Sitting idly in the night, you may wonder, what is the cell phone of choice for rectal insertion in Latin America? Apparently, it's the VK Mobile VK530. Since I love a cell-phone mystery, I had to find out what phone appeared in BoingBoing's post about Salvadoran gang members shoving handsets all the way up into their intestines. A little bit of sleuthing revealed the VK530. At 76 x 44 x 23 mm, it's one of the smallest phones on the Salvadoran market. I think the Panasonic A102 from Telecom El Salvador is a millimeter or two tinier -- and I'd imagine in a situation like that, every millimeter would count, no?

You have to wonder, though, were they having as much fun as this lady with her Nokia 8850? El Reg, always at the forefront of journalism, has rounded up various other examples of the internal-phone phenomenon.

If you're a Gearlog Radio listener, then you already know we're a bit crazy. Okay, so maybe I'm the only one that's crazy, but we do enjoy shocking people with the weirdest gadgets or gear out there. Even still, it probably won't surprise you that we also enjoy our fair share of office pranks.

For Executive Editor Vicki Jacobson's milestone birthday, we decided to do something drastic. You see, Vicki is known as our birthday fairy here at PC Magazine. She's always adorning our cubes or offices with streamers, banners, signs, even delicious pastries. While that's all cute and nice, we wanted to award her with something over the top. Okay, WAY over the top.

Luckily, she took the day off, so all day yesterday, the entire staff of PC Magazine congregated and blew up blue and chocolate brown balloons (her fave colors). As Web Producer Whitney Reynolds would describe it, "It sounded like everyone was hooked up to respirators!" Every once in awhile you'd walk by someone's cube with their head between their legs, or folks grabbing for their inhalers. And, in one instance, Features Editor Sarah Pike exclaimed, "I knew there'd be a good reason to quit smoking!" Poor Blogging Molly though: after one balloon she was on the floor.

In all seriousness, by the end of the day, we blew up over a thousand balloons (sorry, we lost count) and stuffed them into Vicki's office. Why? Because we love her so damn much! Either that, or we just wanted to get between her and her homepage.

We closed the door to her office so that this morning when she came in, she'd try to open the door and figure out why it wouldn't budge.

This morning, a couple of us waited patiently for her to arrive, camcorders and digital cameras in our hands. Yes, we caught her entire reaction on video. And, it's on YouTube.com right now! The footage in the beginning is a little dark, but wait a minute and Vicki finally manages to get in to the office and turn on the lights!

All she could say was, "OH MY GAWD!" as balloons came flying out of her office. When she wasn't looking, we pushed her into the office and closed the door. We found out later she was claustrophobic. Sorry, Vicki! And yes, those are her fingers behind the door trying to escape.

Is this the best birthday office prank or what?!?! I just hope that the unpleasant aroma of latex will clear up over the weekend. That smell is all too familiar!

Happy Birthday, Vicki!!!

The fun doesn't stop here. Check out more of our prank photos below. . . And watch the video footage too.

Those years I spent offering my firstborn child in exchange for a practical solution for moving HD content from my HDTV to other devices in my house may finally be at an end. Avocent is poised to release the Emerge MPX1000, which will send your HD content and graphics at 1280 x 768 resolution from one high-def source to up to eight wired or wireless destinations.  Don’t let this “HD Multipoint Extender” fool you into thinking it will be the be-all, end-all for the future of wirelessly transferring HD content, though: It won’t ship 1080p video sources.

But with a nice selection of DVI and HDMI inputs that will carry your content to wired or wireless receivers up to 150 feet away, you might finally have the perfect solution for moving HD content around your home or office.  No word yet on how the MPX1000 will communicate with the wireless receivers (wireless HDMI, anyone?), but who cares? I get to keep my firstborn!

The company plans to announce pricing and availability next week at CEDIA.

Post by Don Reisinger, a Gearlog contributor.

Haiku Review: Toshiba Satellite U205-S5022

         An optical drive
         with an Intel Core Duo
         but a small touchpad.

The full length, free-verse version of the Toshiba Satellite U205-S5022 review can be found at PCMag.com.

Come on, embrace your girly side! If you've been looking for a good reason to buy an inno, the portable XM Satellite Radio receiver/player from Pioneer that got a very good 4.5 (out of 5) score from PC Magazine, and you don't mind carrying a pink device, here you go.

When you purchase a Special Edition Pink Pioneer inno from Circuit City or xmradio.com, XM, Circuit City, and Pioneer will contribute a total of $30 per radio to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation; this is for the first 5,000 pink innos that are sold and activated. It lists for $349.99 at XM's site, and the XM subscription service is $12.95 a month. Pioneer told us both Jessica Simpson and Pink have pink innos. What more reason do you need?

