The Asus Eee is both Amazon’s best-selling notebook and No. 1 in computers and hardware overall. But it’s also temporarily out of stock. [Amazon via EeeUser]

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This week at TreeHugger: One answer to the question “What can Brown do for you?” is this: deliver your small packages in 100% electric cars in California. Intel’s Penryn chip is sleek, small, and now, green (kinda). Is that good enough to make Penryn now the greenest computer chip in the world?

Epson proudly announced that it has won a 2007 Ecohitech Award for their Epson Stylus Pro 3800 printer. The award is Italy’s most prestigious recognition of environmental achievement by a technology company, and covers hi-tech processes, products, systems and services. Lastly, hop on for a ride on Mercedes’ swanky new folding bike that folds down small enough to fit in something like the trunk of their CLK Cabriolet. In an innovation that seems strikingly sensible, UPS announced that they would begin delivering small packages with small cars in northern California. The UPS branch in Petaluma has leased an initial fleet of 42 ZAP Xebra® electric city cars and trucks for their small parcel deliveries. This is the first time that UPS has used electric city-speed vehicles for this purpose; if it works, it definitely won’t be the last. Intel’s Penryn chip is not really anything particularly new; it is fast, sleek, small, but now, it’s green. Intel released the new chipset last week that caused Intel co-founder Gordon Moore to spout, “These are the biggest transistor advancements in 40 years.” Penryn reduces power leakage which normally manifests itself in a processor unit as heat, with the new hafnium-based chips measuring a mere 45 nanometers each…That doesn’t leave much room for energy loss - making the Penryn, in Intel’s phrase, the “coolest” processor technology to date. Epson proudly announced that it has won a 2007 Ecohitech Award for the Epson Stylus Pro 3800 printer. The award is Italy’s most prestigious recognition of environmental achievement by a technology company, and covers hi-tech processes, products, systems and services. The jury appraisal of Epson’s award, given in the “Energy Saving and CO2 Reduction” category, says, “In comparison with the previous models, the estimated CO2 emissions during the whole product life are reduced by 44% and the amount of the resources used during the production is reduced by 55%.” Now that’s a green printer. The fine minds behind the fine German engineering at Mercedes have been hard at work: not on a fancy new car or stunning new technology, but on this swanky folding bike. Never ones to cut corners, the Mercedes bike includes some slick features like dual suspension and disc brakes that double as the bike’s lock. All that, and it still looks sleek enough to turn the ladies’ heads; after all, a Mercedes is a Mercedes. TreeHugger’s EcoModo column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo.

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Today’s iApp-a-Day brought iPhone users a surprisingly fun game, Air Hockey. This 2-player game takes advantage of the multi-touch display by having the player’s finger control their air hockey mallet. The game can be a bit buggy at times, especially when your mallet goes out of control and hits the puck into a million different directions, but overall it’s an awesome game when you have a partner to play with. To use, iPhone users must jailbreak their phones to get installer.app, which will then allow them to install iApp-a-Day. [Instructions]

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Just as we suspected, Best Buy has been holding out on us with the Black Friday dealios. Top of the list of these Bonus Doorbuster deals is a notebook, a Toshiba A135-7404 for $229 that will also include a Canon all-in-one printer. While all 20 at each Best Buy store are sure to sell out within minutes, don’t get too excited about them, because they’re only packing an Intel Celeron processor, 512MB of RAM and Vista Home Basic. But still, $229? That’s just the beginning. There are lots more Black Friday Bonus Doorbuster deals coming to Best Buy this Friday:

The following items will be available in-store only on Black Friday:

Toshiba A135-S7403 Laptop & Canon 3-in-1 Printer Package $229

Samsung - 40″ 1080p Flat-Panel LCD HDTV & Installation Package $1199

Sony - Cyber-shot 7.2MP Digital Camera - Silver $99.99

LG - 47″ 1080p Flat-Panel LCD HDTV $1999

Hitachi - Ultravision 50″ 1080i Flat-Panel Plasma HDTV $2499

Sharp - 19″ 720p Flat-Panel LCD HDTV $329.99

Hitachi - DVD Camcorder $199.99

Olympus - 8.0MP Digital Camera - Silver $129.99

Seagate - 160GB Internal Ultra ATA/100 Hard Drive $49.99

See the Best Buy site linked below for details.
[Best Buy, via BlackFriday.info and Notebooks.com]

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Tony, a soldier returning from Iraq after a year of active duty, found out that his wife couldn’t wait for some lovin’ while he was gone by checking his Wii. When he confronted her with his friends’ accusations, she claimed that she only kissed another man once. However, after checking his Mii channel for war buddies he discovered a Mii he didn’t create.

