Most people think the FCC is all bad and all that it wants to do is prevent us from enjoying quality television with harsh language and nudity. Well, they would be right except that once in a blue moon the FCC blows the lid on some covert hardware that will soon hit store shelves. This time the FCC has leaked word of Sony’s latest VAIO netbooks.

Yes, you read right. It turns out that Sony does not feel too high and mighty enough to not compete with the slew of netbooks its competitors have been selling like hot cakes. Not much but enough is known about the two new models known as the PCG-1P1L and PCG-1P2L. The PCG prefix is known to represent Sony’s VAIO portable line and the dimensions of these latest models match typical netbook sizes, approximately 9.5 inches long by 4.5 inches wide. We’re excited to see Sony showing interest in the netbook market and can’t wait to get our hands on it!

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YouTube is great for entertainment, but quality is a whole other bag of marbles. When I have a video I plan on uploading, I don’t want it compressed to all hell and back for the purpose of streaming. Because of this, I usually use Vimeo for those vids. But thanks to a hack involving the URL of YouTube videos, you can now squeeze 720p HD quality vids from everyone’s favorite video website.

To do it, find the video you want in 720p and change the following text in the URL or embed code:

By changing that fmt variable to &fmt=22 or tacking on &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the embed URLs—that’s right, turn it up twice past 11—Youtube will kick out compatible videos at a whopping 720p resolution.

Extremely sweet. I’ve included some hacked video of CSI’s David Caruso to demonstrate. Just remember that 720p video means big bandwidth, so no slow connections and don’t go bitching at YouTube because your favorite video isn’t loading right away.

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35-year old blogger Tanya Vlach lost one of her eyes in a car accident three years ago. Now she wants to make the best of it by replacing her prosthetic acrylic eye with an ‘eye cam’ - a webcam for her eye socket. She wants one capable of dilating with changes of light that also allows her to blink to control its zoom, focus and an on/off switch for when she sees something too obscene to record.

“There have been all sorts of cyborgs in science fiction for a long time, and I’m sort of a sci-fi geek,” said Vlach. “With the advancement of technology, I thought, ‘Why not?’”

With an eye like that she could blog her daily events and life story through her own eye’s perspective. I hope she leaves it on while in the shower. That’s a webcam blog I’d like to see!

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Typing, “hot horny girls go wild in a jacuzzi,” can be difficult on an iPhone; even with that QWERTY keyboard. By Friday, Apple hopes to remedy this problem by releasing Google’s new voice recognition application in the iTunes store.

Once you have the app, you can forget about typing. Just say out loud, “Where can I find the Chicks With Dicks Vol. 2 DVD in New York City?” and the sound will be converted to a digital file to be sent through Google’s servers. This is when the magic happens. When the software tries to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine. It won’t be long until you have every smutty video store’s location in New York.

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Finally, Mozilla is coming in to its own with a browser feature that is perfect for porn. For Firefox 3.1, the team at Mozilla have included a feature called “private browsing.” Upon exiting the browser, any trace of past sites you visited located in the browser’s history, cookies or temporary files are erased.

That means: no dirty clues as to where you’ve been digging around the Internet late at night. After all, you wouldn’t want your friends knowing you put Gearfuse in your nightly spank bank.

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I’m not talking about Phantom here, I’m talking about the web browser, Opera. Apple has beef with the competition and in turn has decided to keep Opera off the App Store. Says ZDNet:

Mr. von Tetzchner said that Opera’s engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won’t let the company release it because it competes with Apple’s own Safari browser.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as Apple is trying to gain market share with it’s web browser Safari. Hopefully we’ll see some alternatives in the future, but for now, you’re shit out of luck.

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Way to be lame, Facebook. Thanks to Facebook being a bitch and blocking Google’s Friend Connect service, Facebook in turn will not develop a standalone application for Android. This comes as a huge disappointment to both myself and Google. A lot of people are addicted to Facebook and although the G1 handles the normal Facebook website just fine, a dedicated app like the iPhone’s would have been nice.

No dice. We’ll see what the future holds but let’s not hold our breath.

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Stuart was in the market for a more comfortable controller for his rover platform. Unfortunately, all R/C controllers are flimsy and not so conforming to one’s hands. So instead, Stuart used a PlayStation 2 gamepad and totally DIY’ed himself a new controller for the rover. Operating wirelessly, the PlayStation controller controls the rover in such a way that you feel like you’re playing a video game. Could it be because this controller is a gamepad? We’ll never truly know.

Nintendo may have been the pioneers of the D-pad, but Sony perfected it. You wouldn’t want to control your rover with anything else.

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Seems NBC and SNL creator Lorne Michaels want to start a streaming video site that will feature only SNL content. Schmitt’s Gay, The Rapists for 500 and Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, all in one place. No wonder it’s so chilly. Hell froze over!

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Computing isn’t always about raw power and trying to build the best gaming rig out there. Sometimes the simple bare necessities will suffice.  Lenovo’s first netbook, the IdeaPad S10-42312CU, comes with all the bare necessities you’ll ever need to surf the web.

Featuring a 10.2-inch 1024×600 widescreen display, an Intel Atom N270 single core processor running at 1.6GHz, GMA 950 integrated graphics and Windows XP Home, this netbook packs quite the punch considering it only weighs 2.65 pounds. This specific model comes with 512MB of DDR2 memory and an 80GB hard drive, but other models will be available later with more RAM, hard drive space and a variety of colors. Unfortunately, it only comes with a 3-cell battery, but on the bright side the keyboard is 85-percent of the size of a full-sized laptop keyboard, meaning this thing is pretty damn small. Hopefully it doesn’t use up too much juice. It’s available now for an eye-popping $439 dollar price tag. Don’t forget to slap a warranty on that.

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