People say that the world population is reaching epidemic numbers. This might be true, but imagine how many more little people there would be crawling around if so many couples didn’t have fertility issues. Not to mention a lot more happy, yet stressed, parents.

Issues with fertility have luckily been getting a helping boost from the progress of technology. Medications and laboratory fertilization has totally changed the concept of getting pregnant. Though if you don’t want to grow your baby in a lab, there are other methods on the way to help before reaching that point. The DuoFertility USB Skin Patch could one day help millions of couples plan their newest addition to the family.

Intel’s Classmate PC was originally designed to go up against the OLPC XO laptop as a low cost computer that will help bridge the digital divide in developing countries, but it seems as though folks living in developed countries want their share as well. Analysts have so far concluded that both Europe and the US will be receiving the Classmate pretty soon, primarily targeting the education sector. Intel has to date already run a fair number of pilot tests with the laptop in schools located throughout Texas, Oregon and California in the US. Word has it that the Intel Classmate PCs arriving in US and Europe will of the Windows variety instead of the Linux version, and will come with more advanced architecture compared to models available in developing nations.

Music meets robotics: Gibson have announced the Robot Guitar. Integrated electronics and motorized mechanics allow this instrument to automatically tune itself in various configurations.

Some might call it the lazy man’s guitar, but every cover-playing guitarist will find it to be pure bliss. It will allow them to only carry one guitar with them instead of a set of differently-tuned instruments. Or, for those of us who couldn’t afford a set of guitars, it will practically eliminate the gaps between songs, used for re-tuning the instrument.

A limited first run is will be available in ‘Select stores’ (a whole bunch in the US, but only few in Europe and the other continents), on December 7th. It will only enter ’series’ production in late 2008.

Believe it or not the preparations for the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas start well in advance of the January exhibition date. The decent hotels will sell out long before the end of the year and companies are already booking exhibition space.

Why mention this now? Well here at CG we’re going through the press registration process for CES 2008 and that reminded me that I made a few notes from my first CES in January this year. It was fun, but don’t let anyone kid you that it wasn’t hard work! On re-reading the notes it seems that we spent an awful lot of time just walking to where we needed to be, and it also looks like I have a slight pre-occupation with food! An unintentional insight into my personality I feel

Anyway, if you’re interested in what it was like trying to cover the world’s largest consumer electronics show with two people read on… (it might take a while to load though, there are a fair few photos)

Gallery of posts up to 03-22-2007

Free Spirit Spheres are the coolest tree houses I’ve ever seen, big wooden spheres that can be suspended from tree tops or nestle in the crown of large trees.

The concept of the “connected home” is not a new one to the geeks among us - the X10 system has been around in one form or another since 1978 believe it or not!

It now seems that the idea of digitally serving audio and video content from a central source has started to catch on in the mainstream - the recent What HiFi / Stuff show had a few manufacturers bringing variants on the streaming media theme to the market.