Boy oh boy did I love reviewing the Sonos Bundle 150. The Sonos multi-room home audio solution is superb. One wart to the system was the controller: the scrollwheel was a little cumbersome for some actions, not to mention outrageously expensive as a stand-alone component. Looks like a new touch-screen controller is due out soon, though, which should remove one complaint from my review. Or you can keep using the free iPhone controller with its touch-screen interface right now.

Here’s a little treat for all you Apache admins out there in The Internet: mod_pony. It produces an ASCII art representation of a pony. It would be grand to see ponies proliferate around The Internet today!

Microsoft has announced the pricing for Windows 7, due to be released on October 22. The Home Premium upgrade version will cost $119.99 — ten bucks cheaper than the comparable version of Vista! Other news outlets are trying to spin this as “8% less”, but we know you, dear readers, aren’t fooled by such sleight of hand. Windows 7 Professional upgrade will run $199.99. The full Home Premium version is $199.99; and the full versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions will be $299.99 and $319.99 respectively. Does the Ultimate edition really offer $20 more in terms of functionality? I don’t know!

I was out for my evening constitutional last night, enjoying the sight of “For Sale” signs on homes throughout my neighborhood, when I spied with my little eye something new and novel. I’ve seen URLs on For Sale signs a couple of times, and always thought that that was a fine way to attract eyeballs to your property. Let’s face it: trawling though MLS listings sucks, so going directly to a property’s URL is a time saver! What I saw last night, though, was even better: a URL specifically geared for mobile phones. “Mobile users, go to prtmobile.com/1908″.

Every day should be Father’s Day, right? We should celebrate every single day all the wonderful things our dads did for us, like fixing our bikes, helping us buy our first car, and not kicking us out of the house when we got our girlfriend pregnant. But since we don’t say “Thanks, Dad!” every single day, we’ll use this Sunday to get him some gifts that, hopefully, will remind him of how much we care the other 364 days of the year.

The Lomo LC-A camera, the ur-point-and-shoot that introduced Lomography to the world, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. If Lomography is your thing, look for a Lomo party near your. If you don’t see one, why not set one up? And don’t worry if you don’t actually have an LC-A camera! Just buy CameraBag for your trusty iPhone and pretend you have a Lomo with the Lolo filter! LOL!

In my youth, all those long years ago, I kept up with hardware — specifically CPUs — a lot more than I do now. Of course, it was easy when there was only the 486, 486DX, 486SX and 486SLC CPUs to keep track of. Now we have a mind numbing array of CPUs and codenames: Core, Core 2, Core 2 Duo, Celeron, Atom, Xeon, Conroe, Kentsfield, Yorkfield, Lions and Tigers and Bears oh my! Intel recognizes that they’re confusing customers with all of these nonsense words, and they’re working to streamline the product line.

Scientists at Virginia Commonwealth University have revealed in the journal Nature Chemistry that they’ve created a “magnetic superatom”, or “a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table”. The poor Periodic Table of the Elements barely gets any respect as it is from the kids today (quick: do you know your Noble Gases, or the atomic weight of Nobilium?), now it has to compete with fancypants super atoms!

I’m not a huge movie buff, but I have a pretty good memory and do well enough at movie trivia games. I am also often able to repeat lines verbatim from movies I saw years ago, and usually enjoy doing so. So I was pretty intrigued when I saw Avalinx’s new app, MovieLingo. It’s a simple app, but I think it’s a good example of how to use mobile computing and always-on Internet connectivity to improve the social experience.

Remember those holograms we saw during the presidential election? It was just like the hologram of Princess Leia that R2D2 shows to old Ben Kenobi, except suckier. I bet you wished, like I did, that you could make your own cool holograms, but with Sasquatch, right? Your dreams have been answered, thanks to LivingSasquatch.com!

The Department of Veterans Affairs is testing a fancy new prosthetic arm developed in conjunction with DARPA, the folks that brought us the Internet, and Deka Research, founded by Dean Kamen, creator of the Segway. Unlike a traditional rigid plastic arm, or God forbid a metal hook, the Luke Arm — a reference to Luke Skywalker’s artificial hand from Empire Strikes Back — allows the wearer to grasp small objects and “perform movements while reaching over their head, a previously impossible maneuver for people with a prosthetic arm.”

It’s officially official: the iPod is the number one media player in the known universe. The number two media player is the entire Sansa line from flash maker SanDisk. Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk, admits that he’s content to sit at the number two spot. And why shouldn’t he?

