TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Metal detecting — the hobby that pays! So says Bounty Hunter Metal Detectors, as seen here in full hyperbolic glory at CES 2009. Nothing more, only that this is the awesomest poster I’ve seen so far at CES.

Should you fancy your luck, as do the millions of poor saps here in Vegas right now throwing their wages into the hungry maw of the slot machines, you can buy a Bounty Hunter detector from as little as $130.

LAS VEGAS — Along with new stills cams, Samsung today announced a slew of new camcorders at CES 2009. The pick of the bunch is easily the HMX-H106 (trust me, when you’re covering a press conference, these names start to get very confusing).

The thing that readers will first notice is that the camera contains 2001’s HAL, clearly visible by his glowing red eye inside the lens.

By Mathew Honan

The big theme at this year’s Macworld Expo is not a product, it’s a year: 2010. Next year’s conference is touted on banners, information booklets, and even the show badges, which come with an ad for next year’s event — the first without Apple, its anchor tenant.

But if you want to see what the show will be like in 2010, sans Apple, come down to the Moscone Center right now. Actually, don’t bother.

White balance, the bane of digital photography. Or is it? The answer is mixed, just like the troubled lighting conditions it addresses. If you shoot with a pocket camera that records jpegs, then you should indeed be paying attention to the color of the light falling onto the scene, as it is tricky to adjust the balance afterwards.

But if you actually know about white balance, then you’ll probably have a DSLR.

A start-up company will debut a modular dashboard computer for cars at this year’s CES that will read off email and have several individual control functions for every seat.

It sounds like it’s perfect for multi-tasking nutcase executives addicted to email that can’t wait til they get to the office. 

Car gadgetry is a growing market and building a technology that is moddable for many different types of cars is a good idea.

Best Buy is marketing netbooks as companions to your primary computer — which just goes to show how poorly understood these miniature devices really are.

In a long-winded Flash presentation, Best Buy stresses that netbooks are low-powered computers meant to be purchased "as a companion for your laptop."

That’s a pretty outdated generalization. Maybe before our economy got thrown into a bag of hurt, Best Buy would be reasonable for trying to sell netbooks as complementary devices. But with consumers tightening their spending in a recession, we can expect them to turn to netbooks as their next primary computers.

See those red stains on the floor there? That’s the remains of the dead horse that Ten One Design has been flogging for the last year with its Pogo iPhone stylus.

A short history of this pointless pointing device: Back in December 2007 we called it "The Most Useless iPhone Accessory. Ever", a $25 foam-tipped tube with which to replace your perfectly good finger as an input device for your iPhone.

In September of this year, Pogo realized it had sold almost none of its sticks, so in a transparent attempt to shift some units, it marked the price down to $20 and branded it as iPhone 3G compatible.

Remember when Apple customers felt hip?

There was a time when a glowing Apple logo symbolized radical nonconformity.
Being part of a miniature customer base was, to Mac users, like being a member of a holier-than-thou, secret society — a "Cult of Mac," if you will. But when Apple’s ecosystem grew beyond notebooks and desktops to phones and internet services, that era came to an end.

Apple’s ubiquitous presence in pop culture, news headlines and even politics prove that it’s no longer special to be a member of the Mac cult.

Steve Jobs’ absence from the public eye is prompting questions about the Apple CEO’s status, management effectiveness and health.

So far, the company has done little to provide substantive answers to those questions.

The mystery behind the lack of a Stevenote is leading some to speculate that Apple is getting ready to dethrone him, that Jobs has lost some of his typically ironclad control or that his health is failing.

It has come to my attention, while sunning myself on the beaches of Spain*, that the US has recently suffered a flurry of snowstorms. To get through these trying times, you may want to invest in the new, updated three ball version of the 50 Foot Snowball Launcher from, who else, Hammacher Schlemmer.

The gun makes three snowballs at a time and then launches them up to fifty feet using a slingshot.