Month: January 2006

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Decent Details on Series 3 HD TiVo!

Megazone has assembled plenty of detailed intel on the forthcoming Series 3 TiVo. He writes:

The unit has two CableCARD slots on the back and it will support Multi-Stream (CableCARD 2.0) or Single-Stream (CableCARD 1.0) cards. If you have multi-stream then you only need one card, but as long as only single stream cards are available you can use two of them. Yes, it supports digital and analog cable, digital ATSC OTA, and analog NTSC OTA. The unit has front panel controls clustered on the right, and a nice display in the middle with a very cool feature – it displays the title of the show(s) tuned at the time, so you always know what it is recording at a glance. The remote ls also sleeker – a slick update of the Series2 peanut with minor changes for HDTV (such as an aspect button). But the big change is that the remote is backlit! TiVo will also be selling an external SATA drive for easy storage expansion, and they have that on display here too.

Mo word on pricing, or a firm release date, but it’s rumored to be mid-to-late ’06. More info and plenty of photos on Zatz Not Funny.

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Street Tech Reader Survey

As part of our association with Federated Media, we’re running a survey to try and get a better idea of who our readers are. One of the things that Federated is doing is allowing its network members to have control over what advertisements are fed to their sites. By us choosing ads, we are, to some degree, endorsing the products and services they hawk. By understanding a little bit about our readership, we can hopefully offer ads from companies that suck less (as it were). So, please do us all a favor and fill out our survey. Thanks.

Have your No. 2 pencils sharp and ready and click here.

Update: The Survey is on hold for a few days. We’ll repost when it’s active again. Thanks.

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Street Tech Joins the Federation

Street Tech is thrilled to announce that we have been invited to become part of John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing network. We had the pleasure of working with John during his editor stints at Wired and The Industry Standard and have the utmost respect and admiration for him. He’s a visionary, but he also has an uncommon amount of integrity and passion for what he does. All of this is reflected in this project, which brings together a network of really cool weblogs under one banner and is designed to let the blog authors do their thing (create great content) while the business team at Federated does theirs (find advertisers, forge partnerships, offer various support services to network members). We’re huge fans of the blogs that are already on-board (BoingBoing, 43 Folders, PVRBlog, MetaFilter, TechCrunch), so we’re really honored to be in such esteemed company. Look for more exciting announcements related to this partnership and Street Tech’s future in the coming months.

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IRS to Tax Your World of Warcraft Booty?

Julian Dibbell has an interesting piece in the Jan/Feb issue of Legal Affairs where he explores the idea of whether the trading of virtual “goods” in virtual worlds could constitute an income-generating, and therefore, taxable exchange under the IRS rules of barter. This may sound ridiculous on the face of it, but because virtual world goods now have real-world market values, there is a legal argument here (albeit an unsettling one for anybody who plays online multiplayer games or hangs out in SecondLife). The good news is that, when he pursued the question with IRS officials, they cocked their heads to the side like dogs hearing a high-pitched noise, i.e. don’t expect to see 1099 forms shipping with multiplayer games anytime soon.

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New LEGO Mindstorms Shown Off at CES

LEGO has finally announced a new version of their popular Mindstorms robot building system. It’s amazing it took them so long. Hopefully it was worth the wait. The new system sports a 32-bit microcontroller “brick,” Bluetooth wireless connectivity, Mac support, three servo motors, and an ultrasonic sensor. The kit will sell for US$250 and should be on sale in August. After the jump, see more specs and a nifty pic of the new programmable brick and the new servo and sensor designs.

[Via Gizmodo]

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Sony Announces PSP Movie (More?) Download Service

Live from CES…well, we’re not actually at CES, but our younger, better-looking brother Engadget is. He says that Sony’s just announced from the show floor that a new “Sony Connect” download service will go online in March to provide “movies and new titles” for download. This isn’t completely unexpected – Sony built DRM into the latest version of the PSP firmware and has had a TV download site in Japan for awhile. But it’s good news that finally somebody is offering full-length movie downloads, even if playback is somewhat limited by Sony’s DRM. What really has me drooling is the “…new titles” that Sony mentioned. Could this be mini-games, like the new XBox Live offers? Maybe they’re still just talking about movies or maybe they’re talking about some lamo viodeothingycasts that everyone’s abuzz about these days. I suppose we’ll get the details soon enough, but tonight I will dream of PS1 titles and hope that dawn brings Sony support for indy developers…

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Robot Taggers from Outer Space!

Dr. Gianmarco Radice and a group of students from Glasgow University think they have a workable idea for redirecting an Earth-threatening asteroid: paint the sucker. Commonly envisioned schemes of blowing up asteroids (or detonating a bomb near them) could potential turn one deadly jumbo lump of ice and rock into a number of them. The Glasglow team believes that by painting parts of the asteroid (dark to increase temperature, light to decrease it), you could alter its course. The team has been given 300,000 pounds for three-year study on the feasibility of sending robot graffiti artists into space to go Christo all over any asteroids in our path (such as Apophis, a 390-meter ball of dirty-ice fun that could wreck havoc with Earth in 2036). Other methods will be studied too, such as using a space mirror to melt a portion of the asteroid to create a natural propellant stream.

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Pete Townshend sez: Turn it down!!!

Who guitarist Pete Townshend has an odd warning for the generation of earbuds and iPods: Keep the volume down and save your hearing. Townshend has hearing loss that he attributes to years of using studio headphones. Wait, wouldn’t years of touring with one of the loudest rock bands of his era have a little something to do with it? Anyway, he makes a point.

I’m thrilled that widespread portable music playing has gotten many of us really listening to music again (you hear things with ‘phones that you just don’t hear with over-the-air playback), but it can come at a cost if you rock too hard. So, no crankin’ it to “11,” there Nigel!

Read the short AP piece here.