Back in May we covered the USB Turntable, the handy little gadget that let you rip all your old vinyl onto your PC. If all of your old school music happened to be on cassette you’d be a bit stuck. That is until now thanks to the Plus Deck Cassette Converter.

The Plus Deck Cassette Converter slots into any vacant 5 1/4 drive bay on your PC. You now have a front loading cassette deck that can be used to play tapes of your PC or more usefully rip them to a less stone age format.

You can get the Plus Deck Cassette Converter from Firebox for £99.95.

Want some positive blogger buzz about your product or service? Maybe you should just buy it like Bill Gates. To help promote the Zune and get some positive Microsoft buzz, Gates coughed up a dozen round trip plane tickets to Redmond, hotel rooms, and Zunes (of course) for a group of gadget and tech bloggers. He then hung out with the bloggers for an hour and answered one question from each of them. Once you factor in the total cost of this stunt, I wonder how much Gates paid per letter for a handful of blog posts?

So what did Microsoft get in return for all of this? Were the bloggers wooed by Bill’s big wallet? Yep.

• Check out the tech-news search engine Techmeme.com. Today their homepage was practically a mural to anything related to Bill Gates, the Zune or Microsoft in general.

• While most reviewers are panning the Zune, blogs like TechCrunch [see post], Micro Persuasion [see post], and GigaOm [see post], are restricting their Zune coverage to DRM issues or posting “feel good” pieces about Microsoft.

Honestly, my criticalness against these other blogs is probably part jealously. Why wasn’t MethodShop.com invited out to Redmond? Oh well, I’m an iPod guy anyway and we’re too small of a blog to make much of a dent for M$. But I do give some of these bloggers credit. Most of them (not Ryan) were upfront and disclosed that Gates gave them free Zunes and paid for their flights out to Microsoft headquarters.

But on the other hand, should corporate blogs like Micro Persuasion and GigaOm, who have venture-capital financing and/or big name PR firms, really be accepting free stuff and sacrificing their objectivity?

How cheap are your personal ethics?

digg story | methodshop

You’ve got your brand new 30 gig iPod, maybe even the 80 gig version, but don’t feel like paying the money for iTunes TV shows but you really, really, really want to your shows on there. It’s quite the dilemma, especially for the technologically impaired. If you’re a techie and know you’ve got a relative exactly like this, consider getting them the iRecord this Christmas. No computers are involved, and all it takes is the push of a button.
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Nearly everybody and his mother already has an iPod, which is why getting an iPod as a holiday gift idea is not exactly the wisest thing to do. What you can do, though, is to pick up a third party iPod device that will enhance the owner’s experience with the world’s most popular digital audio player. This wish is fulfilled with the MusicJam portable audio effects mixer for the iPod, effectively turning this ubiquitous MP3 player into a recording machine that boasts a host of other functions up its sleeves as well.

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I’m not the most organised of DIYers, I’m currently fitting a new kitchen and the place is a bomb site of cabinets, pipes, tools and B&Q receipts. I just come across this toolbox that could help with my lack of tool organisation, the iPod Radio Toolbox.

The iPod Radio Toolbox is like a regular toolbox (you know one of those things you’re “meant” to put your tools in) but also incororporates an AM/FM radio, speakers and a connection and holder for you iPod (or cheaper alternative).

You can get the iPod Radio Toolbox from whatever works for $49.99.

Most vehicles these days come with some form of GPS as humans learn more and more to rely on the teats of technology to help them complete everyday, mundane tasks like getting to the office from their home or heading off to some obscure place without needed to know how to fold back a road map. In fact, there are some of us who rely so much on GPS navigation systems that they would even swear by it, with some of these hardcore proponents even driving into a swamp or river just because the GPS navigation system says there is supposed to be a road ahead. I’m not sure if LG’s latest in-dash entertainment and navigation system is super accurate, but at least the LAN-9600R looks extremely neat.

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When you hear the words iPod Dock, you think, blah, not another one of these things, there’s been at least 100 released now and they all seem exactly the same. Well the iSymphony is indeed an iPod Dock, but it does do some other cool stuff that separates it from the pack, like the built in CD player, and the card reader that plays music off of your SD cards.
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Remember the good old days when a sound card was considered to be a luxury purchase? While your friends with Sound Blasters or Sound Blaster Pros managed to eke out just about double the fun piloting an X-Wing with all the explosions and screams of TIE fighters ringing around in a dogfight, you had to endure the cold, stony silence of keyboard taps and joystick button clicks. Come to think of it, that’s how it was supposed to be anyway. Space is a vacuum, and we all know that sound doesn’t travel through vacuum. I digress - sound cards have since come a long way and today, most motherboards come with integrated sound cards, but if you want to go one up on the generic integrated soundchip, why not plug in this USB-powered Virtual 7.1 Channel Sound Adapter?

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