CNET Live: May 15, 2008 Video

CNET Live: May 15, 2008 Video Transcript

>> ^m00:00:05 [ music ] ^m00:00:09 Coming up on CNET Live, live beating pig hearts! I'm to write Pita another check. And then we'll see some 9 inch nails in a nose and to think we were so excited about the Wii Fit, that's coming up too. All that and more actually, coming up on CNET Live. ^m00:00:25 [ music ] ^m00:00:31 It's good to be here ladies and gentleman with a show like that!

>> Welcome to CB, not yet.

>> You don't want to miss any of what's coming. It's gonna be wet, it's gonna be wild, I may faint.

>> Kinda like our day. Give us a call, 888-900-CNET, 888-900-2638. When you do, Cheryl will set you up for the last time. She's moving to New York! She's still gonna work for CNET but it's awful far for her to set up calls, so when you call in and you talk to Cheryl, wish her a bon voyage.

>> Exactly, say hi, say bye, which she's not going too far.

>> Thanks Cheryl!

>> We aren't going to far either, but first before we take your calls, we're going to look at a couple of things we crave. ^m00:01:12 [ music ] ^m00:01:15

>> Heres some of our favorite things from the Crave blog at crave dot cnet dot com. Mine here, is the giant NES controller coffee table that Australian Kyle Downes just finished building; he's got a You Tube video of it. It's not just a coffee table that looks like an NES though. Check this out, here's the video that he put up. It works!

>> This is home grown hour.

>> Yeah, yeah. He's got the thing hooked up to his NES. You play Super Mario with this thing.

>> Cool. I got the directional over here, up here left right, got your buttons.

>> Got your A and B buttons, your reset, all that, all the normal stuff right there but you gotta have some reach. It really puts you in the game.

>> Six months is the over under before that's in the Ikia catalogue.

>> Yeah.

>> That would sell like mad.

>> You should have to assemble it yourself.

>> Oh there's a wire bundle!

>> It took a little bit of doing to make it work.

>> It looks absolutely dead on.

>> Yeah, really awesome. Well done.

>> I look like a dork because mine's not nearly that cool, but I've got cassette.

>> This is pretty cool; I like this a lot.

>> A cassette blue tooth adapter so I happen to drive a car with a cassette deck and no CD, I'd like to stream a blue tooth media device to my car stereo so here's how you do it. You pop this thing in the cassette slot and it's a blue tooth adapter, just that simple. It's not a hands free kit, there's no microphone or mic jack, it's really for streaming a device into your older car stereo.

>> So any audio device that can output stereo blue tooth or even just audio blue tooth, like an iPhone puts out audio blue tooth.

>> The A2DP stereo blue tooth would sound great over this.

>> And then you've got basically the equivalent of that old thing with the wire coming out that plugs into the headphone jack except no wire.

>> Yeah, and in an older car, I love classic cars, so I got cars that have cassette decks. This is really very cool and about 40 bucks.

>> And honestly that old cassette to the mini jack is one of the most reliable connections that you can make.

>> But blue tooth and cassette; that's a great composition of new and old. I love that.

>> Crazy but cool

>> Crazy cool, that's me. Crazy cool. Okay, let's get some phone calls. Where do you want to go first?

>> I can't remember. Which one were you gonna pull up?

>> I think Abraham in Washington because he's got an iPhone question. He'd love to hit you with iPhone prognostication. Abraham, welcome to CNET Live.

>> Hey how's it going guys? Great show.

>> Good. Doctor Carnac is here ready to help you out.

>> Alright my question is, there's a lot of people holding out for 3 G and I'm one of them, but my big gripe is 16 gigs is not gonna cut for me so I'm wondering if you guys know anything, if there's gonna be a 32 gig iPhone?

>> Dr. Carnac, 32 gig iPhone, what do you see?

>> I see a 32 gig iPhone, it's in a Chinese manufacturing plant, it's coming, there's a J in the name, there's a W W D, I don't know. Probably you'll here about June 9th.

>> Wow, that got specific all of the sudden. Yeah, Apple's worldwide developer's conference is coming up June 9th. We are kind of sort of thinking that will be a great time to roll out the new iPhone in 3G, 32 gig, those are all very reasonable asks.

>> Yeah, I mean they upgraded the iPhone from it's original 4 and 8 to an 8 and 16. You still figure that the 32 gig flash drives have been coming down in price, it's a good chance. I'd put it at 62 percent chance that you will see a 32 gig iPhone.

