Can you believe the second Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge from the History Channel and Invent Now is already upon us? Believe it, inventive people, because this year's competition is already heating up. The National Inventors Hall of Fame has opened its call for submissions to any and all inventors who hope to capture the 2007 Modern Marvel of the Year award, and if the first year's submissions are any indication (there were 4,500 entries, from people ages 8 to 80), you might have your work cut out for you.

Last year's winner was David R. Ward, who invented building material made of the renewable source of straw (take a look at Gearlog's post for more info). He was awarded a $25,000 grant to develop his invention. This year, the same prize will be awarded. You'll need to turn in your submission before the November 20th  deadline. The submissions will be judged by Hall of Fame inventors and industry experts, who will evaluate inventions on their originality and potential of application, the inventor's cleverness and approach, and the history behind the idea. Once the judges make their decision, a group of 25 semifinalists will be announced in March of 2007, and the inventions will be shown in a traveling exhibition, visiting a variety of science centers across the country. At the conclusion of the tour, four finalists will be chosen. The final winner will receive the grant, gifts, and a feature on the History Channel's Modern Marvels: Great Inventions Week starting May 14, 2007.

So get your glue and duct tape out, and get cracking. That nifty gizmo you're planning on submitting won't invent itself!

Post by Don Reisinger

Product: PX100MX Crosscut Shredder (Platinum Series) by Royal

Description: Every office geek needs a shredder! The Royal PX100MX Crosscut Shredder is a cross cut shredder that vertically shreds up to 10 sheets at a time. There's also a separate slot for shredding CDs, DVDs, and credit cards! The unit's paper slot measures 9 inches long, and the CD/DVD slot measures about 5 inches. The shredder sits on top of a 4.22-gallon wastebasket, so you can shred tons of materials before it gets full. Royal strongly recommends to keep paperclips, neckties, body parts, and small children away from the shredder when in use.

How It Works: Plug the shredder in to a nearby outlet. All controls are located on the top of the shredder. Press the ON button to power. Then place the item you wish to shred in the slot, and watch as the shredder goes in to demolition mode. If something gets stuck, you can always use the manual feed buttons, located on the top right of the shredder. When the basket is full, just pull up on the handles to remove the shredder and dispose of the shredded materials. The unit is quite loud while shredding (especially the more sheets you shred at one time), so you may want to shred in the morning or late evening when no one's around in the office.

Performance: The unit shredded 1 sheet at 3.7 seconds, 5 sheets at 4.7 seconds, and 10 sheets at 8.2 seconds. I decided to be bold and try 12 sheets at a time (while crossing my fingers). It succeeded in shredding all 12 pages, but it took more than 10 seconds to shred, and the unit made a noise like fingers on chalk board! It sounded like it wanted to give up. (I should have given it a pep talk before I started!) So, I would definitely stick to the 10-sheet-in-a-single-pass rule. You don't want to upset this shredder!

Let me tell you, the staff here had lots of fun shredding old CDs and DVDs with me! We won't reveal any of the horrible music albums or press release CDs we shredded, but let's just say they're fiesty things! I'd insert a CD and it would sit there for a bit unless you push it through the shredder, which took about 5.9 seconds with the delay. What's cool is that the unit shreds them into three parts! Royal claims in its press release that the PX100MX can shred floppy disks. I'd like to dispute that, because the CD slot is NOT big enough for a floppy disk. Sorry, I tried folks!! VIEW MORE PICS WE TOOK OF THE PX100MX HERE.

Overall: The PX100MX shredder works great for shredding sensitive material and old documents, especially CDs or DVDs you don't want anymore. I highly recommend it for any office geek. However, I have a slight gripe about the design of the unit. There are two handles located on each side of the unit, but you can't use those handles to pick up the unit; the handles are only used in order to lift up the top of the unit to dispose of materials. I don't know how many times I had to watch myself NOT pick up the unit using the handles! So make sure you pick it up by grapping the bottom.

The Royal PX100MX Crosscut Shredder (Platinum Series) retails for $99, but many online retailers are selling it for around $45. Good luck trying to find it though. Most online retailers are out of stock of this item, believe it or not! I'll let you know if I find where it is in stock somewhere.

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Thanks to Blogging Molly & Product Review Coordinator PJ Jacobowitz for contributing shredding material and to Commerce Producer Arielle Rochette for not killing me during the loud shredding process.

Side View

Top View

Shredder, what big teeth you have!

Let's see what this baby can do!

Almost there!

Sprint didn't know what was coming to them!

Newton Peripherals wants to shake up the notebook mouse market with the MoGo, a business-card-size Bluetooth mouse. Should you care? Well, yes, if you've got Bluetooth embedded in your laptop and want a wireless mouse. The last thing you need is a silly proprietary USB dongle sticking out of your laptop. And nothing shouts "I'm better than you" louder than the incredibly thin, lightweight, MoGo. Even better, the mouse charges and can be stored in the PC Card slot of your laptop. Here's what my experience with it was like.

