This is the Creative Nomad Jukebox from the year 2000. It may have been shaped like a CD player to mentally ease technophobes, but it actually had a 6GB hard drive on board. And boy did we love it.

That's not to say that this thing was great—because it wasn't; not by today's standards. It had only a USB 1.1 connection, so uploading all 6GB worth of music took hours and hours. Imagine filling up a 1TB hard drive over a USB 2 connection today, if that gives you any idea of how long the process was. Oh, and it cost $420.

But you know what? It actually a pretty decent player for the year 2000. The 6GB is adequate even now (the lowest iPod Nano today has 8GB), and that 8GB of 5-minute skip protection was good enough for continuous music most of the time, except when you were off-roading or running away from cougars.

Hell, because it was so early in the MP3 player era, it even had extraneous features that were eventually ditched for cost cutting reasons because only a small portion of people used it. There was the stereo line input for recording, dual stereo output for 4-point surround sound as well as WAV and WMA support. Creative did do a good job with firmware support after the thing was released, actually adding functionality to the player when they could have just released a new hardware revision.

So yes, the Creative Nomad Jukebox was heavy, and lost in every way to any Android, Windows Mobile or Apple smartphone today in both price and feature set, but it was pretty damn good in the year 2000. [Product Page (Price dropped to $300 by 2001)]

Decades: where we revisit gadgets we loved from the start of the decade and see how they compare to what we use today.

Image Credit Wikipedia

Quick, grab the ent-draught and gather 'round, for I have some exciting news from Middle-Earth! Peter Jackson has put out word that extras for The Hobbit are in dire need. But he's doing it old school for some reason.

Director Guillermo del Toro and executive producer and co-writer Peter Jackson are taking applications via snail mail, a casting video must be included, and New Zealand citizens get priority over other nationalities.

I'm well aware that the Hobbit was set sometime between the "Dawn of Færie" and the "Dominion of Men," but surely their application requirements could be more suited to the 21st century? If only so we can chuckle at YouTube entries of curly-haired Kiwis lisping over their lines. We might even spot a new Figwit that way, destined to go on to greats things like Flight of the Conchords. [PopWatch]

Dress like the dark horse you are for the ski slopes this season, with Ralph Lauren's RLX Aerotype jacket. The super-resistant double layered snow jacket has iPod controls for listening to, err, Snow Patrol.

Made from a microfiber shell, the cuffs are adjustable and drawcords feature heavily for protecting your body from the chills. A bit of padding is included around the bottom, elbows and shoulder, lest you take a tumble. And if you get lost, the Recco Avalanche Rescue system will ensure you're found in no time at all.

Ralph Lauren's just decreased the price from $1,290 to $779.99, so if you're looking for a safe, resistant jacket for skiing and snowboarding in, this could be the garb for you. [Ralph Lauren via Uncrate]

HTC Russia claims in a recent twitter post that the HD2 will be the only HTC phone to get an upgrade to WinMo 7. All other phones will remain on Windows 6.5.

Translation:

For Diamond 2 firmware is not planned. Of the existing communicators on the market, only the HD2 firmware to get WM7.

Of course, I really wouldn't qualify this as "official" just yet. [twitter via MobileTechWorld]

What if, instead of defiling your local school, church or train yard with just a few colors of spray paint, one can contained a near infinite array of expression?

The Color Dial Spray is a refillable spray can design that contains all four base colors of the CMYK spectrum (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black). When the artist rotates hue and brightness dials, the can tweaks the color mix accordingly, making selecting a paint color in real life just as easy as it is in Photoshop.

While perfectly plausible, the Color Dial Spray is still just a concept. But to any fat cat VCs in the audience, COME ON. What better ideas are floating around to sink money into? Social networking? Flying cars? Send these nice people a check. [reddot via Yanko Design]

So what is tramping? It's a popular 1920s sport in which the player's testicles are launched back into his pelvis like water balloons, "just as nature intended." I think. [Modern Mechanix via Copyranter]

In 25 years, we've seen a lot of bastardizations of Tetris, from ice trays to watches, to furniture and Russian dorm Tetris. But a two-player Tetris table? That sounds tricky.

Basically, one of the players gets to choose the pieces to send down to the other player, making it exceedingly difficult to get the right pieces to fit. Suddenly Tetris got even more frustrating to play. [WalYou]

Innergie claims their new mCube Mini is the world's smallest travel charger for laptops. A very good thing, especially if you travel light. I refuse to pack more than one duffel bag no matter how long I'm away.