>> An iPod Touch is already a 32 gig right?

>> I thought it maxed out at 16, is it? Now I can't remember. Oh, well yeah you're right, so there you go.

>> So they already got an architecture for a 32 gig part to go into a portable. Why not? So yeah, it seems like it's a very likely one, so I don't think you've got too long to wait on that one although with Apple; as you know we never really know. I want to grab this one here on line 1 because this is frustrating and I know it's probably annoyed a lot of people. We got Jason here in New Port, Florida. Hello Jason, welcome to CNET Live!

>> Hey Brian, how's it going man?

>> We're doing good, what's on your mind today?

>> Okay, I got this ultimate 64 bit and.

>> That's your problem?

>> The meantime I got to a webpage that happens to have a Windows media player Active X control on there. It locks up my browser whether it's audio or video streaming.

>> Okay audio or video, that was my first question. What version of media player do you have, 11 or 10?

>> It's 11 because that's the one that came Vista install integrated. You'd think it would work right.

>> Yeah, you would think so right? But it is Vista. But looking at a few threads, there's a good couple of threads on this over at CNET forums so check in there and so a little snooping around. I'll give you a synopsis. A lot of folks are finding if they roll back to Windows Media 10 which seems very counter intuitive when you're running Vista, that that may solve it.

>> I didn't know if that was possible in Vista.

>> Yeah, seems like it is, and then you might also want to try over at Microsoft, they apparently have a couple of patches. If you go to Microsoft support section, their knowledge base, and search around for the idea of Windows Media player freezes in IE; they have a couple of patches in there, I don't know if those have been rolled up already in 11 but you're in the Vista world, Vista makes us crazy for a lot of reasons. This is not a device driver issue, I don't think, which is the typical Vista Achilles heel but it might be. Did you buy this machine with Vista or did you put it on yourself?

>> It's a machine I put together myself.

>> Yeah, you might have a device driver conflict but that would be consistent, I would think, and this sounds like it's kind of hit and miss right?

>> Yeah.

>> Alright so it's not every website that causes it hang. But not every website causes it to hang right, it's just some websites.

>> Just only bands that have wmt dot dol and also I tried disabling all the add ons that are loaded in IE and that didn't do anything either so.

>> But Windows Media Player works stand alone when you just open it up to play media without the web right?

>> Oh yeah, it works great.

>> Alright so it's not a device driver issue I don't think. Go over to CNET forum, some folks have been noodling around on this and some are talking about trying WM10. But check it out over there, you'd get some ideas. Okay? Thanks for the call, appreciate it. You bet, thanks a lot, appreciate it. Dr. Mara, where do you want to go?

>> Let's pick up on John here in Pittsburgh. Hey John, how's it going?

>> I had another question about my iPhone. I got accepted into the developer program, I have the 2 point 0 build and I wanted to know if I can use some Go phone configuration I set up last week with that 2 point 0 or am I gonna have to just stay away from it until it goes official?

>> How did you set up the Go phone last week?

>> Last week I just put in a 8 16 Go phone SIM card into an unlocked iPhone and then activated that way with 1 dot 1 point 4.

>> Okay, so if you upgrade to 2 point 0 then it's probably not gonna be unlocked anymore because you're gonna have to go back to the original firmware. And then you're gonna have to see if the other way to do the Go phone is gonna work. You might want to take the SIM card out and then I'll put a link at blog dot CNET dot TV dot com. There is a way to go in and hack the iPhone to take a normal Go phone SIM card which you now have. But as far as I know this is untried without doing some searching around and my guess is if you really want to keep that Go phone, you probably don't want to put 2 point 0 on there; although you could try upgrading to 2 point 0 and then reactivating it putting all 9's into the social security box which will make you fail the credit check and bump you over into the Go phone situation. Only problem there is I don't know if they'll carry over your old account into the new account.

>> I have the pay as you go plan though right now on it.

>> Yeah, so those are the things I would try. If you want to go to the 2 point 0, either don't go to the 2 point 0, you'll be fine, or go to the 2 point 0, look at this unofficial Apple web blog way of hacking it; see if that works for 2 point 0 because it's not meant to, it's meant for an older firmware or try reactivating it with the all 9's to kick you into the pay as you go plan.

>> Okay.