Charging via the PC Card slot took about 30 minutes (a little indicator turns green to indicate charging is complete). Pairing the mouse with my laptop via Bluetooth was, well, typical. (Hopefully the long-awaited Wireless USB will give Bluetooth a schooling on connecting devices.) When you flip out the kickstand, the mouse turns on; it then takes about 10 seconds for the mouse to get going. Using the MoGo is surprisingly comfortable. To turn the mouse off, simply close the flipstand. While I typed up this review, the mouse lost its connection with the laptop only once. I re-paired it and was back in business.

Now for the downsides: First, there's no scrollwheel. I really missed that. The second problem has to do with the PC Card slot. Out of 15 new laptops on PC Magazine Lead Analyst Cisco Cheng's workbench, 9 of them had PC Card slots. (The others had the newer ExpressCard slots ) Out of the 9 that had PC Card slots, 7 of them had Bluetooth. That means out of 15 spankin' new laptops, less than half of them would work off the bat with the MoGo. While Newton Peripherals is on the money with Bluetooth, it would be nice if the company rolled out an ExpressCard model.

The MoGo earned some serious wows from those who saw me using it. All in all, I think it's one of the coolest little Bluetooth devices out there.

Thanks to PJ Jacobowitz for this writeup!

Sony finally launched the Reader this week, just in time for the holiday shopping season. This isn't going to be the kind of success that the PS3 will be, but I think it is a hugely important product just the same. Sony is going to spend a bunch pushing the concept of the electronic book to consumers, signing up publishers from Houghton-Mifflin to Tokyo Pop, and even bringing book retailer like Borders on board. As a result, the eBook market could finally be exiting from a long, depressing slump.

Before I continue, I have to confess: I am an eBook fan and always have been. Last year, I read "The DaVinci Code" on my Treo 650. I reviewed RocketBook and a few others over the years and almost bought the spin each time vendors told me they were going to "change publishing forever." Sure, the products were bulky, expensive, hard to find, and painful on the eyes when you tried to read them for long periods of time. They also had very little available content (Go Project Gutenberg!) and pitiful battery life. Other than that, they were great. Okay, so eBook readers have always sucked, but with the Reader, Sony solves many of these problems.

I tried out a preproduction version of the Reader this summer for a few weeks and was pretty impressed. The 6-inch, 160-dpi electronic ink screen is easy to read in normal lighting conditions. The screen isn't backlit, so you'll need a reading light the same way you would with a regular book. Of course, this is what gives the device its days-long battery life.

You can buy it at SonyStyle.com for a pretty steep $350, but for a limited time, the company will throw in a $50 credit for buying eBooks. The books are sold in DRM-protected BBeB format, but the device will also read unprotected PDFs and RTF files. Of course, it would be better if the Reader supported the protected PDFs that are sold by many online eBook sellers, but that is still a pretty open platform--for a Sony product anyway. Plus, the device can download RSS feeds. Browsing through Gizmodo, Engadget, and Lifehacker posts wasn't exactly pretty, but it worked. (But where is Gearlog? I'm working on it.)

At $350, the Reader will remain a geeky, early-adopter product for the next year or so, but that's OK. Sony is getting the ball rolling again. Already, Panasonic is working on the WordGear, an eBook reader with a 5.6-inch, color screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600. Amazon is reportedly working on a hardware device that will work with its MobiPocket system. Who knows? Maybe the price of the iRex iLiad will come down a bit. Right now, it is a steep $800!

To be fair, the iLiad uses the same electronic ink technology the Reader does, but it has a bigger screen and built in Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, it costs nearly twice as much as the Reader and doesn't support DRM-protected books. Not yet, anyway. (Word is, that will change in a few weeks.)

What would guarantee the Reader's success? If I were Sony, I would try to make some inroads into the college market. Think of all those textbook publishers churning out expensive, heavy-print editions that students need for just one semester. They may seem like a stodgy bunch, but I think they will jump at the chance to publish electronically. Right now, the only ones making money from used textbooks are college bookstores. This is a perfect market for both eBooks and the Reader. Sony could let professors map out all their course requirements right in the Connect online store. Hell, you could lease the Readers to students and still make money on the deal.

As it is, Sony is selling books for about 75 percent of the paper price. The hardcover of "Cesar's Way" sells for $24.95; it's available for $14.36 on Sony Connect. No bad, but not great either, considering the cost of making and distributing an eBook is next to nothing. Eventually, Sony will have to hand over the book-selling business and focus on hardware and services: Buy an eBook anywhere, read it on any device. We aren't there yet, but now that the Reader is finally out, I think we might get there soon.

Dan Costa is the Consumer Electronics Editor at PC Magazine and a cohost of Gearlog Radio; check back every Thursday for his take on the world of gadgets, gear and other tech stuff.

Collecting and trading bootleg recordings is a hobby of mine, so I have a lot of music on tape that I'd like to convert to MP3 or audio CD. The ADS Tech Instant Music ($59.99 direct) is a USB device that adds inbound and outbound RCA Stereo and SPDIF ports to your computer, so you can connect an analog audio component such as a tape deck or a turntable and convert your analog music to digital.

