Playaway, the world’s 1st digital audiobook bundled with a player. Simply purchase off the shelf and listen on the go, no external player needed. I’m going to crack one of these open once I spot them, I’m not really too excited about a DRM’ed locked up device that you can’t get the audio content off of. If you want to listen to two books, you’ll need to buy 2 devices. But, I’ll give it a go. Link.

nLite is a GUI for permanent Windows component removal by your choice. After removal there is an option to make bootable image ready for burning on cd or testing in virtual machines. With nLite you will be able to have Windows installation which on install doesn’t include, or even contain on cd, unwanted components. Link.

Weather Maps lets you view real time weather information on a map. Most of the data comes from personal weather stations that are run from homes and schools. Weather Underground and Weather Bug are two of the major sites that compile this data. Incorporates webcams as well. [via] Link.

The Ultimate Portable Studio by Gina Fant-Saez — If you’re a musician, producer, engineer, or songwriter who wants to set up a professional, laptop-based recording studio, here’s all the information you need. Wow, this makes my podzilla recorder look really dinky. Link.

Great resource of pinouts. This is a collection of pinouts that I’ve gathered over the years and umpteen hours of buzzing out cables. Since others are bound to find some of this information useful, I’ve cleaned it up and html-ized it, but hopefully in a non-obtrusive way so that it is still useable from an 80-column dumb terminal. Link.

Here’s another way to peek under the cap to see if you could win as opposed to the tilt method. What’s the trick? REFLECTION. Get a flashlight, tilt the bottle slightly, and use the surface of the soda as a mirror! If and when the soda folks give away a trip to space via a bottle cap promotion, I’m going to have to do this. [via] Link.

Crude oil and gasoline prices are near an all-time high. But don’t despair. One scientist has found an alternative source of energy: pig manure. Yuanhui Zhang, an agricultural engineering professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, has succeeded in turning small batches of hog waste into oil. Seems like people waste could work too. Link.