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New TiVo Central Software Beta

Links to the beta of the new TiVo Central Online interface have been floating through cyberspace.

The new program is Ajax-based. Clicking on a show in the schedule grid expands to reveal more info about the program and buttons for recording and creating season passes. You can also customize your schedule by color-coding different content types (movies, sports, special interests, etc.). Here’s a link to the beta. You already have to be logged in normally for it to work. Nothing too terribly exciting, but definitely an improvement over the existing interface,

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More on LEGO Mindstorms NXT

Robot Magazine has a nice piece about the new LEGO Mindstorms NXT system that was announced last week at CES. The article includes a video of Soren Lund, who’s been the director of Mindstorms development since the beginning, showing off a number of bots and the new system’s capabilities.

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TiVo Wireless Adapter and TiVoToGo for Mac

When TiVo came out with its own branded Wireless-G USB Adapter a few weeks back, users offered up a collective “Huh?” Why bother, when there are plenty such devices already on the market? Well, according to a short hands-on review on Zatz Not Funny, the TiVo adapter is 60% faster than existing wireless adapters . And being price competitive with other models, that makes it worth the purchase, especially if you don’t already have one.

Also, Zatz reports that Megazone, the only blogger at CES focused on TiVo tech, saw the (pre-Alpha) Mac version of TiVoToGo, so I guess we should see it this year. See a picture of it after the jump.

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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]