Gadgets Inspector | Hot Gadgets and Gizmos

When I checked my email this morning, I noticed that Chitika, the blogger-driven merchandising/shopping network, made a Facebook application called iBought. The application allows Facebook users to show off their latest purchases in their profiles.

How useful is iBought? If you checkout my Facebook profile, it says I just bought a goat. No, I didn’t really buy a goat. But I wanted to see what ads Chitika would list based on the word goat. Care to guess? I now have 3 bottles of Horny Goat Weed on my Facebook profile. But let’s say I bought something good like a giant HD-TV. Why would I list it on my Facebook profile? That’s like inviting someone to rob you. Needless to say, I’m pretty sure the iBought application will be deleted by the end of the week.

Besides being useless, Chitika needs to fine tune the application coding. I got this error after trying to interact with the iBought application in my Facebook profile:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/html/facebook/lib/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:1) in /var/www/html/facebook/lib/facebook.php on line 197

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/html/facebook/lib/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:1) in /var/www/html/facebook/lib/facebook.php on line 200

So why would anyone want to install the useless iBought application on their Facebook profile? Chitika is paying $1 per for every friend you get to install iBought. The offer is only open to the first 10,000 installs.

$1 isn’t a lot, but if you have a ton of Facebook friends it could be a worthwhile. Then again, you’ll probably make all your friends hate you. Still interested? You can install the iBought Facebook application here.

BeSocial: methodshop

UPDATE: YouTube has reworked their site in response to this article. If you get an error when trying to download a YouTube video, please try some of the plug-ins and scripts listed in step #3.

YouTube.com is a great resource. Not many sites allows users to freely upload, view, and share video clips like YouTube does. YouTube even lets users easily post videos on their blogs and personal web sites. But because anyone can upload a video clip on YouTube, copyright violations are rampant.

In an effort to prevent the widespread distribution of illegal copied video files, YouTube encodes its video files in the Macromedia Flash format, which prevents viewers from downloading files and making digital copies.

Here’s a step-by-step MethodShop.com tutorial on how to rip video files off YouTube and convert them for an iPod Video, Apple TV, iTunes or iPhone. This trick will work on Mac or PC using Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer.

BeSocial: digg story | methodshop.com

Lui Hua can’t play the Nintendo Wii or Guitar Hero. He wants to but he physically can’t…. at least not yet. Why? Hua suffers from a rare condition known as macrodactyly. When he was hospitalized in Shanghai last month, his left thumb measured 10.2 inches and his index finger measured close to 12.

From The Shanghai Daily:

“It was the biggest hand in the world,” said Chen Zuliang, a hospital official. “Liu’s fingers stopped growing in recent years so plastic surgery was at last possible to correct the malformation.”

On July 20 surgeons undertook a seven-hour operation to reduce the size of Liu’s fingers and thumb. Doctors removed 11 pounds of flesh and bone in the procedure. A second surgery is scheduled to take place. Enlarged limbs can be caused by a number of medical conditions. Lymphedema is perhaps the most common cause and results in some extraordinarily enlarged limbs.

BeSocial: methodshop | digg story | flickr

It looks like Nintendo’s Wii will soon overtake Microsoft’s Xbox360 in the collective sales total and this is with Microsoft’s year head start in the current generation console war.

New figures from website VG Chartz puts the Wii at 10.10m units sold to date worldwide just below the 360’s 10.32m and by next week the Wii could be in the lead.

VG Chartz asserts to base its figures on over-the-counter sales data from a selection of retailers around the world, or when the latest numbers were taken and that they are “very accurate projections of the latest console sell through figures worldwide”.

Whether you take the numbers with a pinch of salt or not, they have the 360’s 10.32m sales made up of 430,000 in Japan, 6,64m in the US and 3.25m everywhere else. The equivalent Wii numbers are 3.32m, 4.07m and 2.71m, respectively. Not bad, given that the Wii hit store shelves around a year after the Xbox 360 did.

Unfortunately the PS3 is lingering in third place with only 4.11m units. However the Wii and 360’s figures are nothing compared to the might on Nintendo’s handheld, the DS. The site believes that 46.83m DS handhelds have been sold, more than twice as many PSPs sold with 22.37m.

Reference for posting: http://www.reghardware.co.uk

Can an Asian-American ever hold the American Idol title? Paul Ethan Hahn says a resounding “yes” and Internet video might be his Ace in the Hole.

Paul grew up in Murray Hill, New Jersey and has always been a big country fan. He also loves the hit FOX-TV program American Idol. And if Paul has his way, he’ll be the first Asian country singer on American Idol.

“I wanna make Paula Abdul cry and show that jerk off Simon how to sing. I want to be the next American Idol!” Paul quips.

This week, Paul Hahn entered an online FOX 29 Philly Idol contest and hopes that a hi-tech edge will help him bypass the massive lines outside the first round of judges.

FOX 29 posted an open American Idol audition on their website. The winner gets to perform live on Fox’s morning show, Good Day Philadelphia, and gets to bypass the first round of judges at the open American Idol Philadelphia auditions later this month. To enter, all you had to do was upload a video of you singing.

Paul recorded his American Idol demo using his Apple MacBook Pro laptop, with a built in iSight camera, and the video editing program iMovie.

“It was so easy,” says Paul. “I just opened iMovie, recorded about a minute sample of my singing, burned a DVD and threw it into the mail. The whole process only took about 10 minutes.”

Since Idol’s first season, we’ve seen Kelly Clarkson belt out high notes, a plethora of Sanjaya hairstyles, and even a contestant who went on to win an Oscar. But we haven’t seen any serious Asian-American contestants get a real shot at the Idol crown (sorry but William Hung doesn’t count).

Will Paul’s dream of telling off Simon and getting to sing a country song on American Idol come true? Can Internet video voting give this American Idol hopeful a back door to stardom? That’s in the hands of you, the voters.

You can watch and vote for all the top 10 Philadelphia contestants, including Paul Hahn, on FOX 29’s web site: http://media.myfoxphilly.com/idol/idolvote.html. The top 5 get to perform live on FOX 29’s morning show Good Day Philadelphia and the winner gets to bypass the massive lines at the Philadelphia open auditions for season 7.

BeSocial: digg story | methodshop | flickr

Why give someone a single still framed picture when you can give them an entire slide show? The MF-575 is an inexpensive hi-tech digital photo, MP3, and video player with a bright, high-resolution 5.6-inch color TFT screen.

When I bought my first MF-575 picture frame, I got it as a gift for a family member who liked to complain that I never send them pictures anymore. The problem is, I have a digital camera and haven’t gotten any pictures developed in several years. So now, whenever I go over to their house for a visit, I just bring an extra memory card from my digital camera full of new pictures. If you don’t have an extra memory card, the MF-575 has an easy-to-use MD/SD/MMC memory card reader that plugs into any computer with a USB port. So you can just plug the entire picture frame into your computer and copy the pictures onto the card that way if necessary.

This year on Christmas morning, I was thinking about taking a series of pictures while everyone is opening their gifts. Then I’ll take the memory card out of my digital camera and pop it into the MF-575 picture frame for an instant slide show for everyone to enjoy on Christmas afternoon. Good idea right? The number of images you can put into your MF-575 slide show is only limited by the capacity of the memory card being used.

Here’s the full review: MF-575 Digital Picture Frame

BeSocial: digg story | methodshop