John Mahoney

Camera makers love the incremental update: selling a new model with just enough enhancements that you'll be tempted to trade up. But if you own one of several Canon point-and-shoots, you can get new features, such as shooting in high-quality RAW format, measuring accurate exposures via a live histogram, and even running simple applications like games or a calendar, without having to pay for an upgrade. All you need to do is replace your firmware, the computer code embedded in the camera's memory that serves as its operating system.

Sure you've seen two big flat-panels linked together side by side on gaming rigs before. But this bad boy ties them into one sveltely-curved unit. The Alienware Curved is a single 2880x900 (2x WXGA+ resolution), powered by DLP projection (so it's not that svelte, from behind anyway). But it works with any game that already supports dual-head WXGA+ setups and should hit gaming dens near you in the second half of '08. —John Mahoney

Want more? Check out our entire CES 2008 coverage here.

That's right, we're of course heading out to Vegas again this year to cover the world's largest consumer electronics trade show from top to bottom. Look here on the blog Sunday-Thursday for news, photos and video filed from the frenzied trade floor as every major manufacture rolls out the gear you'll be craving in '08. We've got our pedometers fired up—we're ready to go! —John Mahoney

To get an idea of what's in store, check out last year's coverage here.

If you've already gotten your hands on our hot-off-the-presses January issue, you may have seen our announcement of a contest with BUG Labs—makers of the modular open-source hardware kit that allows handy builders to create the gadget of their dreams by snapping one of several available modules to a central BUGbase portable computer, which can then be programmed to get all the modules talking to each other in all kinds of interesting ways. Sounds pretty cool, right?

Along with the BUG folks, we're putting the finishing touches on the contest now—it's going to be great!. So watch this space for details in the next few days. DIY gadget heads, prepare yourselves.  —John Mahoney

Congrats to Instructables user dttworld for bagging the grand $5,000 prize for the iRobot challenge. If you recall, we helped get the creative juices flowing with our iRobot iNstitute—a guide to getting started with the flexible Create kit. Something tells me dttworld wasn't in need of our help, though, judging by his winning home service 'bot: it can talk, recognize faces, control your TV, water your plants, and even remind grandma to take her pills! Check out more photos and video here. —John Mahoney

iRobot Create Personal Home Robot [instructables]

iRobot iNstitute

At long last, the long-delayed A380 has finally made its first commercial flight—over 18 months behind schedule but still early enough to meet the conditions of our PPX proposition. A380FLIES has been delisted and paid out at POP$100 per share.

Personally I was skeptical, but the market was leaning toward success all along, with the proposition trading above $80 for the last few months. It closed at POP$99.75—doesn't get much more certain than that!

Above is a video of the historic touchdown in Sydney, courtesy of the UK's Telegraph. —John Mahoney

Among the friends we've been making over in the PopSci booth at Maker Faire include the guys from Octoparts—an aggregate search engine for electronic components. If you've ever tried to buy resistors, capacitors, or any other component on the Web, you know how obscure and confusing some of these ordering sites can be—if you don't know your part number, you're often out of luck. With Octoparts, just type in what you're looking for and find the best price. In the works is an online app to save and share your parts list for your project. Now that Radio Shack has  almost entirely moved out of the components trade in their stores, Octoparts is a new tinkerer's dream. —John Mahoney

The PopSci booth is hopping here at Maker Faire Austin. Here's Gray Matter columnist Theo Gray doing a version of his "dry ice cream"—this time by simply pouring liquid nitrogen into a pot of cream and sugar. Who needs an ice cream maker? Mmm mmm good.

Here we have yours truly demonstrating a quick and easy way to greatly enhance your computer's ability to detect and connect to Wi-Fi networks both near and far with a piece of Asian parabolic cookware.

Here's hoping that today will go down as a watershed date in the music industry—the day that a mass-market band finally got it right. I'm talking about the English rockers Radiohead and their innovative distribution model for their new album, In Rainbows, which was released for digital download today.

Rather than wait for it to be leaked online well before its physical release, the band decided to publish the recently completed album to the Web themselves, forgoing the many months of promotion and planning that usually come between an album's completion and its arrival in stores. Better yet, the band allowed each downloader to pay whatever they wanted for the DRM-free record—anything from two cents to, well, hundreds of dollars if you were so inclined.

The beauty of this is that nearly every music fan I know (most of whom havent paid for music in years) was excited to buy this album. Excited because they could pay a very small amount of money, sure, but also because they knew it was going straight to the band they admired and not to a record company. They were also excited to play it however they wanted, on an unlimited number of MP3-capable devices or CDs, without DRM restrictions.

Radiohead discovered something important today: Once customers are not theoretically required to put up money for an album that they were going to download for free anyway, they instantly become more excited about actually paying money for it. It certainly also helps if the album is fantastic, which In Rainbows is. Let's hope other major bands and labels follow suit. The future is now! —John Mahoney

Buy it here - inrainbows.com

As we've reported before, it's often possible to fight planned obsolescence and resurrect your dead or dying iPod without bowing to the man by simply buying a new one. Putting a more morbid twist on the issue is the iPod Death Clock—enter in your serial number, answer a few quick questions, and get an estimate on how much time's left until your iPod's funeral, ticking down before your eyes! They'll also give you a link to add your funeral date to Google Calendar, an estimate on your battery's current capacity, and of course some handy links to purchase some replacement parts from their well-appointed shop.

As you can see, PopSci web assistant Abby's relatively new 5G 'pod only has a little over a year left to live. O mortality, does nothing escape your ever-present gaze?   —John MahoneyiPod Death Clock [via Lifehacker]