Doug Aamoth…

Gather ‘round, kids. Gather ‘round.

Amazon’s got the 9-inch Asus Eee PC 900 for $329.99. Get it while it’s hot. This is the 16GB solid-state drive version, which has an 8.9-inch display, Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 4-cell battery, and Linux.

The price reflects a $20 instant discount, which is good until the end of October. Also, that price is only good for the Pearl White version. The Galaxy Black fetches a slightly higher price at $346.98. So as far as netbooks go, it seems that black is the new white.

ASUS Eee PC 900 16G [Amazon.com via dealnews]

Sick of batteries and the burden that batteries carry? Me too, man. Me too. Here’s a hand-cranked MP3 player called the Eco Media Player Revolution. It’s the successor to the original hand-cranked Eco Media Player. This new one handles music and movie files in AAC, WMA, MP3, OGG, MP4, and WMV formats and features 4GB of storage.

There’s also an FM radio, photo album, ebook reader, and an expansion slot that’ll allow to add a 4GB SD card. One minute of winding will get you 45 minutes of MP3 playback and you can even recharge your mobile phone by plugging it into the player itself. The device is good for 48 hours of audio or 7 hours of video playback when fully charged. It’ll ship the second week in October. Pricing stings a bit: it’s $240.

Eco Media Player Revolution [Ethical Superstore via Jaunted]

For those of you who don’t care for the stock interface or firmware on your digital music player, there’s the Rockbox firmware, which works on many Archos, iRiver, iPod, iAudio, Gigabeat, and Sansa devices. The firmware features extended codec support (OGG, Flac, etc.) plus enhanced audio magic, MPEG video support, tagging, plug-ins, playlist creation, games, and more (see the full feature list here).

Plus, it’s open source so it gets developed on a fairly regular basis. Version 3.0 was recently released, adding new software decoding features, a new installer, more codecs, and various miscellaneous updates and improvements.

[via Lifehacker]

Most people who get threatened by the RIAA with a lawsuit opt to settle out of court. Maybe they should go to trial instead. Jammie Thomas of Minnesota did just that. She was found guilty of sharing 24 music files over the Kazaa network and ordered to pay $222,000 – that’s $9,250 per track. The decision came from a federal jury last year and marked the one and only trial win for the RIAA.

Well, yesterday the case was declared a mistrial as federal judge Michael Davis (Duluth, MN) admitted “that he may have committed a ‘manifest error of the law’,” according to Wired. The case will eventually be retried using different rules for what’s acceptable as evidence of copyright infringement.

In the initial trial, the fact that Thomas simply had music files inside of her Kazaa shared folder constituted evidence of copyright violation. Under the new trial, it must be proved that people actually downloaded those tracks. Unfortunately for Thomas, some of the RIAA’s detectives actually downloaded some of the songs out of her shared music folder.

Now the question becomes; if the RIAA itself downloads people’s shared music, does that count as unauthorized distribution? Only one other federal judge has ever ruled that yes, it does. The RIAA’s position is “that it shouldn’t have to provide proof of an actual transfer – because it’s impossible,” according to Wired. So the detectives take screenshots of the person’s folder and download the tracks themselves in order to prove that a transfer has indeed taken place.

The Thermaltake Xpressar RCS100 is basically a mini-fridge PC case, keeping the insides at a cool 50 to 70 degrees. How is this possible? I have no idea, except that it’s “the world’s first DC inverter-type micro refrigeration cooling system,” according to the Inquirer. Also, it looks pretty clean inside — not as many tubes and whatnot as a typical water-cooled system.

The first systems will work to cool Intel’s Core 2 Extreme chips. Thermaltake is developing support for dual CPU and even GPU cooling as well. Everything’s still being tested, so no word on price or availability yet but it should maybe fall somewhere in between water cooling and VapoChill setups.

Here’s the perfect complement to the USB flash drive with built-in bottle opener we told you about a few weeks ago. It’s a Zippo-style lighter with 8GB of storage and a USB connection — because you can never have lighter fluid too close to your computer.

It costs $60, which might seem a bit steep, but if you’re still smoking in this day and age, you’ve no doubt gotten used to  paying out the wazoo for cigarettes anyway. What’s another $60, especially when you can impress everyone by lighting a smoke (outdoors) and then pulling the latest episode of Babylon 5 off of your lighter?

USB 8GB Flash Drive Lighter [ThinkGeek via DVICE]

People who are really into wine get cool sounding titles like “Sommelier” and “wine enthusiast” while people who really love beer are often just called “fat” and/or “drunk”. Unfair though it may be, I happily plop myself into the latter category of beer lovers. So for the beer lover who’s got it all, here’s the $8.99 Beer Wheel — a drinking gadget, if you will. Ooh, and it’s edumacational, too.

It’s actually probably a better gift for people just getting into beer, as it’s got all the pertinent info about all the wonderful beers of the world. You’ll learn about lagers, ales, bocks, pilsners, stouts, and more. Plus the more you drink, the more fun it is to spin the wheel. I’d keep the fridge loaded with beers of each type, spin the wheel, then drink the type of beer it landed on. Then you could learn about your beer as you’re tasting it. There’s a bar near my place that has a beer wheel, although you don’t really learn about the beer. You just give them money and spin the wheel.

Beer Wheel [Organize.com via Uncrate]

Imagine today, but a year from now. You might still be waiting for the next version of Windows Mobile. Apparently hardware vendors had been expecting the final version to arrive “by early next year” but were recently told that it wouldn’t be ready until the second half on next year, according to CNET.

In other news, guess what’s white hot right now? Operating systems for mobile phones. Microsoft stands to lose a lot of market share by sitting on WinMo 6 for another year. Apparently we’re to see a big update to the Internet Explorer mobile browser this year still that’ll allow it to harness the IE6 rendering engine, which means true Ajax and Flash support. That’s a step in the right direction, but I betcha every other mobile browser is about to add the same functionality, and some might even beat Microsoft to the punch.

Sylvania had the right idea when it rebranded the 7-inch Everex Cloudbook as the Sylvania “g” netbook except for the fact that the Cloudbook never really took off. Then came the 8.9-inch Sylvania MESO, which was a kinda-sorta rebranded Amtek Elego by Digital Gadgets, a licensee of Sylvania. Huh? Now, Sylvania seems to be on the right track by rebranding the 10-inch MSI Wind as the Sylvania g MAGNI.

Price and availability aren’t known yet but we do know that it’ll have a 120GB hard drive, run Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and have 1GB of RAM.

[Laptop via SlashGear]

In the war against software piracy, it seems that the rule is: If you can’t beat ‘em, lower the price to almost nothing and hope to make at least a little bit of money. Such is the case in China, where last year’s software piracy rate was over 80% according to the Financial Times. In the hopes of actually selling some stuff over there, Microsoft has lowered the price of Office Home and Student 2007 to the equivalent of $29 – more than 70% off of the previous MSRP.

It appears to be working, too, as retailers stocked up on about a half-year’s worth of inventory for the new promotion and have “run out faster than they had expected.” This all begs the question, though: What kind of message does this send? Pirate enough software and the legit versions will eventually become affordable?

Many software developers would argue that software is expensive because of piracy. If all software was sold at a 70% discount, though, would piracy go way, way down and would revenues actually go up? I don’t make a habit of pirating software but I do know that I’d buy and play a lot more games if they all cost $10-20 instead of $40-50.

This is a good test case. It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft makes more money in China selling a lot of Office 2007 copies at $29 than it did selling a handful at $99.