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Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

While we new LG had a pair of DVR-packin’ plasmas lined up, nothing was officially official until now. The 42- and 50-inch PG6900 plasmas were designed to hold up to 86-hours of programming (SD, we assume) on its 160GB of internal hard drive space, and the 8-day EPG should give you a pretty decent view of what’s coming on in the near future. Additionally, you’ll find a 30,000:1 contrast ratio, Energy Star compliance, a DVB-T tuner (plus an analog tuner), three HDMI 1.3 ports, 100Hz refresh rate and integrated speakers which are said to be “invisible.” Look for these to pop up soon (at least in Europe) for $1,799 and up.

[Via Gizmag]

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Filed under: Gaming

Japan’s Nikkei is reporting what we’ve been hearing Stateside for weeks: Xbox 360 price cuts across the board. Expected to go official sometime later today, the Japanese Xbox 360 Arcade will drop to just ¥19,800 or about $182 (tax inclusive, presumably) in hopes of boosting sales. The new pricing represents a near 30% drop from its previous ¥27,800 (about $256) price and undercuts the Wii sold locally for ¥25,000. Nikkei’s sources also claim that Microsoft will cut the prices on all three Xbox 360 models without going into specifics. If true then this bodes well for the US price cuts expected on September 7th.

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Labor Day weekend is the time to say an unofficial goodbye to summer, to consistent warm weather, to lighter clothes—and maybe to the job that’s holding you back. If you’re looking to make the leap into a new gig or an entirely new career this fall, there are several online tools and power tips for every stage of the job-seeking journey. When you hit your desk on Tuesday morning and quietly decide to find your escape hatch from your current position, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a compilation of our tips and techniques for finding a job, putting your best face forward to it, and sticking with a long-haul job hunt. Photo by Here in Van Nuys.

Let RSS and email find the job for you
New jobs would be much easier to find if you didn’t have those eight or so hours a day you spend doing your current job. Give yourself a break and set up RSS feeds for any job list site, and get those feeds emailed to you before or after work with our how-to guide.

Shoot for the right salary
Use one or a combination of the popular salary estimating sites, each of which has its strengths and quirks, to shape your answer to the inevitable salary question. Our commenters generally believe you can’t stonewall an interviewer if they ask, but you can still see if the employer will throw the first pitch—if you don’t mind a small stand-off.

Rebuild your resume
Write down everything you’re capable of and then prune it. Avoid the words you’ve heard other people use on their resumes. Keep it one page, even if it’s not, or skip it entirely. There’s a lot of advice about a single sheet of paper out there, and for good reason. Check out our compilation of the best tips you didn’t already know.

Ace the interview
A true geek doesn’t like to show up for things unprepared, and a job interview is a great chance to put some of those hacker-style skills to use. Social networks, subtle hypnosis, 100-day plans—there are many more ways to leave a good impression than knowing what your greatest weakness is.

Restart a stalled search
As Bruce Wayne’s father once said, we fall so that we can learn to pick ourselves back up again—geeky reference, but totally applicable to round two of your resume packets. After you’re done feeling discouraged, get yourself an expensive-looking suit on the cheap, work your current contacts for better leads, and start writing online about the topics you want to work in. That and more tips in our guide to getting back on your feet.

What job-hunting topics did we skip over entirely? What tech tools or techniques got you hired that don’t fall into any common advice categories? Give us your elevator pitch in the comments.

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Naoki Maru may live in Hikone, north of Kyoto, down the road from a samurai castle full of katana swords and armor, but for him, the ancient Japanese art of bushido is best carried out with robots, not people. King Kizer, the Maru family robot, has dominated the Robo-One tourney over the past three years, collecting $50,000 in prize money. Maru, a factory engineer by day, is trying to perfect a way to make Kizer even more of an ass kicker using a technique he had seen many times in anime: A harness that captures human movements and translates them into robotic attacks and other gestures.

Check out video footage of the harness in action below, plus our exclusive interview, where Maru discusses the what it takes to win a robotic deathmatch.

Maru builds the bots; his sons Kenta and Ryoma operate them in the combat tournaments. For a prizefighter, King Kizer is only 16 inches tall but has a lightweight aluminum frame, very rapid servomotors and sensors that help it maintain its balance and detect its enemies. Kizer uses the latter to launch speedy, autonomous attacks on foes.

The harness creates a master-slave connection with Kenta. When the boy moves his upper body during combat, sensors with voltage potentiometers transmit the motions via a Bluetooth link to Kizer, which reproduces them. In the video, you can see that there’s a bit of a delay, but apparently robot combat is still clumsy enough for this to not have too great an impact. The lower body is still controlled with a gamepad.

We recently visited the Maru dojo to discuss King Kizer and new fighting-robot technologies:

How does the “master-slave” control technology work? Where did you get the idea? Have you used it in Robo-One tournaments?
The master-slave control idea goes a long way back. The concept has a long history in robot anime, and it has been implemented in surgical devices. I’ve been using it since I first entered Robo-One.

The equipment affixed to the operator’s body is known as a “master suit,” and I concentrated on making this lightweight.

The strong point of the system is that it’s great for adapting to the requirements of the moment. Other systems can only be operated through preprogrammed robot motions. For instance, in hand-to-hand combat, if you encounter a robot that is shorter than what you expected to go up against, your machine will be punching air instead of metal. But with a master-slave control system, that’s not a problem you encounter.

The weak point of my current master-slave system is that it’s limited to the upper half of the controller’s body. But this is a problem that I believe I can solve. I’m also making improvements to use the system in non-combat applications. As you saw, it can also be used to handle eggs!

