We’re not sure if these new fire-retardant covers are meant to protect nearby objects in the event of battery explosion, or if they’re meant to protect the MacBook from thermal disaster in its surrounding environment — but either way, they’re a pretty stylish new necessity. Wrappers, a British retailer, is now selling jumbocord covers made from graphite granules embedded in the supposed contract-quality corduroy that has passed a “100,000 wear and tear rub test” — which we really hope doesn’t mean it was ubbed 100,000 times by a person. MacBook sleeves are £19.50 ($36) including worldwide shipping, and can be embroidered with initials for an additional three quid ($5.63). Regardless of whether or not your order one, we think that Korean Air, Qantas and Virgin should get in touch with Wrappers to make some airplane-friendly fire-retardant sleeves for the type of computers that have a better chance of actually exploding.

[Via Laptop]
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Privacy types are just going to love this one. Major studios, including Warner, Disney and Fox, are prepping to start embedding RFID chips in every DVD produced, enabling them to track the disc from the factory to the store to your home. The chipped DVDs will then be examined by your home DVD player to make sure you’re not trying to do anything fun like playing the movie in an incorrect geographical region, or running a copied disc. While they’re starting out with DVD movies, it seems the proprietors of the tech are hoping to squeeze the chips into HD DVD, Blu-ray and any other medium in need of some copy protection. “This technology holds the potential to protect the intellectual property of music companies, film studios, gaming and software developers worldwide,” sez Gordon Yeh, CEO of Ritek, whose U-Tech subsidiary is all prepped to start making the discs in Taiwan. Once all the manufacturing kinks are worked out, U-Tech will work with the studios for a test roll-out in Australia. Of course, to make any of this relevant, new DVD players will be required, but we’re not clear if the discs will play as normal on non-RFID players. So, we’re still short on deets, and there’s no real word on when we can expect any of this to show up on Wal-Mart shelves, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start running around frantically and start decrying the end of our civilisation, for it is indeed at hand.

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To the audiophile set, McIntosh should need no introduction, since they’ve been raiding pocket books and delighting listeners for about 55 years now. Today it seems they’re bringing both their attention to quality and hefty pricetags over to the home theater space, since they just busted out a 1080p DLP projector at CEDIA, along with a whole lotta HD processing power. While the new MDLP1 projector does its 1080p thing, it’s accompanied by the VP1000 processor that includes dual scalers, 4 HDMI ports, 6 component plugs, and other lovable ports and specs. Of course, all this McIntosh action comes at a cost: the projector is in the $30k+ range, while the processor squeezes by for a cool 16 grand. We suppose they didn’t get the “1080p is cheap now” memo that’s being passed around CEDIA. Quite unfortunate.

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While there’s definitely no shortage of watches that serve a greater purpose than merely telling time, Jeonjun Cho, a sophomore at Kyungki University in Korea, has developed a timepiece that does nothing more than display the current time to the blind. His braille clock collection has both aesthetes and utilitiarians covered, as the sleek silver finish makes for a snazzy piece of 2001-esque jewelry, and the solar-powered braille ticker allows the blind to check the time without consulting their RFID-enabled robot tagalong. The necklace and watch each share the same readout, which is composed of simple “dots, lines, and planes,” all basic factors of creating braille numbers. So if you’ve got a visually impaired pal who hasn’t picked up a talking cellphone to keep him / her on schedule, these fashionable timepieces could be just the thing to keep things on track.

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If you thought the bevy of Merom-based laptops coming at you had finally stalled, well, maybe it has — but HP Compaq’s tc4000 tablet PC has arrived (albeit fashionably late) with spec-bumped innards that include an Intel Core Duo 1.83GHz T5600 processor. Aside from the Merom boost, this convertible also packs 512MB of DDR2 RAM, a 12.1-inch XGA display, 5,400RPM 80GB hard drive, 56k modem, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g, biometric fingerprint sensor, and a 6-cell battery. It comes fully prepared for that stylus abuse thanks to the included Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005, and sports the usual complement of ports: VGA out, S-Video out, microphone in, headphone jack, IR, and a trio of USB 2.0 connectors. If you’ve somehow held out on those Merom-powered laptops and just can’t resist the allure of taking notes on an LCD, the tc4400 is available now for $1,479.

[Via Laptoping]
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Mobility Electronics has launched the latest in its line of Stowaway portable keyboards under its Think Outside brand, the Bluetooth-based Stowaway Sierra. Ok, so it’s not quite as catchily-named as the Stowaway Shasta, but it does look to be a fair bit more versatile, compatible with Windows Mobile 5, Pocket PC, Palm and Symbian-based devices (with Bluetooth, of course), as well as Windows XP and Mac OS X, for anyone that finds their full-size desktop keyboard a little too comfortable. Unlike some portable keyboards, the Stowaway Sierra packs decently-sized 19mm keys, including dedicated numeric keys and shortcut keys for your smartphone, PDA, or Windows XP — yet it still manages to fold up into pocketable (depending on the pocket) 5.0 x 3.5 x 0.9-inch package. You can snag this one now for $129.99.

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