ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Happy Veterans day folks! Or for our readers in England, Australia, and Canada, happy Remembrance day yesterday, and happy Armistice day France!!! Here's your tech news in brief:

Peter Galskowsky describes what it was like to order a laptop from the one-laptop-per-child project. I've included this article for its snappy title alone: One Laptop Per Me. Why didn't I think of that?

Engadget wins best tech blog in the Weblog awards. At ITGumbo we are biding our time. bide bide bide.

And lastly, Google finally honors Veterans day by decorating their logo in military uniform. Except, you know, they did it yesterday, so you can't check out their holiday logo anymore. You know Google, some of us like to celebrate Veterans day TODAY when we get an extra DAY OFF to honor the services of our men and women in the military. It is a FEDERAL HOLIDAY after all. If you even recognize the federal government anymore.

"What's that Mr. Paterson? No, we're not implanting a chip in you, it's an RFID tag. It's like TOTALLY different!"
As this imagined conversation indicates, RFID tags for use to prevent medical errors now have competitive pricing. User acceptance may be a long time coming, however.

For those addicted to XBox 360 (and still crashing in Mom's basement) help is on the way. A new parental timer, coming next month, lets parents limit how much time their kids spend on Guitar Hero and other such games. Or if you're over the age of 18 but want to limit your playing time for your own health (dash love life) you can also use this feature, as long as you make sure you tell the password to someone else and make them promise never to tell you "even if i tell you to tell me later and say that the deal is over, seriously we're not playing anymore, i want you to tell me" even then they shouldn't tell you the password. It'll be like your own personal epic struggle. Go to it, Odysseus.

Mirror mirror on the wall, is the popularity of facebook starting to fall? This article questions whether the original market for facebook, college kids with too much time on their hands, may migrate over to another networking product now that their parents can join too. Maybe I'm getting old, but for some reason I'm not overly concerned about this?

Here's someone whose personal crafting hobby is way superior to yours. Here's the step by step instructions on how to fold crazy complex Lord of the Rings characters out of origami. Be careful though; a thorough browsing of this site may make you feel inferior about your own pop-stick creations, and it's only monday morning.

New federal requirements for technology on voting machines make sure that these suckers will, um, work this next time around. Unfortunately, Stephen Colbert won't be on that ballot, though.

Put on Christmas list, please. This flashlight is also a camcorder, recording everything from night stalkers to shadow puppets. (Although, technically if you tried to make a shadow puppet you would get a video of your hand.) This is what technology should be about, people. Now if only they could figure out a way to get an ipod into a phone.....

Okay, now this next one is just TOO MUCH FUN! But be careful, it might gobble up the rest of your afternoon. Ask.com has just added a suggestion feature to your search box, so that when you start to type your search string it will give you suggestions of other searchers' burning questions. Type in the phrase "Is it legal to..." and you will receive a drop-down menu including: "Is it legal to marry your second cousin?" and "is it legal to own a penguin?" "How much does it cost" reveals that most people are confused about the current rates for US postage. And if you start with the words "Am I..." you'll find that most people are concerned with either being too fat or pregnant. Might be some correlation between those two things, folks. See, it all depends on what kind of questions you ask.