The Super Pii Pii Brothers is actually a video game for the Nintendo Wii coming from who else, Japan. I was totally blown away to see it at work and is damn funny.

You get to strap yourself with a belt harness that has the Wiimote attached and need to control the pee flow onto the three toilets that open and close as they wish, on your display.

What’s the goal? To spill as little as you can, on the floor.If you want to know how the Japanese got the idea to build it, here’s why.

“Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing.”

Not sure if you like it, but throw in a party and get your buddies to play a multiplayer game of the Super Pii Pii Brothers, it’s going to rock, believe me. Just make sure they don’t use their real “wiimotes” on your screen.

Price is $34.99 from ThinkGeek.

It’s a certain thing that 2008 will be the year of ultraportables and Rock’s new Pegasus 210 is just a new addition to the market. It has a lot of Intel UMPC internals, runs on a 800MHz A110 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 80GB 1.8-inch HDD, Bluetooth and 802.11n WiFi. The 12-inch ultraportable from Rock weighs 2.2 pound and also packs a 4-in-1 card reader and a PCMCIA slot. The price is roughly $1,580 and remember there’s no disc drive.

via Bios

A new product in the My Book Studio line has been released by Western Digital. As expected we’re getting two RAID 0 drives in a quad-interface external case that has got itself a new design and upgraded Green Power units drives to run cooler and to consume less power. There are good things for Mac users, too, because the new My Book Studio Edition II is HFS+ formatted.

It’s already available with 1TB and 2TB space for $349 and $599 respectively.

Press release

Is it just me or the new Samsung Instinct is going to be a milestone in the cell phones market? Sprint, the exclusive seller, is going to start their biggest marketing move spending some $100M for the little guy.

The Instinct will have a full touch-sensitive display with haptic technology, GPS navigation and high speed connectivity (3.1Mbps in downlink and 1.8Mbps uplink) it is “a product from a usability standpoint that can compete” with the iPhone, though it wasn’t meant as a clone from the first time.

It’s an EVDO rev.A handset and comes with a 2 megapixel camera/camcorder, stacks up to 8GB of data using a microSD card, has Bluetooth and can be used as a modem if you need to connect your laptop to the Internet. Rumors talk about two 1,000 mAh batteries that should be able to keep it live after 5.75 hours of talking.

A few Sprint services that it will have are Live Search, Sprint TV, Sprint Exclusive Entertainment for sports and entertainment video programming network, Sprint Music Store, and Pocket Express for updated news.
So far all we know is that it’s going to be released in June, but it looks like NowIsGood has it on pre-order.

Bill Ogle, Chief Marketing Officer for Samsung Mobile, said that the Instinct was developed after years of work on the innovative touch screen and the most interesting feature is the “just one touch” that allows a user to access everything easily.

“Samsung feels the Instinct will increase our status as the fastest growing mobile phone manufacturer in the U.S.” he said.

Announced four months ago during the 2008 CES in Las Vegas, rumors say that the new Motorola RIZR Z10 is going to be available for sale, from April 14, but we have a few hints before other so here is a quick review.

I’ve checked TestFreaks and I must tell you the specs are very interesting.

• 3.5G HSDPA
• GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• runs UIQ 3.2 Symbian OS v9.2
• 2.2-inch crystal clear QVGA display (240 x 320)
• 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and auto-save
• Superfast burst that allows up to 3 images / second
• xenon flash for the camera
• a secondary VGA camera
• microSD slot for expandable memory up to 32GB
• Bluetooth
• miniUSB v2.0

I’ll start with the PROs as usual.

The new Motorola RIZR Z10 is actually a pocket sized complete mobile film studio that can shoot high quality video clips, is able to edit and to create transitions between scenes. You also get to add a soundtrack and title slides if you want to.

With these in mind I’m sure it would be a great tool for vloggers (video bloggers) because it supports Youtube, Google, Yahoo and ShoZu for fast image and video uploads.

What are the CONs?

There aren’t much I can comment on, but this sure doesn’t sound like a perfect phone so I have to be mean. So what I would add to make it perfect? Probably FM Radio with RDS and WLAN.

I don’t know if the latex brain hat will get your parents and grandparents a heart attack but I’m sure your geek fellows will be thrilled and will have infinite respect for you and for your hat. It has a 24-inch circumference and costs only $13.99 . Too bad we don’t have a geek girl model to use it, I’m sure it looks better on them.

I’m not sure if I need an elastic USB flash memory drive because I don’t have a habit of accidentally rip it out or knock off. However, looking at the pictures this is a pretty interesting concept by Serbian designer Damjan Stankovic. It’s called the USBee and has the ability to bend in any direction, features a vented housing for cooling and a detachable protective cap.

The USBee flash memory drive won the 1st place at the MS Industrial USB Competition which was held by Serbian Design Community forum DizajnZona and I think it has a lot of potential to go into production.

via YankoDesign

Here goes the problem of storing music on our hard drives.

Researchers at the University of Rochester managed to digitally recreate a music file that is almost 1,000 times smaller than a regular MP3 file. A 20 seconds clarinet solo that takes less than a kilobyte was possible using a computer that literally reproduces the original performance based on what it knows about the real-world physics of clarinet and the physics of a clarinet player.

Behind the computer model of a clarinet is Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and two of his doctoral students, Xiaoxiao Dong and Mark Sterling.

“This is essentially a human-scale system of reproducing music. Humans can manipulate their tongue, breath, and fingers only so fast, so in theory we shouldn’t really have to measure the music many thousands of times a second like we do on a CD. As a result, I think we may have found the absolute least amount of data needed to reproduce a piece of music” said Bocko.

Here are the audio files, in WAV format for Web comparison :

Human performance recorded using MP3 format

Virtual performance using Bocko’s new compression

Though not perfect, it is very difficult to tell the synthesized sound from the original sound. Future improvements of the method will include more than just one instrument, and Professor Bocko is confident that the synthesis algorithms will improve and the future of music could be “reproducing performers and not recording them”.

If your house has no pool, Devicepedia brings you the solution. A mobile bathing unit by ceramist and designer Ole Jensen. Dubbed Moby it is made of white EPDM rubber and cork, has a cord that you plug to a water source and water climbs vertically.

It was designed for the MINDCRAFT exhibition that takes place in Milan and Ole said that it’s “A soft tub for the body. For children and adults. For play and healing. In the garden or the stylish bathroom.”

via Pan-Dan

Circumcision is a very debated method in the medical world. However a report from the World Health Organization comes in to support the fact that male circumcision could reduce female-to-male HIV transmission rates by 50 to 60 percent.

“Based on the evidence presented, which was considered to be compelling, experts attending the consultation recommended that male circumcision now be recognized as an additional important intervention to reduce the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men,” the WHO report said.

Since lots of African men might overwhelm hospitals for a circumcision intervention and there aren’t enough specialized doctors to perform it, Physician David Tomlinson designed a “tool” to do the job.

He worked in his spare time with a team of collaborators from the Brown University and Clinical Innovations to develop a sterile device called AccuCirc (510k) which is almost foolproof.

Tomlinson got the idea of building it after performing circumcision on over 200 babies and noticed that almost every device existent right now, could harm.

AccuCirc can be used only once, protects the glans beneath the foreskin from injury and requires only minimal training. Here are some demo videos.