The WatchScale, oddly enough, is a watch with a built-in weighing scale. It can weigh anything up to 300 grams (10oz) with a 0.1 gram accuracy, comes with a 20 year warranty, and will make you the talking point of the local drug-buying populace. Oh, and it also tells the time.

Claiming the title of “smallest digital scale ever made”, you’d expect this bad boy to cost some serious money, but as it happens it’ll only set you back $18.

Here’s a credit card from MBNA with a difference – they’ll donate money to open source projects every time you use it! The card has raised over half a million dollars for the open source community since its inception in 1999, donating money to projects including Debian, Blender, Wikimedia Foundation, Freenode, and lots of others too.

Plus, it has a picture of Tux on it!

Get yours here.

Today we all take MP3 players for granted. iPods are ubiquitous, mobile phones can play the format, even most new car stereos support MP3 right off the showroom floor. But it wasn’t always like this – Back in 1998, highly illegal sites like Audiofind were giving away artist’s songs quite openly and completely for free in pretty poor-sounding 112 and 128KBps MP3 format, and we were downloading them with our 56K modems – often taking up to half an hour a time.

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There are quite a few options out there for people looking to hack their Wii, from mod chips to crazy lighting kits, as well as some awesome totally custom jobs… Hell, you can even go all-out and play the damn thing with your genitalia if you like (not really a mod, but I just had to mention it).

But one thing I haven’t seen until now is a PC crammed into the Wii case. I’m guessing that there just aren’t enough dead Wiis around to mod in the first place, or maybe Nintendo fans just can’t bring themselves to take the dremel to their favourite console.

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The guys over at Kombo.com grabbed the above screenshot to highlight what will be released as next weeks Rock Band DLC, the PAX pack containing 3 songs at 240 points ($2.99) for the pack, with all profits going to the charity Child’s Play:-

• Jonathan Coulton – “Skullcrusher Mountain”
• MC Frontalot – “Livin’ on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe”
• Darkest of the Hillside Thickets – “Shhh….”

But that was not what grabbed me about this picture.  It’s the one at the bottom, the Offspring Track Pack that we reported on a few months ago, and it seems we could well be getting it on 09.09.08!  The line up for the Offspring pack is:-

• Self Esteem
• Gone Away
• Pretty Fly for a White Guy

This release date is not yet confirmed, but seems a bit odd to advertise it with this weeks and next weeks tracks if it isn’t due then, doesn’t it?

(source, source)

This week I decided to go and take a look at Brando, because all of my previous awesome gadgets have been from DealExtreme, and it’s a bit unfair to give them all of the crapgadget glory.

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Thanks, Reddit user Crackerpac, whoever you are, for providing one of the funniest things I’ve seen all week. I really need to stop looking at screenshots and get out more.

That’s “Elmo”, y’know, the little fuzzy guy from sesame street, not “emo”, which Guitar Hero has had plenty of flirtations with in the past. This mod was created by a parent who wanted their 2-year-old to play along with them, and crams the guts of a PS1 controller into the Sesame Street guitar casing.

The fact that there are only four buttons means little Jimmy (or Janey, in this case) won’t be playing any songs on anything above medium skill level, but I’d be impressed to see a 2-year-old playing the game at all. A kid truly destined for greatness!!

It seems that Bloomberg dropped the ball yesterday by accidentally publishing Apple legend Steve Jobs’ obituary, despite the fact he is still alive and kicking!

The whopping 17 page document was accidentally published after Bloomberg decided to update the document, as apparently having an obituary ready and waiting despite the person being in perfect health (pancreatic cancer aside) is quite a common thing for the news agencies.

The document had placeholders for multiple causes of death as well as a long list of people to contact for comments in the event of his death.  I really can’t imagine that this did Apple’s share prices much good yesterday, but I guess that’ll all be back to normal by now.

Bloomberg have since posted the below retraction and take the story down

Story Referencing Apple Was Sent in Error by Bloomberg News

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m. New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted.

—Editor: Joe Winski, Cesca Antonelli

Follow this link to Gawker.com’s copy of the full obituary.

(via)

What do you get when you combine nVidia’s NVISION show, the Mythbusters Adam and Jamie, and 1,100 paintball guns? You get possibly the most impressive rendition of the Mona Lisa I’ve ever seen.

The whole thing is supposed to explain the difference between traditional CPUs and GPUs with parallel processing – or something. Look at the pretty colours! Compressed air is fun!

(via)