>> Alright, hope that helps John. Good luck with it. Coming up, we're gonna be talking to Bryan Brushwood, scam artist and star of scam school on revision 3 dot com. But first the much anticipated Wii Fit will go on sale May 21st and like the Wii console, it may be hard to get your hands on one anytime soon but CNET New York's Jeff Bakalar got one in earlier this week and took it out for a stand, sort of. ^m00:09:42 [ music ] ^m00:09:45

>> Hey everyone, I'm Jeff Bakalar for CNET dot com. Today we're gonna have a first look at Wii Fit from Nintendo. The basic idea behind Wii Fit is for you to become more aware of your own body. Using the balance board that's included with the package, it measures your weight and gives you your BMI which is your body mass index. The whole point of Wii Fit is for you to manage your BMI using the exercises embedded in the software. Over time, you gradually lower your BMI and that's basically the entire point of the game. The initial set up for Wii Fit is very easy. You just sync the balance board through the Wii and you'll go through an introductory set up mode where it's gonna weigh you, give your initial BMI. The software will use your Mi that's on your Wii console and in my case, it made it a lot fatter. Now inside the game are various amounts of exercises. You have yoga, aerobic exercises, and balance games. Once you complete an exercise for the day, you'll get a stamp on the calendar and you'll be able to track your progress over a long period of time. When you first try Wii Fit, it's gonna feel a little weird. It took us a few minutes to really get used to the idea of the balance board. It's really sensitive so getting used to the fact that it can pretty much measure the slightest degree of movement takes a little getting used to. You start out with really exercises but as you earn Wii Fit credits you're able to unlock more and more complex exercises. We really enjoyed the balance games, there's a few games that are really fun to play using the board. You're basically using your body as the controller for the game so that's a lot of fun. We really like the soccer exercise, it's where you use your balance to basically head butt soccer balls out of the way. Overall, Wii Fit's probably not gonna have you dropping pounds left and right. It does allow you to do exercises; you will feel somewhat of an aerobic work out if you really stick to it and follow all of the exercises carefully. However it might not be your one stop solution for a complete workout. But for 90 dollars, it might be worth a shot. I'm Jeff Bakalar and we're looking at the Nintendo Wii Fit. ^m00:12:00

>> Alright Jeff I hope you're feeling fit. That looks like fun, right?

>> Yeah.

>> Alright joining us now, Brian Brushwood from revision 3 scam school here to show us how to, I don't know, cheat, con, swindle, get free drinks, that kind of thing.

>> Yep, all of the above.

>> So your show on Revision 3 dot com is called Scam School.

>> Correct.

>> As I just said. What is it about? What are you schooling us?

>> We call it the show about social engineering at the bar and on the street; everything from cheating your way to the first place in line, how to scam drinks out of your friends, even street cons and swindles, if it's something untoured and possibly illegal then it belongs on Scam School.

>> So this is life hacking?

>> Yeah. Pretty much, pretty much, but with alcohol.

>> Yeah. So for a good cause? [ laughter ]

>> Absolutely.

>> Well love the show, I have to say. I really enjoyed it. Brian have you caught it?

>> Not yet, so this is gonna be my first exposure.

>> Fantastic. One of the things I recommend you do if you want to get free drinks is you gotta grab people's attention, and the best way I found to do that; this is an old side show stunt called the human blockhead. Do me a favor; I've got 9 four and a half inch 30 penny nails, Brian, whichever one you want, pick a nail, any nail. Do me a favor, we gotta verify for the folks at home. Try to bend that nail.

>> So it's real?

>> Make sure it doesn't, there we go. This is no switches or anything. This is called the human blockhead, check it out.

>> Oh no you're not!

>> Alright some people think.

>> Oh no you're not! Oh for - oh no! No you're not!

>> Yeah, it really is. This is called the pharyngeal cavity.

>> You okay?

>> Oh yeah. Here we go.

>> I don't think I have a pharyngeal cavity.

>> Ah, no! No! Oh! Don't do that!

>> We're gonna go one step farther.

>> Stop that!

>> Here's what I need you to do. I need you, Brian, to reach forward with your pinching fingers.

>> To do what?

>> Do we have any gloves?

>> Just grab the tip right there.

>> Oh God! You kidding?

>> You know Brian's a germa-phobe, right?

>> I'm a blood-a-phobe also!

>> Alright it's through, it's gonna sprout!

>> No, no, no.

>> And there's a souvenir for you to keep.

>> Take this away from me right now.

>> You should put it in your pocket.