To read PC Mag's review of the inno, click here.

Also check out a video review of the inno, here.

More goodies from SendStation: The company is giving away 1,000 PocketDock FWs to the first 1,000 people to respond. PocketDock FWs are thumb-size iPod FireWire adapters. The offer goes till September 13, 2006; one per person only. 

The company must be cleaning its closets for some new products. So hurry up and go to SendStation's Web site and grab one.

(UPDATE: The ordering process is a little confusing; there's no box to check to indicate you want one. If you don't want to purchase anything else, just check out with your name, address, etc. The PocketDock will show up as ordered. You pay shipping.)

(UPDATE 2: This just in from SendStation.

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Greystripe partnered with Alten8 to bring mobile game enthusiasts 38 more free games on GameJump.com! To date, GameJump.com offers over 100 free mobile games on its site, ready for download.

"With so many games available, there's simply no reason for consumers to continue paying to play games on their mobile, when they'll find a wide variety of titles for all ages at GameJump.com," said Greystripe CEO Michael Chang. I like his way of thinking!

In addition, Greystripe is also distributing the games through its mobile Web site, http://gjmp.tw. Game genres and titles include:

• Action Adventure: Snake, Lop Ears, Haunted House
• Retro: Bird Hunt, Fruit Catch, Amusement Park
• Casino: Casino Player
• Puzzle: Quick 6 Fix Sudoku
• Sports: Golf Club, USA Basketball, Xtreme Ignition

Bear in mind though, while the games are free, standard carrier charges (WAP, GPRS, and SMS) and taxes may apply to text messages sent to you and to data transfers when you download games from GameJump.

I was happy to find that the site offers games for my cell phone model, the Sanyo PM 8200. To download the games, send your phone the download link through the site's web form, and then voila! You'll be able to play that game on your cell phone. Among the ones available to my phone are: Adventure Boy, Attack Chopper, and Why Chicken Why?

Shown here is a screenshot of the game, Brick Annoyed!.

Updated 10/24/06 to reflect new prices. Back in June, we told you about the Media Buddy ($139): a portable media hard drive. Well, even though summer is just about over, you can use the Media Buddy all year round! Thanks to Web Producer Rachel Florman for the review!!

I don't have a laptop.  But I do have a digital camera, and I'm the kind of photographer who might shoot 150 pictures in a half an hour. Generally, these two issues are unrelated—until I go on vacation and have to figure out what I'm going to do with all my photos when I fill up my memory cards and still want to take more.

Enter the Digital Foci Media Buddy.

The Media Buddy is a portable storage device for photos. Plug your camera's memory card into the proper card slot and download. (There are three different slots, supporting lots of types of cards: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, SD Card, MicroDrive/CompactFlash Type II, MultiMedia Card, Memory Stick/MS Pro/ Duo/Pro Duo.) Later, attach the device to your computer via USB 2.0 cable. It shows up as an additional drive, and you can drag and drop to transfer your photos. The device in its carrying case weighs just under a pound. If you add the AC/DC adapter (which you should—the batteries need to be recharged relatively often) you're carrying a 1.2 pound system.

I took a 30GB Media Buddy with me on a recent family vacation: 5 people, 4 cameras, one Media Buddy. It was just what I needed. There are, however, a few design flaws.

First of all, the navigational system is totally unintuitive. For my purposes, that didn't actually matter so much. You can download an entire memory card's worth of photos by pressing one button (although you'd never know which button without reading the booklet), and that's what I did. Once I had photos on the drive, I tried wading through some folders, but often I wasn't sure which buttons to press, and really, I didn't need to see what was in the folders. It's not like I could look at the pictures.

I haven't yet mentioned that the Media Buddy can also function as an MP3 player. I think this is part of the reason that file navigation is so confusing. The buttons on the drive look like buttons you would find on a media player. Play/Pause and Stop, for example, make sense when you're dealing with music, but which one should you press to open a folder?  (It turns out that when using the Media Buddy, you should press Play/Pause.) Also, you have to be careful when pressing the Next and Back buttons—the machine often interprets one press of these buttons as two, which moves you farther than you mean to go.

I was really happy to have the Media Buddy with me on my trip. 30GB was plenty of storage, and the benefit of having the drive outweighed the confusing elements of its design. Would I buy one? I'm not sure. I think it's a terrific idea, but with a few changes it could be so much easier to use.

The Media Buddy is also available in 40GB, 60GB, and 80GB capacities and sell for $139, $169, and $189 respectively.