Every time I rip a CD and wait for the painstaking process to be done (listening to the horrific grinding spinning noise the whole time), I think about how many CDs I’ve collected over the years and conclude that I’ll probably be listening to CDs even when everyone else has all their music stored on holographic jewels around their necks (-_-;). Digital storage offers so many advantages, but unless you’re a real young’un, you likely have much of your music collection stored in boxes, not a hard drive. There are actually services available for people who want to have someone else transfer their entire music collections in one go (and who don’t want to spend a weekend in a ripping frenzy) but they’re expensive. RipDigital, probably the best known of these companies, charges $199 for 200 CDs, enough to buy you 199 brand-new iTunes tracks.

Of course, those guys at RipDigital don’t have employees sitting there ripping each CD one by one; they’ve got the big honking machines that you throw a whole box of CDs into which spit out mp3s. The large capacity rippers tended to be prohibitively expensive for home use, not to mention being bigger than my washing machine, but a new one, the Pico MP3 ripper, weighs just 6.5 lbs. and costs $699. Yes, you could get about 700 CDs converted by RipDigital for you for that much, but the Pico will let you start your own neighborhood or family racket, letting you rip 25 CDs in a go, totally hands-free. The Pico will rip into mp3, wav, aiff, or flac files, and will retrieve all your CD track information from CDDB just like an application like iTunes will do.

The Pico is also a disc duplicator, so you can make up to 12 CDs or 6 DVDs an hour, a big advantage if you’re the type who likes to share the “wealth” when you’ve compiled all your home movies onto DVD.

The Pico super-duper drive connects through USB 2.0, and rips right into any home computer. The $699 price includes 50 blank recordable DVDs and a lifetime discount on Disk Makers other compatible blank media.

Sony released a new firmware update for the Sony PSP in Japan and the United States.

The new Sony PSP Firmware 2.80 improves over the Firmware 2.71 with Video RSS Feeds, AAC music format (3gp) support, Music, Video and Picture folders, and wireless feature improvement for the Location Free Video streaming support, and of course new fixes against homebrew hacks (-_-;)…Sony just wont give up.

Sony also released another demo Game download for the Sony PSP. This time it is a World Tour Soccer 06 demo.

More details and download for firmware 2.80 can be found on the Sony Playstation site.

Mitsubishi Electric has completed construction of the world’s largest high-definition video screen at a horse track in Tokyo. The screen employs Mitsubishi’s Aurora Vision LED technology and measures 11.2 meters (37 feet) x 66.4 meters (218 feet), giving it a surface area of 744 square meters (8,000+ square feet), or the equivalent of 3 tennis courts. Mitsubishi manufactured the screen for the Japan Racing Association (JRA) at its Nagasaki factory in the town of Togitsu, Nagasaki prefecture. The screen was divided into 35 pieces for delivery to the Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchu, Tokyo.

The bright, high-definition display is 3 times larger than what was previously installed at the horse track, and the screen’s three sections allow the audience to take in the action at other tracks. Total cost is reported to be 3.2 billion yen (US$28 million).

The video shows a girl sprinting from one end of the 2,651-inch monster to the other (in 12.8 seconds). You’d have to stack 1,550 32-inch TVs to match the size of this screen.

Get lost? Do you? Well, a bright young designer from the U.K is developing a system that will have tag and name exactly what your staring at. Google Vision is a conceptual product developed by Callum Peden, for the worlds favorite search engine. The product provides the user with a truly unique information hub by combining GPS, OLED technology and advanced image recognition in the form of a retractable screen device.