Dan Ackerman asked, "What happens the day after Vista's launch?" earlier this month, but what happens the night of Vista's launch? If you must have Microsoft's forthcoming OS the second it becomes available (a week from tomorrow, January 30), you have a few midnight-hour options. CompUSA will open its 230 stores next Monday shortly before the clock strikes 12, while Best Buy will do the same thing at about 15 of its stores. Both retailers will have Vista-equipped desktops and laptops priced to move, along with helpful staff on hand to assist you in choosing … Read more

When I first saw the pictures of this house on Make Magazine's blog, I thought they were straight off the sets of one of the Lord of the Rings movies. Seriously, doesn't it look like the kind of place where you could open the door and expect to see see Elijah Wood and Dominic Monaghan inside sporting prosthetic foot fur? But, no, it's actually a "low-impact woodland home" in Wales that was built at a total cost of 3,000 pounds (a little under $6,000) and 1,000-1,500 man-hours over a period of … Read more

There are tons of retro-designed music players on the market, but they've almost become parodies of themselves with the same old jukebox and '20s-style radio cases. So we're thankful that Pure Digital has decided to break out of the box, figuratively and literally. It's created a digital radio that looks like a Marshall amp--including, as Crave UK points out, a volume knob that goes to 11 a la This Is Spinal Tap. Brilliant.

Citing those deep holiday discounts for big-screen HDTVs, such as the $999 Westinghouse 42-inch LCD, analysts told CNNMoney.com that this year's Super Bowl won't occasion the same kinds of price cuts. Previous years have seen lineman-size reductions in HDTV prices during the two weeks leading up to the big game, but this year outlets such as Circuit City and Best Buy, whose profits were hurt by a blitz of holiday sales, will instead focus on kicker-size price promotions (the deepest discount analysts saw so far is a $250 Vizio deal at Costco) and bundles. If you were … Read more

Somewhere, ghosts of IBM's past are spinning in their graves. ColorWare is bringing 28 hues--including pink, purple, yellow and bright orange--to laptops from Lenovo that were once produced under the nameplate of Big Blue, that most buttoned-down of corporate establishments.

Laptoping says ColorWare applies its "X2 scratch-resistant liquid plastic coating" to Lenovo's "ThinkPad T60" laptops, whose features include an Intel Core 2 Duo processors, 1GB of memory and a DVD burner. But it's the complex coloring process that draws the most attention: "The X2 coating is applied to the laptops and … Read more

About a month ago, we wrote about the HomeStar Pro Planetarium, which uses LEDs to project the night sky on your ceiling. Here's another one for the astronomy buffs: Laser Stars, a projector that beams star and cloud formations onto your wall or ceiling of choice with laser technology and holographics. For those of us who live in brightly lit cities where we can't really see any real stars at night, it's a cool idea.

The Laser Stars projector looks to be less for nuts-and-bolts astronomy buffs than for people who just like to look at a … Read more

We've developed an intense dislike for the overuse of Bluetooth headsets, as they seem to encourage obnoxiously loud talking in public places. But if people insist on grafting them to their skulls, the least they can do is wear ones that look good. Bluetake meets that challenge with its latest offering. Gadgeteer wasn't thrilled with the performance of the BT400GL, which the company describes as "one of the smallest and lightest headsets on the market," but did note an important style point for fashionistas: It comes in "girly flashy pink and manly silver."

As we've seen in Las Vegas and elsewhere recently, SanDisk's Sansa is coming out with some of the more innovative and practical personal technologies--a combination that seems increasingly rare these days. The latest example is the "Sansa Xpress," which Chip Chick says has every reason to give the iPod Shuffle a run for its money with 1GB of memory, a 15-hour battery, built-in microphone and FM tuner. We think the best feature is its direct USB connection, but that may be because we have a thing for SanDisk's design sense (and the Xpress' $60 price … Read more

A "cultural engineering" group in France, called the HeHe Association, has come up with a transportation concept that's a whole lot cooler than Segways: a "personal rail service" that puts small single-person vehicles onto abandoned light rail and tram tracks.

It's definitely conceptual, and likely will never see actual implementation, as it would hit plenty of roadblocks (ha ha). It doesn't look like they've made any concrete outline for how they'd be powered, though the creators have stressed on their Web site that it would be eco-friendly. There are also logistical … Read more