Gadzooki

Use your Nokia N900 to play SNES games

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Okay, sure, old-school gaming emulators are a dime a dozen. You can easily download one off the net for a small price – or if your Google-fu is strong, free – and you can just download the ROMS of the games that you legally (heh) purchased back in the console’s heyday, and play away! I actually have quite a few installed on my computer and a NES and GBA emulator on my Nokia E63 as well.

So what’s the big deal about playing SNES games on the Nokia N900?

Well, I don’t think any other cellphone can allow you to play SNES games through a PS3 SixAxis controller. And if you use the Nokia N900’s TV out function, you can actually connect your diminutive cellphone to a ginormous HDTV and enjoy your games on a huge screen!

Setting it up is a bit complicated though. Pairing the PS3 SixAxis controller to your N900 via bluetooth isn’t as easy as it looks, though. Unfortunately N900’s Maemo does not come with joystick and mouse support in kernel. These instructions will help you reconfigure the device’s kernel to enable joystick device and mouse support.

Were you able to get SNES emulators to work on your N900? Don’t be afraid to try it, and tell me what happens!

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Such a cool concept pencil!

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Ok, first thing that flashed in my mind “Why didn’t I invent this!”.  Such a cool concept from Japanese designer Yuta Watanabe.  He calls this as the “peg pencil”.  It’s his version of a mechanical pencil made of spring activated (and re-modified) clothe’s pin.  You can all see most of his recent work on his website http://www.yutawatanabe.com/.  Really creative work showcasing the Japanese creative mind.

Ayayay!  I wonder how Yuta thought of the peg pencil.  I am arround clothe pins all my life and yet it has never come across to me that this can morph into something really cool.  Step up for Yuta and loud high-fives.

Anyway, back to tech stuff.  Did you know that Apple has once again upgraded their clip iPods?  Their 1GB model now retails for $49 while their new clip iPod 2GB model retails for $69.  Not sure if it’s in apple stores yet, but yes, I will be in line for one of the 2GB babies the moment it hit shore.

Now the only thing that I am yet to discover is if I can juggle all these iPods I have on a single iTunes program/account.  I think I read from somewhere before that it’s a tricky setup.  I have the 512MB 1st Gen iPod Shuffle, an 80 GB 5th Gen video iPod, a 4GB nano… yeah yeah… many pods there, but we’re three in the family and you know how it is.  Sometimes one just ain’t enough in this dang multi-tasking world.

Fearless prediction:  by the end of the year the clip iPods will reach 8GB at $69 a pin.  Tech is getting cheaper as we speak, is it a good idea?  For the early adopters… hahaha (wink wink).

Getting the Steampunk Look

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We’ve all seen and heard about modding the look of computer peripherals and other present-day machines to fit a person’s personality or simply to follow certain whims (read: too much time on one’s hands).

An interesting, shall we say, genre modders like to do is that of Steampunk. It’s a look based on the type of sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction literary genre, Steampunk, where steam is used to power high-tech inventions set in the Victorian era.

Steampunk Keyboard

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Top 10 Gadgets I Actually Use

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I know. I know. This is a gadget site. We’re supposed to be all about the wanting, the salivating, the dreaming…

But I thought it would be fun to step out of fantasy land for a second and consider the top 10 gadgets that I actually use on a daily and/or weekly basis. Maybe this will give you a glimpse into the inner depths of my life…or maybe not.

1. My Old School Nokia Cell Phone

What can I say. I’ve got a RAZR, but that’s mostly for fun. When it comes to the daily grind, I still find myself preferring the simple, big-buttoned, hard to lose, big bodied Nokia from three years ago to the sleek, thin pretty flip-phones of today. Maybe that makes me uncool. But in this post, I’m all about telling it as it is. 4 hours a day with this baby.

2. My 2 Year Old Gateway Laptop

Sure, I can’t play Pirates or Empire Earth 2 on it, but I spend at least six hours a day on this sucker. Type, type, typing away. It does plays Empire Earth 1 though! And it does some mean web browsing, email checking and word processing. Hey, I use it and that’s all that matters in this post.

3. My Old School Nintendo DS

Well, it isn’t really old-old. But it isn’t the new Lite either. Big and bulky, I play Mario Kart or Advanced Wars every night as a bedtime story.

4. The five year old AC in my window

This summer has been hot, and a day doesn’t go by without churning on the ol’ window AC. Hey, my wife wanted “and old house with character” and that’s what we got: a house with lots of demands. Ever wonder why the men always say they want the newer homes on all those home shopping shows on HGTV (look, my wife makes me watch it!)

