I finally had a chance to build a fitting home for my newest prize possession last night. I made a trip out to Hobby Lobby and found myself a shadow box and created a museum-quality display for the one of a kind kidney-bean shaped Mentos. Now all I need to do is get the lasers and alarms rigged up.

This news is a few weeks old, but I still think that it’s pretty cool. Volkswagen is going to start adding USB ports to their cars.

We will start with the Golf, Golf Plus and Touran and then next year USB connections will be available for other models.

These ports will allow you to play mp3’s via those dime-a-dozen USB memory keys you can pick up just about anywhere. I really wondered when this type of thing would become more standard in cars, especially with the popularity of mp3 players and the iPod. I do really wonder why you don’t see more mp3 players, or mp3 CD players built into the stock car stereos. Not too long after purchasing my car in 2001, I put in an mp3 CD player and have never looked back. Maybe this will push more car companies into doing similar things.

With the next geek LAN gaming party scheduled for later in October, I ran across a nice site with a pretty sizable list of free (yes, I said FREE) Multiplayer games. We might have to try a few of these out. I did notice that the list was lacking a fun multiplayer puzzle game I ran across last yearplayed: Bontago. I may try submitting it to the site.

Also on the subject of games, I ran across a cool site yesterday called Millions of Games which is a directory of those flash games you see all over the internet categorized and rated. If you need to kill some time on the net, this is the place to start!

Sombody spent a little time building a rocket out of a big mentos tube. I guess this is one way to ensure that evil martians don’t kill us when we rocket towards their planet. How could anyone or anything possibly have any sort of ill will towards something mentos related?

At the very least, the martians, or the man on the moon will be fresh and full of life!

You all may recall this post about the “Kidney Bean Cinnamon Mentos Candy” up for bid on ebay. Well, I returned home from work today to find a package from my friend Jon (who by-the-way just got engaged… congrats!). Apparently, he was the high bidder for the rare Mentos. He packaged it up, and sent it to me as a gift. So now I am the proud owner of a one-of-a-kind kidney bean shaped Mentos. I’m sure there will be people knocking down the door to get a glimpse of my new prize. I should probably start charging admission… maybe open a gift shop (that would of course sell Mentos!). I’m going to have to find some sort of display case for it now. Thanks Jon!!!

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later… Google has finally launched a blog-specific search engine (blogsearch.google.com) . I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play with it, but it seems to work pretty well. Apparently it gets the search information from RSS feeds and the help document points to weblogs.com as a good place to ping ensuring that you show up in the Google search.

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven’t picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this.

I wonder if this means down the road a ways Google will be filtering their regular web to avoid blog posts.

At a special media event today, Apple rolled out a few new products to their digital music offerings.

iPod Nano
Probably the most notable of the new products is the iPod Nano. This tiny new flash-based digital music player takes the place of the iPod Mini (no longer being sold). It sports a color screen, 2 or 4GB sizes, 14 hour battery life and is not a whole lot larger than the iPod Shuffle. It sells for $199 (2GB) or $249 (4GB). The high end is only $50 less than the 20GB iPod which seems like a bit of a stretch to me, but I guess people will buy it because it’s small and looks cool, not because of how much music it holds (that’s why they bought the minis right?).

iTunes 5.0
Apple also released a new version of iTunes (ver. 5.0) which sports a new (more streamlined/rounded) look similar to the new Mail.App in Tiger.
Also new in this release:

• Search Bar

  Find stuff fast and refine your search with the handy new Search Bar.

• Smart Shuffle

  Adjust random playback to hear what you want.

• Sync from Outlook

  iTunes now supports iPod syncing for Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows PCs.

• Playlist Folders
  
  Organize all your playlists into folders.
• Parental Controls

  Limit kids’ access to the iTunes Music Store and sharing features.

• Album Reviews

  Browse over 1,000 album reviews.

• iTunes for Your Mobile Phone

  Sync music to the Motorola ROKR E1.

iPod Phone (ROKR E1)
Apple’s third (and least impressive) release today was the iPod Phone from Motorola. The phone, called the ROKR E1, has been rumored for quite some time now. It will sync with the new version of iTunes and hold 100 songs. The ROKR (how do you supposed to pronounce that?) is available with service from Cingular.

Three guys (Ardy, Jorma, and Kiva) put together a pretty funny pilot called Awesometown for Fox. When Fox passed, they shopped the pilot to MTV and Comedy Central, who also passed. Both pilots are available for viewing on the Awesometown site. Definitely check it out!