>> That is yours to, you gotta keep it like that, like a triumphant. [ laughter ]

>> How does that work? Are you alright?

>> It's an old side show stunt, the body's really good at rejecting foreign entry right? But the sword swallowers, people who do the human blockhead, they learn to kind of overcome that gag reflex.

>> So that's really going in there? You just loosen up basically and it makes it's way in.

>> In fact if you ever see the cut away of the human skull you see the sinuses curve down and become the throat, this thing stops. I actually feel it touching the back of my throat.

>> And you straightened it out when you put your head back, is that right?

>> Well it doesn't matter, you can bend here.

>> What in the hell am I doing? [ laughter ]

>> Sorry.

>> That's right!

>> Okay so that's laying the ground work right? That's like hey, this is impressive, check out what I can do.

>> Exactly.

>> How do you, what else you got?

>> Another way to grab attention is something, if you want something slightly less painful to do this is what we did in the Kylet episode, we taught how to do this. This is an effect called the human chimney. It's probably.

>> Now I'm getting nervous again. ^m00:15:18 [ silence ] ^m00:15:30 How'd he get that to come out of there?

>> Okay, now here's the thing. I saw the pilot episode so I know how he does this. I've seen it because he explained it in the episode. It still gets you.

>> Yeah, totally.

>> Even though you know what to look for.

>> Totally and essentially what you do, well here.

>> That's scam school so you'll reveal to us.

>> You know what, I guess so. I was gonna be a jerk and take everyone over to the website.

>> Just tell us this one.

>> I'll tell you this one. Now here's the deal. When you light a match, you get a little bit of silver flash then almost nothing while it actually burns right? When the match goes out that's when you start seeing lots of smoke.

>> Right.

>> But if you inhale whatever that sulfur poison is, when you strike the match it actually becomes smoke inside your lung. By the way, I'm pretty sure this kills you. I don't recommend anybody try it.

>> I'm not doing that either. So we're all together on this.

>> You let all the air out of your lungs and as you strike the match you inhale.

>> Oh we didn't.

>> Ah-ha. Oh.

>> But you do it so quick.

>> And now it's turning into smoke. Good grief, a lot of it too.

>> But it's that thing, moving like this and we don't even see you inhale.

>> A great magic trick, it's already over before it begins. So what I do is I strike the match and I hold the match out.

>> It's like BS now.

>> Yeah exactly, I'm like okay the trick's beginning, it's already done. I've already got a lung full of smoke.

>> I'm sure you haven't paid for a drink in about 20 years. When was the last time you got your ass kicked by some Hell's Angel at the bar?

>> Well you gotta learn how to roll with the punches, you gotta learn how to remain a friendly lovable jackass while you're there; otherwise they'll get ya.

>> And pick your marks carefully I guess right?

>> Yeah, absolutely. You gotta know when to hold em, know when to run, right? But I tell you what; can I show you what we're doing today? I want to teach you how this one's done but I'll show you, this is actually we just did a new episode today for this effect. I don't know if the lighting's gonna cooperate, but this is called the jack-o-lantern. ^m00:17:21 [ silence ] ^m00:17:24

>> Good grief. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it looks like a jack-o-lantern I can see the light right through your teeth.

>> Yeah.

>> How do you not burn the roof of your, well?

>> Well you gotta go to scam school right?

>> You describe it in the latest episode right?

>> Right in there? It's right in his mouth! It's right in his damn mouth! It's in your damn mouth and it's burning! You son of a!

>> I will tell you this much, I will tell you this much, the way you can do it is.

>> It hurts.

>> Yeah, you actually don't get burned at all. Once you get it down, you don't get burned at all. But somebody on the forum saw the episode, we taught how to do it and he says, you know what you should do is have a contest. Hand a match to somebody and say let's have a contest and see who can hold it in their mouth the longest. Exactly, the other guy has no idea how to use it, they're burning the roof of his mouth.

>> Ahhhh!

>> While you're sitting pretty not getting burned at all.

>> This is great stuff.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah, this is fantastic. Now like I said, these tricks are sort of laying the ground work in the show itself, you show some tricks where you can do some betting once you've kind of got them.

>> You grab their attention first then you set up a puzzle or some kind of challenge effect, and you don't give the answer until they buy you a drink. When you start doing this stuff for free, then you set up a puzzle and they'll finally give up they'll be like, I gotta know how it's done, be like I'll tell you I'm just so thirsty right now. [ laughter ] And then once that happens you established a precedent of pay for play; from then on you're gonna be drunk off that.

