I might be drinking too much tonight but isn’t this teeny scanner a bit too small? Oh, wait… it’s a barcode scanner. I see now. Anyway. The Intelliscanner Mini is basically the smallest barcode scanner in the whole wide world and could, potentially, be a choking hazard. It costs $179 online for the Media version (for scanning books) and $249 for the all-inclusive package.

I just got back from MacWorld and stopped by the Fastmac booth on the way out to see what was shakin and came across this unannounced external Blu-ray drive. Sure, it looks super ugly and not really geared towards Mac owners, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a $99 external Blu-ray drive.

I’m told they have an external Blu-ray drive that will burn BD-R discs but it won’t be coming for a while. This one only burns CDs and DVDs. But, again, it’s $99. It needs an external power source, but it does come with a dual head USB cable so you can just run it off your laptop, which is what most of us would do. I want one now.

What a day! While Apple was busy announcing, relatively speaking, nothing at MacWorld, 4Chan, the bad boys of the Internet, went ahead and hacked MacRumors’ live coverage of the show; Twitter freaked out, which is to be expected. Hardly confusing wrechedness.

I just downloaded the Slumdog Millionaire soundrack for $8.99 and it came automatically in Plus format. The files themselves are considerably bigger than the average previous iTunes download and the quality is quite nice. Most importantly, however, there is now a “create MP3 version” selection when you right click on the song.

Whoever predicted that Apple would introduce iWork ‘09 today gets a gold star. Keynote, Pages and Numbers all received what I would consider minor updates; no need to run around all willy nilly for these, methinks.

At the unibody MacBook event back in October, Apple remained mum on the unibody 17″ MacBook Pro, though hinting that one was in the works.

During today’s Keynote, Phil Schiller made it official.

The new version if iLife will include a new version of iPhoto with facial recognition called Faces, allowing you to select images based on the faces of the subjects. Another system, called Places, uses embedded GPS data to place your subjects on a map.

Welcome to our live coverage of Phil Schiller’s MacWorld 2009 keynote. We are hoping and praying that the server holds out so we’re no trying any special tricks this time – just good old fashioned blog posting. To see updates, please hit F5 to refresh.

Nowhereelse has photos of what is purported to be a (PRODUCT)Red iPhone but the lack of (RED) branding on the back definitely puts this in the fake category. As we see below, the (PRODUCT)Red branding always appears above the iPod branding.

MacWorld is going to be amazing this year because, get this, there will be a new MBP announced. 9to5Mac reports that the 17-inch MacBook Pro will come in the unibody aluminium design and include a long-life battery pack that is not removable. D’oh!

Time to throw away your old Mac Minis, friends, because new ones are coming next week. TUAW has on good authority (read “some guy told them”) that the new minis will have SATA optical drives that can be replaced with hard drives and that they will look more like the MacBooks with sexier styling and black and aluminum accents.