5. The Good Ol’ Coffee Pot

Eight cups a day for three years and still chugging. Simple yet effective. I just wish they’d make it fool proof for those times when I forget to slide the pot under the filter and the coffee runs all over the counter.

6. The Hyundai Tucson

Sure, I’d love the electric Tesla or a hybrid or a Ford Mustang, but for $17,000 I just bought a brand new Hyundai Tucson that’s actually fun to drive and has plenty of room for hauling. I just wish I could find some places on the East Coast to do some mild off-roading. Every time I get in this sucker I want to drive up on the curbs.

7. The Trusty Toaster Over

Hey, I’m no cook. But I also don’t like my stuff soggy. So instead of the microwave, I usually throw my food into the Toaster Oven to get a quick but golden brown meal. (I like my marshmallows burnt!)

8. My Dell Axim x50

He’s getting old, but when I’m on the road, my Dell Axim gives me the flexibility I need to track down free WiFi…and that’s all that matters, right? It’s like a treasure hunt, and once I’ve found free WiFi, my heart skips a couple beats before I fetch the laptop and hunker down for an internet feast.

9. My 8th grade Texas Instruments TI-81

Want to figure out how old I am? Figure out which year the TI-81 first came out, then figure that I was in 8th grade at the time. You know what. This calculator has balls of endurance. It graphs, it charts, it makes entering calculations a breeze (you can screw up and edit your numbers without having to type everything else in again). Hey, I’m still using it almost everyday, 15 years later with the original batteries (kudos to Duracell too).

10. My $35 DVD player that we bought on a whim for our bedroom

Now that my wife and I do Blockbuster through the mail, we have a steady stream of DVDs flying to our house each week. The DVD player which was sort of bought for “emergency” cases of boredom, has turned into a nightly event. Ali G, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and all the movies you can shake your fist at (though many of them turn out to be duds, like last nights movie…which I hated…Flightplan).

Itty Bitty Tube Amp: The ZVEX iMPAMP

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Ok. Ok. I admit it. I watch HGTV sometimes.

Tonight it paid off. They had a cool-ass little gadget called the iMPAMP. This thing rocks. Literally. It’s a power tube amp the size of a notecard (or a Nintendo DS) but with sound big enough to produce the effect of a decked out studio.

Itty Bitty Tube Amp

You can hook these guys up to your iPod for old-school sound from a new-school device. But you don’t have to go big to get that old-school sound. The zvex iMPAMP is designed small enough to fit in the palm of your hand…a perfect compliment to your iPod nano.

As a burgeoning old-sound connoisseur I’ve got to get my hands on one of these guys. For $525 it’s a steep price to pay, but if you live for sound like I do, then it might just be worth emptying out the spare change.

Whether you hook it up to an old-school turntable system or a latest-tech portable media player, nothing compares to tube sound. And with these tubes, you can take the sound anywhere.

Look Mom, No Hands: The ELP Laser Turntable

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Laser Turntable

The ELP Laser Turntable lets you listen to your old school vinyl records without worrying a bit about mechanical damage. You see, old school vinyl players actually had to make physical contact with with the grooves in your vinyl discs, slowly wearing them down over time. With old discs, this causes concern for collectors and old timers alike. But the ELP Laser Turntable reads the grooves with lasers, fully preserving the surface integrity of the vinyl disc.

In fact, the ELP Laser Turntable can actually help regain some of the discs fidelity if it has been damaged or scratched, letting people listen to their long lost artifacts that they thought they had lost forever.

I’ve gotta confess that relative to vinyl, I’m a youngster. I seriously started flirting with vinyl records around the time Pearl Jam started proselytizing and selling vinyl discs of their stuff and playing it on their free radio shows. Then I went into my mom and dad’s huge vinyl collection and started getting schooled on Peter, Paul and Mary, The Beatles, CCR, Simon and Garfunkle and Led Zeppelin.

Pretty soon, I started falling in love with the character of vinyl records. The scratchy imperfections, the pops and spits. My major concern with the ELP Laser Turntable is that since it uses digital technology, I doubt it preserves the actual character of vinyl listening.

What would be truly cool is a digital laser device that sells for something like $500 rather than $15,000 and which could introduce a whole new generation to the distinct pleasure of old school vinyl listening. But for now, the ELP device will have to suffice for those who want to digitize, preserve and frequently listen to their old vinyl records.