>> Yeah, I want to know when the free drinks are coming in. I like that, good story.

>> Appreciate it, thank you so much.

>> Good to see ya. If you want to find out how to get those free drinks or how that jack-o-lantern trick was done, check out Scam School at Revision 3 dot com slash Scam School. Coming up next, not so much a magic trick but we are gonna run Windows inside OS10. It's the download of the week, right after this. ^m00:19:08 [ music ] ^m00:19:13

>> Nigel you okay? Kelsey, are you ready Kelsey?

>> Yeah, I'm here. I love what you're doing with my cookies. I'd like to discuss some of my new ideas with you. What about jelly bean cookies? ^m00:19:29 [ music ] ^m00:19:39

>> Catch the Baz Exploitation Biz at CNET TV dot com. ^m00:19:43 [ music ] ^m00:20:02

>> Okay folks we're back to it! Oh there you are, don't run away from me like that. Triple 8, 900.

>> And that's for buying me a free drink.

>> Triple 8 900 CNET. 1 phone line open, call now.

>> But first, time for the download of the week. ^m00:20:18 [ music ] ^m00:20:22

>> The download of the week is brought to you by our good friends at CNET's download dot com, purveyors of spyware free, free downloads and you're actually looking at the download of the week; we did not realize it. If you pull out a little Lynn, just zoom back out, over here on the right side you see the OS10 dock. Now this is not some fancy Window blinds theme in Windows XP or vice versa, this is virtualization. I've been fighting with this thing for weeks now, but it's a way to run Windows within OX10. The reason I've been fighting is I've been trying to do 3 of them and then I run into Windows activation hell.

>> I'll do an insider's secret on that.

>> How Merittonian is that?

>> What I'm using, Parallels does this, you can see the little Parallels icon, or VM Ware Fusion does it and it allows you to actually just run Windows right inside OS10. So there you go. I have got FireFox from Windows running right here; I've also got FireFox for OS10 over here. I've got Outlook down here in my task bar; I can go into the start menu.

>> Yep.

>> I can go up here and I can go into the finder and looking around on the OS10 desktop. It's emulating the entire operating system within the other operating system and then a mode they call unity on VM Ware or coherence on parallels, allows you to run the programs independently, move them around like you can any other program in OS10.

>> Slick.

>> This is a, we have a VM Ware Fusion Beta program going on now?

>> Yeah, this is the free download right now. You could enter the Beta program and be warned it's a Beta right? So it might be a little buggy and they want you to give feedback and all that, but they've got the serial key here. Normally these programs are 80 bucks to keep. You can do a free trial and you gotta pay 80 bucks. VM Ware Fusion's Beta program's totally free. It adds the ability to do multi monitor support. So when you're running this, you can actually drag the programs across multiple monitors if you want to do that.

>> Virtualization's come a long way in just a few years especially, yeah on the Mac it's amazing. Alright, let's get some calls here. Let me jump on one here, line 5 I think I got a pretty straightforward answer to this one with Josh here calling in from New York. Hi Josh, welcome to CNET Live.

>> Hey Brian. First of all I'd like to commensurate with you guys on the whole CBS deal.

>> Thank you.

>> Well thanks.

>> Maybe I can see you guys on the news sometime, that'll be pretty fun.

>> What's on your mind? What's going on with your machine?

>> Well what I do is I can sort of log me in on my computer at work and when I go home on the weekends I can use the software to access the work computer. Now the problem is that I put my computer to sleep so I can save energy, but I want to be able to wake it up remotely so I can get in with log me in. You guys know any way to do that?

>> I snooped around on this, I'm a big user of go to my PC for example. I think you have to keep the machine from going to sleep. Sleep's a pretty deep state and I don't believe it is aware of it's network connection in sleep. It's just that simple. And so without that, there's no way a log me in can tickle it and get it to wake up. I think you've got to get it into a, what would a lesser state be? Is hibernation lesser than sleep? I think it is.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> I think hibernation is more aware, it actually moves your RAM onto the hard disk.

>> Okay so sleep is a little less deep and then above that is basically just screen saver and a power saving mode of spinning down the drive maybe. I think sleep is too deep. I don't think that the ethernet jack is awake and then the network application can't wake it up.

>> Are you using OS10 or Windows?

