Topic by topic, you never know what will wake the Badger…
These cool little tanks on ThinkGeek look like a huge amount of fun. They are small radio controlled tanks that shoot via infrared cannons at each other and you must have 5 hits to win. The trick is they give you a mild (2 shock strength settings) shock when you get hit 
I love this idea…more toys should be like this 
Staying up way too late tonight, but I have been playing around with Mac the Ripper, the DVD ripping software, and Matinee, a VIDEO_TS loader. Very cool. I guess I never really thought about ripping my DVD collection so that it could be easily watched on the computer or placed on a laptop when going out of town. I then started considering what it would take to have a server loaded with all of my DVDs in ripped form.
If you take my current collection of 331 titles (which contains quite a few multi-disc sets…probably more like 360 movies, and maybe 400+ actual DVDs), assume a 6.5GB rip, and 1 disc per title, you are left with a need of about 2152GB. Now, assuming I would want to raid this (RAID-5) and allow for future expansion, I would need to plan for 3+TB of actual disc storage pre-RAID. That is just immense and way too extreme for home use. Not to mention it would be so costly as to make the whole plan impossible. I am looking into compression, but I am not sure how I might best go about that. One piece of recommended software, DVD2OneX, looks like it would cost 49 euros and very likely wouldn’t save me a large amount of space.
At this point it looks like a digital DVD library is out of reach unless you have a small DVD collection or access to very a nice hardware setup. I think I will hang on to Mac the Ripper just for favorite movies from my collection or for when I am going out of town…
Heather and I were walking though Bed, Bath, and Beyond in Crossroads shopping center earlier today. Heather pulled me aside and started pointing back and to our left. It turns out there was a woman holding a baby monkey that had clothes on. I briefly toyed with the idea of asking her why she had a monkey, but decided it was better to just shelve that conversation and move on
I think the only real important release this week is the Incredibles. I have been looking forward to this movie hitting DVD since I walked out of the theater. Definitely a good candidate to purchase if you liked previous Pixar films.
Check out the new trailer for the upcoming film, Sin City. This is my most anticipated film of the year. Yes, this one…not Star Wars (low expectations) and not Fantastic Four (expectations a level or two above Catwoman).
If I am right, this movie is going to simply rock
UPDATE:
Almost forgot, check out the site for some cool extra stuff and the very cool posters