Specifically designed for cars and airplanes, the mCube Mini can be powered by either a 12V or a 15V outlet and can support netbooks and laptops that need up to 65W of power at 15-21V. It also has a USB port so you can charge other portable gadgets at the same time. Again, it's small—60 x 26 x 18mm to be exact, so it's fairly comparable in size to a typical cellphone. Available now for $70. [Innergie via Slashgear]

This is a unique image of Saturn in natural color, exactly what you would have seen if you were riding the Cassini spacecraft—wearing your cowboy hat, knitted astronaut sweater, and Star Trek underpants—on November 4 2009.

The image—released last week—was created by combining three exposures using red, green, and blue spectral filters, which results in a natural view, showing the true color of saturn. Cassini was taken 808,000 miles away, and each pixel in the full resolution image represents 45 miles. [NASA—Full resolution image]

What to do when you "do not have friends, have no one to speak too, no one to consult, no support, and feel depressed and lonely"? Easy: First, put a bomb in your underpants. Then, board an airplane.

That's what Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—the crotchbomber—did, and that's what he wrote about himself. He was just a sad lonely loser trying to find an online friend or a wife. Writing under the name Farouk1986, the fortunately-failed terrorist wrote 310 posts in Gawaher's Islamic Forum. His writings, adorned with sad emoticons exactly like the yellow one above, read like this:

First of all, i have no friend. Not because i do not socialise, etc but because either people do not want to get too close to me as they go partying and stuff while i dont, or they are bad people who befriend me and influence me to do bad things. Hence i am in a situation where i do not have a friend, i have no one to speak too, no one to consult, no one to support me and i feel depressed and lonely. i do not know what to do. And then i think this loneliness leads me to other problems. As i get lonely, the natural sexual drive awakens and i struggle to control it, sometimes leading to minor sinful activities like not lowering the gaze.

I'm sorry that you were such a bloody lonely loser, Faruk, but I feel no sympathy for someone who turns his sadness or loneliness into so much hate that he decides to take the live of hundreds of innocent people in an airplane. That's not a nice way to make friends. [Gawaher via Danger Room via Boing Boing]

Correction: I posted the wrong quote following Boing Boing. My apologies for not checking it first. The above is the correct quote. Needless to say, my opinion still stands: Zero sympathy for people who try to mass murder.

In a 32-page filing with the FCC last week, AT&T asked that the requirement that it support a landline network be repealed. It's an aggressive bid to get rid of the cumbersome wall jack and move entirely to VoIP.

An all-IP phone network may be inevitable someday, but AT&T is clearly hoping for that day to be as soon as possible. Landlines are less efficient and more expensive to maintain for the carrier, and don't add much consumer benefit either. Unfortunately, AT&T's filing doesn't account for the 20% of Americans who currently use only landline connections, and there's no way the FCC is going to leave one in five taxpayers twisting in the wind. The migration seems to be happening naturally anyway: according to GigaOM, total interstate and intrastate switched access minutes have fallen 42% from 2000 to 2008.

A National Broadband Plan has been a long time in the works, but we're almost there. It'll be interesting to see how much influence Ma Bell can peddle. [GigaOM]

The Palm Pre is coming to Verizon early next year. We know this. But this morning, BGR gives us something new to be excited about: The Pixi's apparently coming to Verizon as well, and both models get a (titular?) upgrade.

Verizon's lineup, according to BGR's tipster, will consist of the Palm Pre Plus (codenam: Russell) and Palm Pixi (codename: Romo), which apparently look exactly like their non-plus predecessors, and will both run the currentl version of webOS, 1.3.5, at launch—a fact that jibes with the previously-announced "early next year" launch time, since Palm's been updating the OS at a steady clip.

So anyway, what's "Plus" about these phones? It could just be change in moniker, engineered by Palm and Verizon to inject a little energy into their existing lineup, but I'd expect something more more substantive: a faster processor, larger battery and in the case of the Pre, reengineered keyboard are all plausible guesses. Whatever it means, please, Palm, please don't tell me your CES keynote is just going to be a glorified carrier announcement. Palm needs new hardware. We need new hardware. Hardware! Ungghhhhhhhh. [BGR]

When it comes to websites, I've had my share of whirlwind romances. CuteOverload and I had a thing; Scrabulous whispered sweet nothings in my ear for most of 2007. But no site ever captured my attention like Kozmo.

