As if society wasn’t lazy enough Hasbro has announced that they will be releasing new varieties of classic board games with an electronic tower that is going to run the game.

The tower will manage aspects of the game such as dice rolls, rent, cash flow, etc. The tower “bathes the board in infrared light, and a camera can see reflectors placed on each game piece.”  The days of dealing out paper money and a banker are gone apparently. Paper money is being replaced by a plastic money card that is automatically reloaded by the tower when you pass go, collect rent from another player, etc.

Monopoly Live will be available this fall for around $50. You can still pick up the classic for around $15 if you are terrified about Sauron’s tower being able to watch your every move don’t want to drop the cash for the electronic version. But just think of all you will be missing. As one of the games designers, Leif Askeland said “The tower never makes a mistake”.

This image shows that we would need 308,762 square miles littered across the world in deserts with almost 24/7 sun all year round. The little boxes on the map don’t seem like much, but to put this into perspective Texas is 268,601 square miles. We would need to have monstrous solar panel parks providing power to our world. Alternatively commercial and residential structures could have solar panels arranged on top of them to generate energy. Start-up costs of such a project would probably be so great that none of us will ever see it in our life times, but it is still cool to think about.

Have you ever sat and thought to yourself: “I wish there was a robot that could take control of my body and teach me to play the piano”? Yep, me neither, but one company has developed a device that will make this dream come true for some out there. Concert Hands is a robotic device that is attached to your piano or electric keyboard. There is a rod that goes the length of the piano that sits in between you and the keys. You sit down in front of the piano and the Concert Hands latch onto you like a leech you lock your wrists into the slides that move your hands to the spot on the piano where they need to be and then slide your fingers into the finger sleeves that make your fingers press the correct keys.

If you aren’t sold on this great idea press play on the video above and let the mind controlling hypnotist Concert Hands advertiser convince you. I–personally–am creeped out.

The idea is that repetition will force your body to memorize how to play a song–muscle memory–just like anything you have done so much that you can do it without looking, like changing chords on a guitar or typing on a keyboard.

I am not saying this won’t work; in theory it sounds like it very possibly could. All I want to know is who thought of this? And one way or another you aren’t really learning to play the piano. A robot is training another robot your brain to play one song at a time through grinding repetition.

For more information I would tell you to go visit the Concert Hands website but at the time of this post it is down due to them exceeding their monthly bandwidth limits…

Like technology from an outdated sci-fi movie the color picker concept pen designed by Jinsu Park can scan the color of an object in the real world and reproduce it using a mixture of Red, Green and Blue.

Why they thought to go with RGB instead of CMYK is beyond me. It could be that Jinsu is more used to digital design where RGB is better suited instead of printed design where CMYK is better. One way or another it is still impressive that the technology is there that can scan an object and automatically mix together the correct levels of ink in order to produce a match. All it needs now is a USB connector so you can scan the color of something and use it on your computer or push a color from your computer to the pen.

The camera is able to adjust for light and movement distortion using a laser grid to assess the current page geometry and is able to create copies that are true to the original. Right now it is just a concept but with some funding this could be a huge time saver for large corporations, schools and print shops. [PlasticPals]

We knew this was coming and I have got to admit, now that they are on their way I am rather excited about going in to test out a Microsoft Surface PC or Xbox 360 with Natal device. Yes this picture doesn’t show us much but as plans are passed around and construction begins we will no doubt begin to see more images leaking to the net. The first two stores will be opening in Scottsdale, Arizona and Mission Viejo, California this fall.

The BedBunker Gun Safe is now available. If the name alone didn’t sell you then let their Billy Mays impersonator moderately enthused spokesman in the video above do the job.

With a BedBunker you can keep your money, guns and other important items right under the bed in a secure and incredibly convenient hidden location. The safe is rated to be able to withstand 2 hours of fire and can hold 30 rifles and 70 handguns but will that be enough?

You can pick one of these puppies up from BedBunker for $2k to $4k depending on the size of your bed.

This interesting survey performed by the American Time Use Survey shows how the majority of people in the US spend their day. Using the interactive graph you can change the demographic to show information based on age, employment status, etc. Check the NYTimes website to see the graph.

What can you expect right? It is the developer preview and this early in developement. This is more than acceptable right now. I spoke with some of the other developers and was told I would have better luck in Chrome. After pulling up Wave in Chrome the experience was much more enjoyable.

Currently Wave only supports the following browsers:

You have the option of using IE if you want but our experience with Wave and IE was terrible. Personally I wouldn’t mind if it stayed that way. I have never been a fan of IE and now that Microsoft is openly trying to make advances over google with Bing and now partnering with Yahoo to “create the future of search” I think it would be just fine if Google decided to say “hey, Wave works great in our browser! If you want our users to be able to use your browser then make it work with our program.”

Now on to Wave itself. The default layout when you open Wave has your Navigation menu on the left with Inbox, Trash, By Me, Spam, etc. Below that are your contacts. In the middle area you have a list of any Google waves that you have started or have been invited to by order of most recently commented on in real time. From here you can see which ones have been commented on since you left, how many responses there have been that you haven’t looked at yet, other people that are part of the wave and even see what text people are typing in as they type.

When you clikc on a wave it will open to the right and you can scroll through all of the text that has been entered. You can even see text from everyone else that is commenting at the moment in real time.

One cool part of the interface that makes it very intuitive is the ability to minimize any and all of the windows or move them around. You can even click on the minimize button on the navigation and contact menus. Everything that you minimize will appear at the top of the window. While they are there you can click on one to see a mini view of the wave to check on the updates or you can move it back down to the main window.

Here is something else that caught our attention when we first began using our Wave mail:

With standard gMail accounts you are currently given 7352 MB–and counting! With our Google Wave email account we had 25,600 MB. This could just be a perk to being in the developer preview so don’t get too excited just yet however there probably will be a need for more space when using Wave and so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if all Wave accounts started with 25 GB of space.

We will update when we begin to develop apps.