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Could the end of the next-gen optical format war be on the horizon? While you wait for the shakedown, why not tune in some ambient color for your TV? Plus, organizing meetups with your 700+ Facebook friends, 800 IM contacts and your five real friends isn't an easy task, and we found one service that aims to annoy everyone equally. Lastly, we send Mark the intern out into the streets to see if New Yorkers are scared their workplace computer habits could get them fired. That and more, on today's episode of The Queue.

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Josh's iTunes Album Art Grabber is a pretty good resource for those of us who like getting their album art from one place. It's not perfect, but it's simple in both form and function, despite being tied to the iTunes Store at the same time it helps users free themselves from it.

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Being art lovers ourselves, we appreciate LaCie's attention to aesthetics in some of its latest products. After all, it's not easy to make a hard drive look like something that belongs ni a museum.

That's exactly what it did last week with the debut of its "Golden Disk," by French designer Ora-Ito. In our humble opinion, however, its second attempt isn't quite so successful: The "Little Disk" from designer Sam Hecht does sport a glossy finish but, aside from its removable cap, it looks pretty much like a dark-chocolate box.

The portable … Read more

Perhaps we should have seen this coming. As The Times reports, Electronic Arts has announced that it's going to start giving its games away...for free. What's the catch? It turns out that people spend more on the accoutrements of gaming, given the chance, than on the game itself.

Astute readers will immediately have seen the link to open-source software.

Back to the announcement:… Read more

Do you eat ice cream when you're sad? I sure do. When I saw that my nasty co-worker Tim Moynihan had pitted the Beer-Launching Fridge against Keepon the Dancing Robot in his artificial intelligence showdown, I got totally emo because I had no idea who to vote for. Then I bought myself a pint of Phish Food and ate it for breakfast with a side of Kleenex, sunny side down.

But technology is always making our lives easier, and here's a gadget that can help me figure out just how much self-pity eating I'll need to do … Read more

Just for the record, turntables aren't the only types of audio equipment that occasionally resemble heavy machinery. It's just hard to resist singling them out when systems start to approach $1 million.

The latest example of industrial chic is the "Eagle Neo-Retro CD Player," whose prosaic name really doesn't do justice to its unique design. We would expect no less from the site of Art Lebedev Studio, the Russian design house that's been a darling among technophiles for such groundbreaking innovations as its "Optimus" and "Upravlator" keyboards.

The turntable is … Read more

Hint: It's not a kitchen appliance. Another hint: It's not military equipment. And it's not both.

If you guessed turntable, you're either a true audio aficionado or a cheater. We thought it was some kind of high-tech meat slicer.

Modestly dubbed the "Work of Art" by Basis Audio, the player in question boasts a list of technical specs as long as long as the title track of "Layla" by Derek and the Dominoes. Among its many attributes is an anti-vibrational technology called a "Resonance Annihilator," which makes us think that … Read more

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has few qualms about exploiting the behavior of nonhumans. For one of his projects, presented last year, he choreographed a ballet danced by honeybees. For his latest project--video pornography for plants--he has gone even farther off-species and, many would say, farther still off the deep end.

Keats calls the genre Cinema Botanica and billed its gallery premiere, scheduled for September 10 at the 1078 Gallery, in Chico, Calif., as the "world's first porn theater for house plants." The logic behind the project, which now includes a trailer on YouTube showing plants being pollinated, … Read more

When Power Downloader received an e-mail from an artist friend recently, he wondered what he could do to help. Though Power knows a lot about software, he never had the type of talent needed to create art. His artist friend told Power that his work was going great, but that he was at an impasse. He wanted to get into the world of advanced 3D drawing and animation, but all of the software in the category was too expensive. That's when Power Downloader knew his friend was asking the right person.… Read more