When he went through the calendar, he found that his wife and the man had spent several nights together playing Wii bowling. Tony has since separated and filed for divorce.

You gotta feel for the poor guy. He spends all this time serving our country only to come home and see a cartoon character who looks “strikingly similar to [his] wife’s [alleged lover]”. I can only guess what the original phrase was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “Mario Party expert.” [Gamepro]

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So Amazon unveiled its Kindle yesterday. The fancy eBook with “free” EV-DO got a lot of attention and has a lot of people talking about whether or not digital books have a chance of taking on the paper kind. But the Kindle is far from the only eBook out there, naturally, and it’s turned a lot of people off with how it charges you to read blogs, get RSS feeds, and load PDFs on it. In addition, there are some huge advances on the eBook horizon that, when released, will make the Kindle look like it was made in the late ’80s. Lets take a peek at some alternatives to the Kindle that are both available today and will be in the not-too-distant future.

Sony PRS-505 Reader: The Sony Reader is $100 less than the Kindle at $300, and it won’t charge you to load PDFs on it (the Kindle will take a dime for every PDF you allow it to convert to its DRM’d format). It also won’t charge you to read blogs or get your RSS feeds, something else the Kindle nickel and dimes you for. This is probably the Kindle’s biggest opponent, and, to be honest, would be my choice if I actually wanted an eBook (which I don’t).

Bookeen Cybook V3:The Cybook sits between the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle pricewise at $350. Like the other big two, you can load MP3s up on an SD card and rock out to your tunes while you read books on it. It also can handle RSS feeds for you, free of charge.

Fujitsu eBook Demo: This is only a demo so it isn’t available for sale yet, but Fujitsu’s eBook is notable for how light it is. Clocking in at a mere 177g, it’s much lighter than the Sony Reader (255g without the soft cover) and the Amazon Kindle (292g), which makes a difference if you’re gonna carry it around all day. If that’s important to you, maybe it’s worth waiting for this guy to appear.

Seiko eBook Reader: Oh, did I say the Fujitsu was light? Well, it is, but not compared with this beautiful Seiko Reader that comes in at a nearly-immune-from-the-effects-of-gravity 57g. It’s also a mere 3mm thick, making it the thinnest, lightest, and slickest of the selection here today. In addition, it has a crazily-high 1200×1600 resolution on its 6.7-inch screen. This is clearly the sexiest of the bunch, but there are few details on it and my guess is we’ll be waiting a while for it. Patience is a virtue.

LG Philips Flexible eBook: This conceptual eBook from LG Philips features one thing that no other eBook does: flexibility. Yep, that characteristic of paperback books that we’re all so used to feels conspicuously missing from these technological updates to the medium, it’s sure to make the transition from dead trees to synthetics a little easier. This is more an e-paper display than an eBook at the moment, what with its 14.1-inch form factor way bigger than you’d want an eBook, but it’s an example of what we have to look forward to in the future.

So what conclusion can we draw from all these products? Well, it seems like there’s a lot of research and work being done in the eBook, eInk, and ePaper fields at the moment, which should mean that newer, better, and cheaper products will be coming pretty frequently. That means you early adopters might feel stuck with the $400 Kindle in six months when another eBook comes out with a better screen, free RSS feeds and weighing half as much drops for the same price.

And if you’re planning to use your eBook to import a bunch of your own documents and use it to read a lot of material downloaded from the web, the Kindle doesn’t seem like a great option due to the charges for doing pretty much everything on it.

But if you just want something to read books on (presumably books you’ll download from Amazon), the Kindle seems like a good, albeit an expensive, choice. Just know that your Kindle won’t be the hottest eBook on the block for long.

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The Writers Guild strike already stripped us of our Daily Show and Colbert Report, and now it may take away Heroes and House as well. Looking to escape Reality TV hell? We’ve painstakingly reviewed three free (and mostly legal) video services—Joost, Miro and Hulu—for your faux-TV enjoyment during these dark times.

The Contenders:
Hulu: NBC Universal/News Corp.’s mutant is a sandbox-y YouTube for their properties. Joost: Streaming P2P service from Kazaa/Skype founders that wants oh so badly to be real TV. It’s got deals with Viacom and other name players—News Corp.’s rumored to be at the table as well. Miro: Open-source Cory Doctorow-anointed Joost-slayer. You download, rather than stream. It uses RSS-based channels and BitTorrent for its P2P workings.How They Look (and Feel):
Joost’s translucent black interface wins hands down in the Slickness Dept., and its channel grid layout is the standout of the three. One issue is that player controls disappear when you’re going through channels or shows, so you can’t mute or pause a video playing in the background while surfing. But in terms of intuitiveness, on Joost, it’s naturally apparent how to click around then start watching shows. (The “oh no, we can’t play this now” error message assailed me more than a couple of times, showing there are still some P2P kinks to work out.)
Miro is more powerful for tweakers and creators, which contributes to it being less straightforward. It’s not immediately obvious how you start watching stuff. Since its channels are RSS-based, you have to subscribe to them first, and then pick episodes to download. I should add, the best (though perhaps non-legal) content might require you to hunt outside Miro’s interface for a torrent. Miro’s the least flashy, using a modified browser scheme that takes longer to zoom through than Joost or Hulu, which is a problem when it overwhelmingly features the most content.
Hulu’s good for a browser-based streaming player, as I’ve said, with a clean, mostly easy-to-navigate system.

