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Not much going on today except for a few parties, but I did pass the convention center on my way to the hotel and noticed that Ubisoft and Sony dropped crazy money on signage.

Dell’s got a $60 price break on its 19-inch S1909WX LCD monitor, which brings it to $89 with free shipping. The monitor has a 1440×900 resolution, DVI and VGA inputs, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, and 5ms response time.

As my better half says, “Only in the South.” Have you guys seen these e-ciggy kiosks in malls around your neck of the woods? If you’ve never seen one of these things then check out John’s review of the SuperSmoker Blue.

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is currently running a Star Trek exhibit with all sorts of whimsical items from the various TV shows and movies. A few devices, in particular, look mighty familiar to present-day gadgets.

Mega Man 2.5D: Holy wow
3D candy fabricator promises a sweet time
We would like to present a Lego bar chart

Tired of the long hours you spend preparing your Wiimote for charging? So much of our short time on this Earth, wasted in removing the rubber shock jackets and lining up the charge points — the best days of our lives gone! Well, no longer. Penguin United has an induction charger lined up for release during E3 that looks pretty hot: just drop the Wiimote in the charger slot and it immediately starts charging right through the sleeve. Very sci-fi — sorry, I mean SyFy.

Thank god. The absurd and arbitrary limitation of running three apps at a time on Windows 7 Starter edition has been lifted, although all the other ways in which it sucks are still intact. When they announced the six different flavors of Windows 7, everyone gaped at the punishing 3-app limit, wondering how Microsoft intended to justify it when so much rides on Windows 7 being a good choice for netbooks and nettops. There are still many pieces missing, and the blog post announcing the change goes out of its way to make this clear.

So for the record, what isn’t included in the Starter edition?

While I won’t go as far as the press release does in calling this unlockable content “unprecedented” and “incredible,” it certainly is something I’d be happy to grind levels for. The Transformers game itself is coming out June 23rd on pretty much every platform, but the PS3, 360 and PC versions will be the only ones with these great bonuses. We’re talking episodes of the original series here, people.

Too bad they don’t have an unlockable that turns you into Soundwave… in real life.

Similar to a light saber but more Nintendo-y, this DIY beam katana seems to be an actual working device, although I question its lethality. The creator won’t reveal his secrets, but I think it’s pretty clear there’s some kind of little smoke generator and one of those green high-powered lasers involved. Get a couple more high-powered ones or a mirror setup in there and you could actually start burning through some junk, though admittedly not at a true beam katana rate.

Assuming you are European and never have more than a head-sized bag of garbage to throw away, this Dustbot appears to be the perfect trash-related companion. I believe the idea is that an army of these things will lurk in every city and constantly collect garbage, eliminating the need for garbage trucks to come to every home. It navigates via GPS and can be summoned by a text message — sounds like some people I know.

Just in case you have some DVDs or Blu-ray discs laying around, Amazon wants ‘em and is willing to give you a gift card for ‘em. All you have to do is head over to Amazon and print out a shipping label. The discs do have to be worth more than $10 and in good condition. They don’t want your nasty-ass used discs.

I know that, in the beginning, the idea of DJ Hero appealed to me. As a fan of house and related genres—Renaissance The Master Series Part 13, mixed by Hernán Cattáneo, just hit the Internet—I was looking forward to playing the role of a big haired animated DJ. But then I realized: what a minute, actually DJing isn’t that hard at all! Why bother playing a DJ video game when you can actually DJ?