Apparently Wii-motes flying out of peoples' hands and damaging expensive TVs has become a big enough problem that Panasonic announced that some of its new plasma TVs will be strong enough to sustain a blow from a Wii projectile. We imagine that could come in handy for beer cans tossed at ball games too.

Speaking of the Wii-mote, of you haven't been one of the millions of people to watch Johnny Lee's Wii-mote hacks on Youtube and you want to see some clever engineering from a certified wiz kid then check out this video.  read more »

Hello, My name is Andrew Eisner. I just joined the Retrevo team full time now that we have a little cash in the bank.  read more »

Keep your eye out for firesales on HD DVD players. If the price gets low enough these players might still make excellent standard definition DVD players. For example, the Toshiba HD-A30 has an HDMI 1.3 port and upconverts to 1080p. You might even be able to pick up a player that comes bundled with some discs.

I just sent my daughter off to Florence, Italy for a semester abroad. Naturally, I wanted to connect with her the cheapest and best way possible. Fortunately she had a Motorola V551 which is a quad band phone required to handle European GSM frequencies. Unfortunately it needed to be unlocked before it could take an Italian SIM card. Cingular provided the unlock code for free, it just took a few days for them to get it from Motorola.  read more »

While reading  Etan Horowitz's new tech blog for the Olando Sentinel I came across a reader's comment that mentioned another fallout from next year's digital TV conversion and that is all those analog-based TV audio receivers. I've had many multi-band radios that have had a TV band that let you listen to the audio portion of a TV show. All those old radios will stop receiving analog TV signals next year. They'll all have to switch to digital receivers for TV audio. Just in case you want to read more  read more »

As I mentioned earlier, my daughter is spending a semester abroad. What could a Dad want more than to be able to see his daughter as well as talk to her from oversees?  read more »

Retrevo is at the CTIA show in Las Vegas this week. CTIA is the big cell phone conference. Showstoppers is an event held at all the most popular tech conventions that brings the press and vendors together in a comfortable setting. The draw for journalists is easy access to the right people from companies with cool products. The attraction for companies is access to fish or rather journalist in a barrel. The fact that they always have great food helps lure in hungry journalists looking for a free meal. It's always a great place to see cool new stuff and meet interesting people.  read more »

Here's the cheapest and best way I've found for callingmy daughter who'sdoing a semester abroadin Florence.The problem with the no charge call-backservices isshe gets charged about $.38 a minute for local calls while incoming calls are free so the $.32 that rebtel charges seems to be the most reliable and cheap so far. Jajah only charges $.21 but the two times I tried it, I couldn't get it to connect. Allfreecalls.net told me they didn'twork withher number,My hunch isthey don't work with cell phones but I could be wrong.  read more »

It was opening day at CTIA today and no one was fooling around. I have to say this show is a lot easier to deal with than CES; much more manageable and less crowded. You could actually get a chance to check out the products at the booths and lunch in the press room didn't vanish at 11:45.

Speaking of the press room I ran into a Becky Waring, an old colleague who has a degree from MIT and has been writing a lot recently for PC World. She just finished a roundup of new wireless routers due to be published soon. One thing she told me that I wasn't aware of is how WiFi networks ca  read more »

I connected with David Strom, an old friend who I first met when we both worked at Ziff Davis. David is an articulate, knowledgeable, observer and reporter on everything high tech. Here's a link to one of his many sites which has some interesting and useful posts on using tech in your daily life. You can also find him onour blog roll.