>> I'm using Windows Vista. Is there some way I could set it on a timer such that it'll come out of sleep automatically?

>> Oh at certain hours of the day? You know, I have a feeling Vista might have that in there and if not there are, I think if you go to download dot com you can look up programs that will let you schedule activities. It might be considered a service scheduler or just search scheduler under download dot com. They used to have these back in the day when Windows was a lot less sophisticated. I haven't looked for one in awhile though. But that might be a way to skin that one. Okay? Good luck with that Josh.

>> Alright let's pick up Winston who's on the line from Canada. Where in Canada are you calling from Winston?

>> Ontario.

>> Ontario. How are things in Ontario today?

>> Good.

>> Good, what can we do you for?

>> I'm finding myself when I reinstall Windows after install like all of my programs, so I'm wondering instead of having to reinstall every thing can I just like right now, clone the image of my existing operating system and put it on external hard drive also with all the programs and if I want to recover it in the future I can just access the external hard drive and just reinstall it from there?

>> If he images the drive, that should work doesn't it?

>> Well yeah, you won't be able to, if you image your drive to a hard drive and then reinstall the operating system, you wouldn't be able to necessarily run all those programs off the hard drive because the registry is not gonna be playing well.

>> But if he images everything including the OS.

>> If you image everything to a hard drive and then put that hard drive back inside, you'd be able to run it. I've done that several times.

>> Yeah.

>> I think what you might want to do, if I understand what you're asking, you might want to install the programs on the external drive. But that's not gonna work either because if you reinstall Windows you gotta whole new registry situation so.

>> What if he just images the entire OS with registry, I mean the current state of his machine?

>> It's the reinstalling, like do I have it right, that you're wiping the hard drive after you back it up and then you're reinstalling Windows?

>> Yep, I wanna wipe the hard drive then reinstall Windows but like in instead of running the programs from the hard drive, I want to install everything.

>> The registry's not gonna mess up.

>> So okay, so if you don't want to keep that, if you just want to wipe the hard drive and reinstall you either have to image it off, wipe the hard drive and then put it back on exactly the way it is.

>> Exactly the way it was.

>> Or you have to reinstall the programs.

>> Yeah, you can't reinstall Windows and then copy an image of the programs. You can't have it both ways, you gotta reinstall everything from scratch or bring everything over on an image; a snapshot of your OS and it's registry and the programs, and of course that will be getting out of date immediately as you continue using your main drive so it's a stale back up, it's a rigid back up.

>> Now one half measure you can do is you could say I'm moving to a new PC but I don't have the other PC hooked up and have Windows store it's moving data and all the registry settings and everything it collects, onto a hard drive, wipe it, reinstall it, then tell the new installation I'm moving from an old PC and all it's data is on this hard drive and move it back on. You'll still have to reinstall a bunch of apps but would keep a lot of your preferences. You just gotta make sure you install those apps before you do the moving back in.

>> Why does that sound a little messy to me?

>> Well it's one way to do it.

>> Yeah, if you want to do it.

>> If you want to keep all those settings, especially if you got preferences.

>> I just know there's gonna be a little exceptions riddle through that.

>> No, I've done that a couple of times.

>> Really?

>> Yeah I did that on this actually, worked fine.

>> That's why you put Subundo on thumb drives.

>> Cut it out! Best of the web but first we got something for robot enthusiasts, and be forewarned, ladies and gentlemen this video does include video of a live beating pig heart. ^m00:27:33 [ music ] ^m00:27:37

>> Hey there I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News dot com, and you're looking at video of me shot on the end of a snake-inspired robot that could one day be used in search and rescue operations.

>> What's nice about this robot is not only can you thread through tightly packed volumes, but you can achieve a variety of locomotion capabilities that other mechanisms can't.

>> Inspired by snakes, Professor Howie Choset's robots are so cool and so mesmerizing to watch.

>> There's certainly no robot in the world that can climb a pole like this. In fact one thing you may have noticed is that the robot gingerly walks to the pole and then climbs up it. It was able to exhibit that behavior transition.

>> Besides climbing around a pole, this snake bot outfitted with a camera, can climb vertically through tubes like a drain pipe.

>> Let's say you want to get vantage points on top of a building for some reason, you can stick this in the drain pipe, it'll go to the top of the building and look out.

>> These bots are all designed for search and rescue and have already been used in disaster training exercises around the world.

