TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

This week, Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney waxes enthusiastic about MIT’s programming language for kids, Scratch, which works with a $50 sensor board so you can make programs and animations that interact with the real world.

And we also talk about a bunch of UC San Diego students’ ambitious plan to make $12, 8-bit computers — already widely available in the developing world — into workable education PCs.

If you ever want to get on airplane, you should probably not carry around these suitcases.

An artist in France has created a line of boxy luggage that uses toy weapons for decoration. It appears that the ‘weapons’ are cut sideways, stuck on the bag’s side, and then painted over to appear as if they’re jutting out from the case itself.

As can be seen in her website, the self-styled ‘hippie girl’ artist is trying to make a point about the apparent social behavior present in the current climate of fear when traveling.

The 2006 iPhone prototypes we told you about yesterday? They’ve already been pulled from Ebay, where bidding had reached around $2000. And the YouTube video showing how they worked? Also gone.

It will be no surprise to find out that Apple was behind this — the company has secrecy in its DNA, even when it comes to three year old test hardware. Here’s what the seller told iLounge: "as many people predicted would happen, Apple has contacted eBay to close the listing."

This is a crying shame.

We have two shiny new Apple rumors for you today, one hot but unlikely, and one fairly straightforward. First, the obvious one: the new, improved version of Mac OS X – Snow Leopard – will be shipping on June 8th.

This predictive magic has been worked by the Baltimore Sun’s Apple expert and fortune teller David Zeiler.

A BlackBerry app store has been long in coming and now it looks like BlackBerry users will have to pay more than their iPhone and G1-using friends, too.

The BlackBerry App store, App World, hasn’t launched yet, but maker Research in Motion has been slowly releasing details about how it will work. While developers will be able to give away apps for free, RIM has set a minimum price for the for-fee apps at $3. 

It’s a risky bet considering that the iPhone’s most popular paid applications are priced at just $1.

By Christopher Null

Continued from Winebloggin Episode V

[ED Note: Hey remember about 6 months ago when gadget scribe and drinkhacker Chris Null wrote a series of posts about his experiences with the Winepod. Well guess what? The wine finished the aging process and is now drinkable! Here he recounts the final stem of his vino venture.]

With the wine in the barrel and daily maintenance a thing of the past, it becomes easy to forget about the winemaking process, even though another five months of work are ahead (mostly tasting the wine and topping it up with the extra wine in the glass jugs).

The Problem: My desk is a mess, and, if you are anywhere near normal, so is yours. It’s not the coffee cups and papers that bother me, though, but the tangle of cables hanging down the back and trailing across the floor, twisting like Tarzan vines in a particularly fertile rain forest.

This weekend, I decided to do something about it. There are plenty of tutorials on the web detailing intricate schemes for cable management, most of which involve drilling holes, installing wooden screens or other long-winded solutions. I’m lazy, and I’m also fussy about how things look, so I thought about the easiest (and cheapest)
fix I could make.

A London IT manager played the role of firefighter Wednesday when a PowerBook in his office exploded in flames.

"I went to get a fire extinguisher and was just getting ready to put out the fire when all of a sudden it went ‘Bang!’" he told Inquirer. "Suddenly flames flew up about six foot in the air and there were sparks flying everywhere."

The company requested to remain anonymous. "Steven," the IT manager, said he told the staff to evacuate when he saw smoke coming out of the battery.

Like many people, Jaya Kumar wanted an e-book reader that was a little more capable than Amazon.com’s Kindle. So he built one.

Kumar’s custom-built e-book reader has a fully capable web browser — it can even handle Google Maps — and the same "electronic ink" display used by the Kindle and the Sony Reader.

"It offers an opportunity to get involved with a disruptive technology that is at the tipping point of having a huge impact in the real world," says
Kumar, an embedded Linux developer who lives in Malaysia.

Could being tied to Sprint hurt the Palm Pre’s chances when it launches later this year? Maybe so, given the carrier’s economic woes. The Gadget Lab crew discusses the good phone/not-so-good carrier problem in this week’s episode.

Plus, we talk about industrial designers’ latest fascination: putting bamboo in everything from notebooks to computer mice to bicycle frames.