Crave

These days--post-'60s and post-rave both--the term "trippy" is no longer one of endearment, but the British ambient act's latest could spark a revival. Filled with jammy synths and snapping rhythms, "The Dream" (finally available Stateside) is a less earnest redux of glowstick culture.

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(Credit: BrickHouse Security)

Competition is fierce on the golf course even for amateur duffers, and some will go to practically any lengths to acquire the slightest advantage. And now there's a gadget that can give you a covert peek into your opponent's practice sessions if you can sneak it into his bag.

BrickHouse Security--the crazy outfit that's responsible for such gizmos as the "GPS Mail Logger"--has done it again with the "Micro Orb Spy Camera," a device that it says is the same size as a golf ball. This surveilling sphere records audio as well as video, so you can delight in all the expletives that will accompany every shank.

It records up to six hours of video at a time at 30 frames per second, but its battery lasts for only three hours at a time so plan accordingly. The incriminating evidence can be transferred with a 2GB microSD card. If you don't golf, BrickHouse offers some alternative uses--as a helmet mount, nanny-cam, and our personal favorite, a mannequin eyeball.

(Thanks for the tip, Bob)

This morning at the Game Developer's Conference here in San Francisco, Alex St. John, the CEO of WildTangent, will announce a new version of the company's gaming software that he hopes will make people think twice about buying a video game console.

Taking a cue from the growing number of casual gamers buying consoles, St. John, who is most famous for helping create Direct X specification for Microsoft, figures that people are itching to get their hands on video games, but that they shouldn't have to buy a proprietary piece of hardware and pricey software titles, or even relegate gaming to one room in the house.

His solution is to take WildTangent's gaming marketplace software and tune it to work on the go, or in the living room on large televisions. The application, called "Orb" (not to be confused with the Orb media-sharing software) is designed to let anyone with a laptop and a gamepad navigate the various games available for play without having to use a keyboard or mouse. St. John notes that a majority of machines that have shipped out in the last year or so can more than handle the graphics capabilities of the Wii and original Xbox, and if users are looking to take part of that software ecosystem, they don't need to buy anything new.

WildTangent's Orb interface has been made friendly for large screens and aging eyes. Instead of paying, users can now opt in to play games for free after sitting through preroll commercials.

(Credit: WildTangent)

Orb has also been created from the ground up with a new advertising model that lets home users play titles for free as long as they're willing to sit through a commercial from sponsors that's inserted at the beginning of each gaming session. St. John equates WildTangent's model to that of television programming, noting that advertisers have been more than willing to get on board, whereas users aren't always into shelling out the cash up front to play a game.

Besides advertising, WildTangent runs off a micropayment system similar to what you see on Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace with packages of credits that are purchased several at a time instead of an a la cart model. With the new system users don't even have to invest in the micropayments if they're willing to opt in to the advertising in front of each gaming session.

In addition to the new software, Orb will be launching with developer support to get various titles into the marketplace. The two being announced today are Sierra Online and THQ. St. John says other developers will likely want to join up to place their games on Orb in time for software that's slated for release in April.

I've been playing around with a pretty cool service this afternoon called SeeToo. It's targeted toward people who want to share a private video with someone else but don't want the rest of the world to see it or for it to sit on some server farm out of their control. Unlike other services that have played around with the idea of multiple users watching the same video at the same time (see Lycos Mix, YouTube Streams, and Meebo's rooms) SeeToo handles video links like one-time conference sessions. You can only get in if the video holder has their browser window open and has given you a private URL. SeeToo then streams the content to one person only, who can interact with the host using a simplified chat window that sits just below the player.

Baby mind control is a powerful drug. Using SeeToo you can share this video with one person, and one person only.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

SeeToo doesn't rely on server farms to transcode and optimize the video streams. Instead, it works entirely on the client side, requiring the video host to download and install a small desktop plug-in that sits in the Windows taskbar. It's essentially like Orb, which lets you stream and repurpose desktop data to other devices. There are positives and negatives to this. The good is that your viewers don't need to install anything (assuming they have Flash), and videos begin playing almost instantly. There's also a pretty big cap on video sizes (500 MB), which means you're probably not going to have to shrink down a video before you share. The bad is that you're going to need a capable (Windows) machine to both host and crunch the data. On my month-old Core 2 Duo machine, playing a video was sucking up about half of my processing power, which is about what I expected considering the files were large and encoded in H.264.

The service has some pretty basic upload requirements at 100kb/s, which should be fine for anyone with a cable modem or decent DSL package. Users who have good speeds on both ends get the added benefit of improved quality. SeeToo's creators tell me they'd like to move toward providing higher resolutions almost to the quality of the original video. I'm giving SeeToo a bit of a pass in this department since they're brand-new, but just with interoffice testing, the video got a little choppy and pixelated from time to time.

SeeToo is currently in private beta with plans to open up its doors to everyone soon. You can sign up to be a beta tester here.

[Originally spotted on the Museum of Modern Betas]

(Credit: Reef One)

Now this, friends, is one invention worth crowing about: a self-cleaning fish tank. It's something that practically every parent must endure at some point, when a child brings home that first goldfish from the school carnival.

Unlike standard aquariums, the "biOrb" has a special ceramic system that "provides a massive home for filter bacteria," according to its U.K. distributor, Reef One. The only maintenance required is a regular changing of the cartridge in the aquarium's built-in filter.

T3 adds that the spherical tanks come in a variety of colors and can hold 15 liters of water, enough for six fish to cohabitate comfortably as long as none of them is a Sabretooth Tetra.

Orb 2.0

(Credit: CNET)

Back in 2005, CNET reviewed Orb, a software package that promised to let users access media files located on their home PC and stream them to any other broadband-connected computer and even some mobile devices. Orb scored a 7.0--"very good"--and that was that--except that Orb has offered some pretty compelling upgrades in the meantime.

Since our original review, the company has rolled out Orb 2.0 (fall 2006), which is essentially a Web 2.0 version of the product. You still run a small server applet on your home PC that catalogs and streams your media files--video, audio, and photos--but you can now access all of these files via a single Web page (available at mycast.orb.com). It's a user-customizable, AJAX-based page that's similar to the personalized home page that you can make at Google, Yahoo, Live.com, and elsewhere. In addition to keeping links to your home PC media files (or any other documents you choose to make accessible), Orb 2.0 lets you add pretty much any RSS-based resource from the Web. In addition to a variety of pre-fab options available (news, weather, sports, stock quotes, and the like), I was able to add several blog and news feeds, plus an array of my friends' Flickr, Twitter, and Jaiku feeds. In other words, you're able to mix your own "local" media with pretty much anything you can find online. Orb even supports Google Gadgets; I was able to include a Google Maps applet and even a decent game of Pac-Man.

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(Credit: Make)

Sometimes, the techy arts-and-crafts picks that Make magazine's blog talks about are just too cool to pass up. I never did get around to obtaining a paint mixer to build a Mark Foley Halloween decoration, but now I'm inspired to build myself a GloGlobe, which Make recently featured. It's constructed out of a Styrofoam ball with a battery, an LED, and some electronic bits shoved inside. The blog recommends it for Dune junkies who want to create their own Holtzman effect, but personally, I think they would make amazing party decorations. Too bad I didn't know about this before New Year's Eve!

Of course, I'd have to learn how to tweak meticulously with small pieces of electronic equipment, first.

GloGlobes would also be a great way to scare co-Craver Mike Yamamoto. As he's very willing to admit, round glowing things scare him almost as much as Hello Kitty does.