>> The idea is, there's this collapsed building and you want to get into this collapsed structure as quickly as possible in order to locate victims because it's very critical in the first 24 to 48 hours, to find people; just finding them really saves their lives, bring food, water, oxygen, that's icing on the cake.

>> Also coming out of Professor Choset's lab at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, are snake bots to help in medicine.

>> This robot here is both rigid and flexible so if you want to have a heart operation for example, instead of cracking the chest and prying your ribs open, you can enter through the subxiphoid process, a quarter inch turn one way, a quarter inch turn another way, and you could perform a whole host of diagnostics and therapeutics on the backside of the heart.

>> For surgery, the robot is shrunk down to 12 millimeters in diameter. Here's video of it operating on a pig's heart.

>> Then with the excised tissue from the backside of the heart, in a completely minimally invasive fashion.

>> Eventually when used on humans, Choset says it will have major health and economic benefits.

>> You'll be able to go home that day or the next day and be back at work by the end of the week, whereas in the past it would take 6 weeks just to recover from your breast bone cracked open.

>> The snake is not the first animal to inspire robots and now joins the gecko and certain insects and fish, that have all lent their unique abilities and design features to modern technology. I'm Kara Tsuboi, CNET News dot com.

>> Does that remind you of a break dancer in some way? [ laughter ]

>> I was gonna say, didn't I see him in the Bronx back in the late 80's? I don't know.

>> Let's do last call, where do you want to go? Let's go with Sean in North Carolina. Hey Sean, welcome to the show, what can we do for you?

>> Hey, now I want to be able to control my iTunes from my cellphone or my PSP.

>> What kind of cellphone do you have?

>> I have a Sprint Katana 2.

>> I'm sorry, I didn't catch it, what do you have?

>> A Sprint Katana 2.

>> Okay. There are a couple of ways you can go. Unofficial Apple web blog has something called iTune my Walkman. If you've got a memory stick or a flash card slot, you can actually download this and control iTunes from the phone that way. A better one probably is life hacker which allows you to remote control iTunes with signal, a shareware Windows and Mac application for remote control of iTunes. So those are the 2 that I would check out.

>> What kind of remote control here? We're talking remote control as in a remote app or remote control like infrared?

>> You're talking about remote app with this one, yeah.

>> Cool.

>> Point your browser to the signal home page and grab the free demo.

>> That's cool.

>> I like it, you're gonna love that one, courtesy of Dr. Merritt.

>> What time is it?

>> It's time for the best of the web. ^m00:31:21 [ music ] ^m00:31:23 Best of the web brought to you by our good friends over at CNET Webware dot com. How many of you out there are Flicker users? Probably all of you. How many of you are Flicker Pro users where you have unlimited access? Probably very few of you. That's where Tiny Album comes in, Webware's loving this thing, it's a simple Flicker like interface that you can see unlimited amounts of photos you can put up there, up to 8 meg per photo; that's the only limitation that they've got, without having to pay a big fee to get in their Go Pro. And the other thing I like about more than Flicker is that it's very simple. Flicker's gotten a little bit bulky and clever and overwrought. This is super simple, there's a real obvious drag and drop. You notice on the bottom here, they have easy links for the different sizes of files; Flicker kind of buries those one layer down. This is really slick, it's Flicker but it's kind of like the way Flicker used to be before it got kind of bulky. So Tiny Album, check it out and there's no fee to put as many photos up there as you want. It's just straight ahead good photo sharing.

>> Alright, next Thursday Jordon Glazier, CEO of Eventful dot com joins us. Eventful's what Jonathan Colton uses to book his gigs.

>> Oh the musician?

>> Musicians put their stuff up here and when enough people say I want you to come to my town.

>> That it makes it worthwhile to go?

>> For concert goers? I like that, okay it's coming up, that'll be next week, don't forget you can call early twelve thirty pm Pacific the phone's open next Thursday, here for CNET Live which begins at 1 Pacific, 4 Eastern.

>> And 10 am Hawaiian.

>> See you then. ^m00:32:48 [ music ] ^m00:32:59

>> You eating enough? You look a little thin. [ laughter ]

>> Yeah, oh that's a very mom question. Yeah.

>> I miss you baby.

>> I miss you too.

>> Love you.

>> Yeah, we love you.

>> We tell everyone about the relief work you're doing you know.

>> Of course you do.

>> Welcome to a network that's bringing countries and families a little closer.

>> It's been awhile now.

>> Cisco, welcome to the human network.