Filed under: Home Entertainment

The long-promised day that die-hard sofa jockeys have been yearning for is almost upon us, friends, with a partnership between Echostar and the Home Shopping Network promising to finally bring the first large-scale shop by remote project to the US. Rather uninspiringly called, um, "Shop by Remote," the service will allow DISH customers to simply click a button on their remote (plus 15 other buttons corresponding to their phone numbers and zip codes) when they want to buy the current item being shown on HSN -- a process that is supposedly "three to four times faster" than ordering by phone, but only slightly lazier (especially if you've got all these shopping channels on speed dial like certain people we know, Mom). If the current product isn't doing it for you, you can also select from the two previous items or the deal of the day, all of which allow you to further customize your choice (color, size, etc.) through a series of contextual menus. Sure we're not yet able to one-click Rachel's pants while watching Friends like the futurists predicted oh so long ago, but this is still an important step on the path towards the completely-impulsive, thought-triggered shopping experience that will finally enable us to accumulate crap at an even faster clip than we've managed to already.

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Tips on how to gain 10 days of extra sleep a a year. Found through Lifehacker.

Filed under: Features, Gaming, Home Entertainment

So naturally the first thing we did this morning was to boot up our PlayStation 3 and download the v1.8 firmware update, which among other things enables DLNA media streaming support and 1080p video upscaling, even on DVDs. The media streaming is what we've all been waiting for though -- that's the biggest leg up the 360 has in terms of media, so we dove straight in there, testing our Vista media PC's ability to stream to the PS3. Unfortunately, the results were less than impressive -- but we really can't totally fault Sony on it. Yes, they could have released some fricking documentation with v1.8, but Windows media sharing and DLNA support in Vista is already pretty half-baked, and although it was possible to play (and even copy) music back on the PS3 no problem, we had nothing but issues with video streaming. Read on and check out the gallery.

Continue reading Sony PlayStation v1.8 hands-on

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Storage

More of a heads up than anything else, PNY issued a release today stating its intention to debut is new SSD drive lineup at Computex early next month. We don't know the sizes or prices on these things, but we do know that every time a new company adds their products to the mix it only means everyone else has to work harder to make their gear cheaper and better -- and the sooner we can take out all the spinning disk drives from our machines, the better.

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

No joke, man, Memorex -- yeah, that Memorex -- recognized that teenage huffers are so into snorting their compressed-gas dusting products they went ahead and added a deterrent ("bitterant", a "bitter safety additive") to keep impressionable youth from getting all whacked up on the stuff. So far as we can tell, their new, smellier Air Dusters won't be branded any differently, so the next time you go "bagging" or "dusting" (we love the fact their press release quotes euphemisms for getting high), don't be too surprised at the awful and/or vomit-inducing scent emitted. Remember kids: no huffin.

 

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!