How do you build your robots?
When I decided to make my first bipedal robot from scratch, I had to study. The manufacturing process includes making the aluminum panels—cutting, bending and finishing—, plus vacuum form molding, resin casting and other techniques. The design is done in 2D CAD, and then I make a model, printing the frame on paper. Once I confirm the mechanical structure of the paper model, I start creating the actual aluminum panels. Since I don’t do it in 3D CAD [just 2D CAD], this work process is really critical.

I already had computer programming skills, so making the robot’s control system wasn’t so difficult for me.

What is the role of your sons in your robot activity?
They’re more than operators—our team is like the driver and mechanics in an F1 race car team. But their most important role is that they keep me motivated. I give it my all so that my sons can be victorious. I doubt I would have the power to keep winning at Robo-One if I had to create and operate the robots and compete in the tournaments all by myself!

Also, my sons sometimes provide me with unexpected inspiration. As children, their perspectives on robot making are invaluable.

In only three years of robot fighting, you have collected about $50,000 in prize money at Robo-One. Why is the Maru family team so successful?
I could not do this if I were not part of a family team. Most competitors in Robo-One are bachelors—there are few family teams. And I don’t want to see my kids cry if they lose at the tournament!

Another reason for our success is not the technological power of our hardware and software, but how we manage our team. There isn’t a great difference between competitors. in Robo-One. Fighting really hinges not on the actual winning or losing, but on seemingly trivial factors that are not obvious.

To give you some specific examples, one must consider things like safety parameters that are in your robot’s design and how they’ll affect performance, readiness for bugs that crop up during a fight, as well as strategies and practice based on your study of opponents. You can’t count on having a winning streak if all you have done is create a robot with some cool abilities.

What is special about Japanese robots in general?
For Japanese people, a robot means a humanoid, bipedal robot. It seems Japanese are unique in the world in this way of thinking about robots. Many of the competitors in Robo-One watched robot anime when they were kids and that really influenced them. Robots are part of their childhood dreams, and that is reflected in their robot designs and fighting techniques.

Music for the second clip: “Prelude No. 1″ by The Grift; no frikkin’ clue what the song in the first clip is.

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Apart from their Spinn 70s-retro analog goodness, iRiver had two beautiful concept products in their IFA 2008 stand which had a design that looked further into the past, as far as the beginning of the 20th century. As you can see in the video, both their Clix speaker—inspired by the shape of cathode ray tubes—and their pipe music player—which you can blow to mute (insert joke here), and connect it to a speaker resembling a phonograph horn—look both intriguing and beautiful. [More IFA 2008 Coverage]

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Stained glass adds a hard-to-replicate ambiance to any room, but the stuff sure isn’t cheap. One Instructables user has detailed a method for making faux stained glass with a hot glue gun, acrylic glass (also known by its trademark Plexiglas), and whatever paint colors you plan to use. As the commenters at Instructables have noted, it’s not a perfect simulation, but the faux stuff can serve as a stand-in for frames missing some glass, or for trying out rough sketches (or goofier ideas) to see how they look as stained glass. While you’re at the store, consider adding your own $16 DIY privacy frosting.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

While Apple’s App Store was far from being the first of its kind, we’re now seeing a job posting over in the Redmond area that suggests that Microsoft is looking to produce something similar for its Windows Mobile platform. The news comes hot on the heels of Google’s own Android Market announcement, and if the Product Manager position writeup is to be believed, said platform will be christened Skymarket. Described as a “marketplace service for Windows Mobile,” Skymarket could seemingly be a critical part of WinMo 7. But don’t take our word for it, the proof is the pudding — or in the read link, in this instance.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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Filed under: Laptops

There are two kinds of Dell rumors: sure things, and ones that aren’t sure things. This one falls in the latter camp, so proceed with caution. We’ve got a tipster who says a friend of his from Dell handed him this shot of what is purportedly a new XPS M1330 / M1530 design. As you can see, pretty much the same old fare… but what’s this? A large glossy touchpad? Here’s our hunch: Dell is tired of drawing inspiration from Apple after the fact, and decided to turn the tables by capitalizing on one of the most persisten (and outlandish) Apple rumors in existence. A good capacitive touchscreen for the trackpad on a laptop would undoubtedly be a blast if it was done right, with the right software support, and at least seems like a good gimmick. Or maybe it’d just be lame. We won’t go further than that, this could just as easily be a Photoshop, but we will be keeping an eye out.

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Filed under: Laptops

While MSI’s 8.9-inch Wind U90 first made an appearance in June at Computex, it took MSI this long to flesh out all details — which is actually a relief, given the ridiculous quantity of Eee PC SKUs ASUS has managed to pump out in the meantime. We just got to handle the new laptop, and we think MSI might have a winner here. The laptop is shipping with SUSE Linux exclusively to start, with an XP version in the works, and boots quite rapidly to the full OS. SUSE has never looked better, and we think these two might be quite the pair. MSI has kept the full keyboard of the 10-inch Wind, and merely bumped up the bezel while cutting the price; all the other specs are the same. MSI is planning on shipping this at the end of September or beginning of October for 339 Euro (no word on a US release), and is also working on a six cell battery to fix the paltry 2 hours of battery the Wind currently gets from the three cell.

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The TipNut weblog offers an illustrated guide to wrapping meat in freezer paper for an airtight seal. It’s not hard to learn, as the major trick is folding and re-folding the creases to push out the air, along with keeping the fold tight while you tape it off. Once you’ve mastered the “drugstore wrap,” you’ll get better-quality reheats and a lot less guilt at freezer-cleaning time, as you end up tossing fewer arctic-frosted cuts. For another savvy freezing technique, try portioning ground meat with a chopstick.

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