The more time I spend using computers, the more I realize that the ways in which we interact with them suck. Typing is a pain, and I’m very inefficient using a physical keyboard. When using an on-screen keyboard, I’m even less efficient. Until someone invents a really superb way to interact with computers, I guess the best I can hope for is the crocodile keyboard layout for on-screen text entry.

Whether your a systems administrator managing hundreds or thousands of machines, or a freelance designer working on your trusty laptop, chances are that a mandatory system update has, at one time or another, interrupted your day with a mandatory reboot. When it’s just your laptop, it’s not so bad — get a refill on that coffee! — but when it’s hundreds or thousands of machines, it can be a logistical nightmare. Now a new company called KSplice is looking to make all our lives a little easier by applying system updates to a running computer without requiring a reboot!

Hot on the heels of their successful advertising campaign to make consumers see a PC running Windows as a better value than a Macintosh, Microsoft is now declaring “It’s Better With Windows“! The new website, aimed at Asus Eee PC users, reminds us that “Windows helps you quickly and easily get online and connect to your devices and services — without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues“! Oooh, burn! Watchoo gonna do, Linux?

Memorial Day has come and gone, which means that aside from an abundance of family cookouts, many swimming pools have officially opened their doors for the summer swimming season. I love swimming, and I enjoy swimming laps for exercise. Unfortunately, it’s mind numbingly boring to swim back and forth. I’ve long wanted a waterproof MP3 player to liven up my swimming. Enter the Finis SwiMP3. Read on for a full review.

There hasn’t been too much buzz lately about that Netflix programming contest. You remember the one: Netflix ponied up $10M US dollars to any team that could improve their movie recommendation system by 10%. When I was a Netflix user I was never really dissatisfied by the recommendation system, so it’s hard for me to imagine how they’d gauge that it was 10% better than it was before. Nonetheless, lots of very smart people took the challenge, and an awful lot of progress has been made.

One of the complaints lodged against Linux systems is that they update too frequently. Die-hard Linux users compulsively update their systems, always running the latest bleeding edge version of the kernel or various applications. At least, that’s the impression that many non-Linux users have about die-hard Linux users. Dell, who have been offering Linux on some laptops for two years now, have recently made it known that they won’t be updating to the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu any time soon.

If you’re going to practice guitar for several hours a day, you might as well have a really cool looking amp to use. The attention to detail in the instructions is pretty impressive. This would look great with the steampunk Stratocaster.

QR codes, or “Quick Response” codes, are a mechanism to codify data for quick recognition. They’ve been used in package tracking applications for some time, and apparently they’re hugely popular with mobile phone users in Japan. Snap a picture of a QR code with your phone’s camera, and your phone can then decode the info and do something useful — usually load up a URL contained within the code to alleviate the tedium of typing. Now an Austrian company plans to put QR codes on fashion accessories!

The Laptop Hunters commercial campaign that Microsoft is pushing seems to be working. Young people in the 18-34 demographic see a laptop running Microsoft Windows as a better value for the money than an Apple laptop running OSX. Apple had dominated consumer mindshare in the winter, but has since fallen behind Microsoft.

Breaking news! Pay attention, people of the Internet! Apple has revealed that under some circumstances, iPod and iPhone users may receive a mild electrical shock to their ears through their earbuds. Knowledge base article TS2729 has the full technical details about how something called “static electricity” can build up in your precious iPod or iPhone and then lay in wait until you insert the earbuds into your soft, vulnerable ears.

Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who have been researching AIDS for almost a decade, have come up with a novel new way to fight the immunovirus. Traditional vaccines didn’t seem to be working, so Dr. Philip Johnson, chief scientific officer at Children’s Hospital, shifted gears, and used muscles to deliver a gene in order to create a protein that interferes with the virus. Yay science!

I had a few X10 products back in the day, but never got beyond turning my lava lamp on through a web page. Unlike my buddy Rich who was interviewed in the New York Times for his home automation efforts. Things have come a long way in low- to mid-range automation technology, so put away your childish X10 products and graduate into something from Bitwise Controls.

Thank the maker that we live in an age when we can order anything online and have it delivered right to our door. Even better, subscription services free us from the tedium of having to remember to actually go buy stuff. Today, friends, I’m pleased to let you know that the magic of Internet shopping and the convenience of subscription services have merged together for the benefit of your sock drawer! Blacksocks.com makes sure that you’re regularly stocked with fresh, black socks!