Frayed nerves at the workplace is an everyday occurence as the virtual and real-life inbox seem to pile up with more documents than you can process. Working in a prolonged stressful environment can lead to detrimental health effects in the long run, and hence this is where the Duck Shooting Gallery comes in. Relive your childhood memories at a fun fair with this desktop toy and loosen up those tense muscles in the process. Of course, you won’t get much relaxation if you keep on missing them birds and raising your blood pressure in the process.

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We all know what a pain it can be to run out of batteries on the go, rendering our digital camera useless at the most inopportune of moments. Fancy a rechargeable AA battery that does not require you to lug around a huge and heavy charging station? Enter the USBCell, a rechargeable battery that is capable of charging directly from any USB port without the need for using a charging station. This will definitely give you more luggage space when you travel while lightening your load simultaneously.

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You might think it’s hard to deviate from the standard game of air hockey, right? Nah, instead of that old two player version, there’s the three player one!

The table itself doesn’t look much at all like a regular air hockey table, instead of being a plain old rectangle; it’s a bit more triangular.
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Apple has been selling movies in iTunes 7 for a full week now. How are sales? According to The Wall Street Journal, Walt Disney says they’ve sold 125,000 movie downloads totaling $1 million in revenue. Not bad for just 1 week.

“This is just the beginning,” Disney CEO Robert Iger told Wall Street analysts at a conference Tuesday. “[iTunes] has proved [to be] a great business because there’s no marketing or other expenses involved in selling digital downloads except the cost of encoding.” Iger went on to predict that iTunes would help generate $50 million in additional revenue for Disney this year.

Walt Disney Pictures, which includes Pixar, Touchstone Pictures and Miramax Films, is currently the only major movie studio participating on iTunes.

75 Disney movies, including such hits as Pirates of the Caribbean, The Incredibles, Good Will Hunting and National Treasure, can currently be purchased on iTunes. The other major movie studios are exploring partnerships with iTunes competitors or have disagreements with Apple over licensing fees. Disney’s success this week will probably help convince the other studios that participation on iTunes is probably a good idea.

Disney was also the first to offer TV shows on iTunes a year ago from their American broadcast network ABC.

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It might just be my childish sense of humour but I thought this was quite funny, the fartaphone key ring, your own personal fart recorder.

Now you can savor and share the sound of your farts. When you’re about to let rip press the “Record Fart” button and any bottom burps will be recorded (well apart from SBD’s (Silent But Deadly)). Then when you go down the pub you can play your best farts back to all your mates (which I’m sure will really impress them).

As the recorder only captures audible aspect of a fart (thankfully) any playbacks should be safe from the fart detector we seriously reported on.

If you fancy farting on your hand and need a handicap when pulling women you can get the Fartaphone for $6.99

Some parents are just not satisfied with the standard audio-only baby monitors, or even the ones with the ability to “talk” to the baby, no, they need more, namely the Wireless Color Baby Monitor.

That’s right, you get to watch your baby either cry or sleep on a 1.5 inch color LCD. Now, what if the lights are turned off? Once the lens detects darkness it switches over to infrared mode and displays a black and white picture.
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As our regular readers may have noticed a few members of the CG team (all bar 1 I think(no pun intended)) do enjoy the odd tipple or two. We’ve had to suffer the hardship of testing the Guiness Surger and comparing the taste with all other types of Guinness. Then there was the time we crawled round London pubs looking for looking for Sub Zero Beer, though unsuccessful this has now turned into another ongoing quest. This latest drinking gadget is another one for the home drinker, Phillips HD3600 - PerfectDraft, pull the perfect pint of draught lager at home. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple is riding high lately. Their transition to the Intel chip has been smooth and the popularity of both iTunes and the iPod has been translating into computer sales.

But according to the Net Applications newsletter I got in my inbox yesterday, the apocalypse is about strike at Apple. What are the signs of the Apple apocalypse? They cite accounting irregularities (Wall Street didn’t care), the mass recall of notebook batteries (it was Sony’s fault), and a 0.02% drop in OS usage. Yep, just a little 0.02% drop.

Here’s a passage from their newsletter:

“Mac Intel OS usage is growing quickly, and currently has 0.62 percent usage market share, but overall Mac OS usage is slightly down.. Back in December 2005 total Mac OS usage market share was 4.35 percent, but August 2006 numbers show total Mac OS market share down to 4.33 percent.”

So how did Net Applications measure this 0.02% drop? They have an expensive web traffic analyzing service for webmasters called HitsLink. I used to use HitsLink for MethodShop.com but have since switched to a less expensive service with more features. Hummm… could I be the source of the 0.02% drop? Because of all the iPod related articles on our website we tend to have a higher Mac user base. Maybe the 0.02% drop could be attributed to people going on vacation and not using their computer that month. Or what about the wave of blackouts in America this summer. Yes I’m being sarcastic, but can you blame me? It’s only a 0.02% drop.

Besides the fact that Net Applications is all jacked up over a 0.02% drop, can you really match up marketshare (computer sales) with visitor statistics solely based on HitsLink subscribers? No. Web usage by only HitsLink subscribers is just a small random sampling and has nothing to do with overall market share. Maybe Net Applications should offer to share their data with some other web traffic analyzing services before they declare the next 0.02% apocalypse.

Also, how credible is Net Applications? In the same September 18th newsletter they mistakenly reported that “iPod sales peaked at over 12 million units for the 4th quarter of 2005, but have stumbled to 8.5 million and 8.1 million units the most recent two quarters…” 12 million is close, but wrong. In Q1 of 2006 Apple sold over 14 million iPods.

One last thing. The newsletter also reports that 1% of web users are still using Windows ME. Those crazy backwards bastards. God bless ‘em.

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