In the end, no one’s really nailed the content organization bit. None of them are bad, but they don’t make surfing for new stuff particularly intuitive or fun. It can be a chore, and sometimes it feels like a long one.

Ads, I mean uh, “Revenue Model”:
Miro is blissfully ad-free, but the other two are not. Joost’s bumper ads are quick and not overly annoying. The ones that occasionally interrupt shows without rhyme or reason, however, are too long and randomly timed. They’ll drive your head into your monitor. Hulu’s gotten worse since its debut week, where I saw a single 30-second clip per 40-minute show. Watching Heroes the other night, I got slammed with an ad at each of the dots in the timeline.

The Meat:
Joost has 356 total “channels,” though some aren’t channels in the traditional sense. There’s stuff from MTV, Comedy Central, Adult Swim, CBS, Warner Music, as well as channels of CSI, Happy Tree Friends, Transformers and GI Joe. There’s offbeat stuff, too, like the Really Terrible Film channel. Used within legal boundaries, Miro lacks solid mainstream content. Comedy Central’s “channels” are stand-up clips and web shows only, and Adult Swim just contains their video podcasts. But Miro boasts 2,756 channels, with everything from “Ask a Ninja” and National Geographic to NASA and Wired Science. But yes, you can start your own channel—all it takes is a torrent and a dream.

Hulu’s the slimmest, but it has the most recent episodes of the best shows: House, Battlestar Galactica and any other popular shows from NBC Universal and News Corp., like SNL, The Office or Family Guy. There’s no indie or offbeat content whatsoever—it’s a totally corporate venture.

Across the board, scattershot content is still a major issue. Joost has a Comedy Central channel but no South Park or Chapelle’s Show. Miro’s kind of defined by being whatever from whoever. Hulu’s trimmer offerings at least have an internal logic, with the newest five or six episodes of current shows available, and full seasons of past shows like Buffy.

What You Now Know:
No matter what service you pick, you won’t find everything you want, thanks in part to corporate hang-ups and in part to the primitiveness of these early stages. They’re maddeningly incomplete, like a crappy library in a rural town. Joost is probably your best bet in terms of quantity and quality, with Miro working better if you want a ton of new programming but don’t care about corporate quality. And if you want Battlestar, well, the choice will be made for you. [Joost, Miro, Hulu, Flickr]

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Instructables has a neat if dangerous tutorial on how to quickly make a key copy by tracing the metal from a Coke can. It’s pretty obvious, and with that seed planted in your mind, there’s probably no need to read the instructions.

Let me go one step further and remind you that you can copy a key for like two bucks at the hardware store, and that combining scissors, a key, and the edge of a shiv of aluminum can, this tutorial might as well be titled “How to lose a finger.” Also, entering someone’s home with a key copy is probably still considered unlawful entry, regardless of the lack of shattered door frame. Having said that, I will try this later and let you know how it goes. [Instructables]

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The Register is reporting that according to a manager at Spain’s Telefonica cell carrier, Apple has plans to drop a sexy 3G iPhone on the world in May. Translated from the Spanish, the exact quote from the manager is: “OMG OMG iPhone OMG 3G OMG Apple May Rumors OMG!!!” OK, not really. Here’s the real quote:

When iPhone will be launched in Spain?
Telefonica expects it on May.

Will Telefonica release a 3G iPhone version on May?
Yes! They expect it.

Take this with a grain of salt the size of your fist, but the timing does seem to make sense, coming about a year after the first generation. What else do you think iPhone 2 will have, other than the obvious boost in HD size? [Sevenclick via Register]

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You don’t need a snorkel with a bone-conducting speaker that receives audio from a base headset. But it’s interesting to know they make gear like this.

The set comes with seven radio equipped snorkels, with antennas in the 40.68MHz range that extend out of the water via the breathe tube. The base station can send a signal to unlimited snorkel receivers, has a range of 260 feet and has an input jack for routing tunes or whatever. List of applications: Water polo, SEAL training, synchronized swimming, killer pods of military dolphins. [AMS]

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