Kozmo and its close relative UrbanFetch were online messenger services that would deliver any number of household products, food items, electronics—almost anything you could imagine. A Kozmo messenger in your area was dispatched the instant you made the order. Delivery was free and tipping was discouraged. Genius! Really, it all seemed to good to be true. This, it seemed, was why the Internet was invented.

The Kozmo guys darted around the city on bikes with orange messenger bags. They each had special Kozmo names like Skip or Spike or Mac. There was something romantic about the notion of these young men (and they were mostly men) dipping in and out of dozens of people's lives each day. It made me feel like I was part of something larger than myself—without actually having to leave my apartment. Each time I went online to order order a video or a bag of pretzels, it was as if I was tugging some imaginary string that would bring a cute guy to my door. A cute guy with presents, no less. 

Ultimately, Kozmo broke my heart. It ceased operating in April '01. The memories, however, will live forever: The late-night soup and trashy magazines when I had a cold; the time you brought over Annie Hall and a bag of popcorn at 2AM; the many, many Ben & Jerry deliveries. Kozmo, I would rather have shared one lifetime with you than have to face all the ages of this world alone.

Anna Jane Grossman has joined us for a few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

You've heard of resistive touchscreens, and hopefully you've been fortunate enough to own a capacitive touchscreen phone. But have you heard of Interpolating Force-Sensitive Resistance, or I.F.S.R touchscreen technology? Touchco hopes you soon will.

A bunch of scientists at New York University's Media Research Lab have grouped together to form Touchco, which is working on the aforementioned I.F.S.R technology. They want to create touchscreens which are even more multi-touch enabled than we've seen so far, capable of receiving simultaneous touch inputs. Apparently these touchscreens can be produced very cheaply, with Touchco hoping to sell them for $10 a square foot.

As you can see from the photo above, these touchscreens are very flexible, and don't require much power—making them ideal for ereaders, laptops and netbooks. [NYT Bits blog]

If this Lego Polaroid 1000 instant camera actually worked, I would buy 24. And then I would destroy them to make a giant camera that takes 24 frames per minute. That would have saved instant photography. [Brickshelf via Obsolete]

The Nokia n900 is not a cool phone, OK? It's just not. But I admit, it can do some cool stuff, like play Duke Nukem 3D and double as a PS3 controller with the help of BlueMaemo. [MaemoCentral via MAKE]

This map by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre examines the travel times from any spot on the globe to the nearest city of 50,000 or more inhabitants by land or water. The surprise?

As NewScientist observes, less than 10% of the world is more than two days away from a major city using ground-based travel. That stat only jumps to 20% when scaled to the Amazon, where river and expanding road networks have made even jungle terrain semi-assessable.

Also, nobody fucks with the cold climates.

On one hand, the map is a testament to human advancement and expansion. On the other, well, there are a buncha roads in what was once pristine jungle. (Yeah, I saw Avatar twice.) [Flickr and NewScientist via Neatorama]

Made from a WWII German fighter plane and Yamaha Wild Star motorbike, this sidecar bike looks like a less-colorful Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. [Henrik Toth via LikeCool]

Traditionally favored by middle-aged women, wallpaper could cut carbon emissions and eliminate the need for light bulbs, with a UK company using OLED technology to create light-emitting wallpaper.

The government-backed Carbon Trust has awarded a £454,000 ($720,000) grant to a company by the name of Lomox, to develop the special wallpaper. Inspired by OLED TVs which use low voltage, Lomox hopes to use some of the same technology for wallpaper that lights up rooms and outdoor areas, believing they can get an affordable product to market by 2012.

Let's just hope they don't stop at Laura Ashley for design influence. [FT]

Image Credit: Country Living

The last time we heard about the antiqued G1 being loaded with 2.1 it turned out to be fake, so we're not holding our breath now. Nonetheless, AndroidSpin user Drizzy is claiming success, with the ROM on its way.

Speculation is also pointing at an official over-the-air 2.0 or 2.1 upgrade for the G1, but considering the G1 is over a year old now and not exactly Google's priority these days, don't go holding out for an official one just yet. [AndroidSpin via RedmondPie]