Installation was pretty much a no-brainer. I plugged the Instant Music into a USB 2.0 port and installed the drivers and software from the accompanying CD. I then connected my tape deck, a venerable Denon DR-M10HR, to the Instant Music, and following the clearly written instructions, I to set Windows to use the USB Audio CODEC as the Sound Recording device. 

The included Nero SoundTrax application is wizard-driven and easy to use. I converted my first show, Neil Young at Jones Beach in the summer of 1989 (which, incidentally, I attended), in no time. Just set the sound levels, follow the suggestions for how to process the recording, and record. After that you can save in a variety of audio formats: WAV, MP3, WMA, and AAC. Quality is pretty much what you would expect from a tape: It's not enhanced to CD quality. But if you're looking for an easy solution for migrating music to digital, the Instant Music is a good solution.

By the way, I prefer to use MAGIX audio cleaning lab software. It does a much better job of recording and cleaning analog music than Nero, with many more treatments for audio to decrackle, dehiss, and so on. It also has a graphic equalizer that lets you tweak the music before saving it as a digital file.

Thanks to Friend of Gearlog Matt Sarrel for this review!

Maybe you thought I was crazy to still be using a Sony Mavica digital camera with a handy floppy disk slot, but as Carol Mangis pointed out, I could put all those disks to use some day by building something.

Why not make a bag? This guy did. He found a whole bunch of disks in a dumpster and decided to recycle them. After all, who has a floppy disk drive anymore?

My disk collection is much more colorful--blue, red, yellow, green, purple, and standard black. I don't have enough disks or the patience to make a carrying case, so I decided accessories were the way to go.

Sports-oriented wireless carrier Mobile ESPN shut down today, in a not entirely unexpected move.

Mobile ESPN was an application masquerading as a carrier; a great sports-info app running on Sprint phones on the Sprint network, but for some reason selling their own subscriptions. It never attracted many subscribers because in a nation of family plans, it's tough to convince anyone outside of Green Bay, WI that Mom, Dad and the kids should all have the same high-priced sports-oriented phones. Mobile ESPN also never let people watch ESPN TV live on the phone, which I always found confusing.

The carrier was part of a quartet of flashy launches of 'virtual' mobile carriers this year, including Amp'd, Helio and Disney Mobile. Helio is said to have very few subscribers, but its deep-pocketed backers have said many times that they're in for the long haul. Amp'd, which I met with a few weeks ago at the CTIA show in LA, says they're starting to pick up traction, but they're also exploring being a content provider to a larger carrier with Telus in Canada. Disney Mobile targets the huge potential market for kids' phones, so I wouldn't count them out quite yet.

Sports fans shouldn't despair, though. According to Mobile ESPN's site, they're reinventing themselves as an information application on another wireless provider. I'm assuming Sprint.

Yesterday, our beloved Gearlog reader Phoenix commented on the chicBuds earphones post, saying that he was hoping to find a more "manly" solution for tangled cords. Well Phoenix, here's your answer!

Is your life a tangled mess of wires? Mine certainly is, with the extra-long cord of my Sony MDR-EX71 earbuds often getting mixed up with the strap of my purse or catching on the subway turnstile. Digital Innovations' ZipWraps are designed for people with exactly my problem. The small round device flips open to reveal a little metal clip to which you attach your headphone cord. After that, it's just a press of a button and your cord zips up to wind neatly in the center of the device almost alarmingly fast.

ZipWraps works just as advertised, but ended up not really fitting my lifestyle. It's just as easy to wrap the excess length of my iPod around it and stick it in my pocket than fiddle with getting it neatly stored in something that looks sort of dorky clipped to my pocket.  But, for the more anal retentive among us, it could be a perfect solution. ZipWraps sell for $9.99 and are available in both black and white.

(Fun fact: Googling the name 'Zip Wraps' got a lot of hits for what we call in the South "foundation garments". Gearlog recommends that you are careful not to confuse the two when ordering.)

Thanks to PC Mag Assistant Producer Whitney Reynolds for this review!

Updated. There are three versions of this watch. I heard about (and saw) the Abacus and Fossil versions, which are $199 and $249 respectively. But the Sony Ericsson branded version is $399 and adds the ability to control your phone's music player, which isn't on the other two versions.

Original post. Okay, okay, maybe the Fossil Wrist PDA wasn't a hit - maybe I was the only editor who gave it an award. But to listen to Fossil, they've learned their lesson, and what consumers want in a "smart watch" is a simple way to grab some info off a phone that's lost in a bag, pocket or purse. Witness the new Caller ID Watch, developed with Sony Ericsson. It hooks up to Sony Ericsson phones via Bluetooth and tells you whether you need to empty your whole bag to answer that important caller, or whether it's just yet another collection agency who should roll to voice mail. The watch comes in several designs under the Fossil, Abacus and Sony Ericsson brands, and it will cost $199-249 depending on fashionability. Click on the photo at right for a bigger image of the Sony Ericsson model.

Read all about it in my story on PCMag.com.