It’s no coincidence that there’s a new Trek movie just as Dream Cheeky will be releasing a USB VoIP/Skype phone in the form of geek gold: A replica of the communicators used on the original Star Trek TV series.

The phone is compatible with XP, Vista and OS X Tiger or greater, and you’ll get speakerphone, mute and volume control functions, plus the usual Star Trek sounds. Stuff like, “Transporter room ready to beam up”. It’s due out in April, but we don’t have any pricing info yet. Should be affordable though.

This 2GB thumb drive is encased in White Oak. It’s basically a Jenga game piece with tiny little Post-It Notes glued on. It may not look like much, but at least it combines two items that take up room on your desk into one device.

The only problem is that when the Post-It notes run out, you’re stuck with a wooden flash drive that somehow finds it’s way into the Jenga box to mingle with all the other pieces, only to be lost forever since no one plays that stupid game. The notes, being an odd size can’t be replaced easily. All for $30.

If you are too young to drink or simply don’t drink you might not realize that the Guinness Book of World Records was started by the managing director of the Guinness Brewery. The first edition of the book was bound in August 27, 1955 and came from an idea stemming from an argument over which game bird was the fastest.

Today the Guinness Book of World Records covers a litany of records and has spawned a version just for gamers. A 14-year-old boy named Danny Johnson from Texas has grabbed the record for “Highest Score on a Single Song on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.” The teen scored a whopping 973,954 points on the singe track.

In an effort to make one console appeal to gamers more than the competition, console makers like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are adding new features. With the global economy down the console makers are also adding features to make gaming systems perform tasks outside of gaming to broaden their appeal.

One such feature was the addition of Netflix streaming capability to the Xbox 360. The Netflix application was made available for Netflix and Xbox Live Gold customers in November of 2008. In the roughly three months since the Netflix application was made available Microsoft says that over a million Xbox 360 owners have installed and activated the Netflix application.

There are many uses today for hard drives optimized for storing and streaming video files. Uses for this type of drive include DVRs, video work stations, and video surveillance applications. Hitachi has announced its latest video centric drive that is added to its CinemaStar line.

The new drive is called the CinemaStar C5K500 and is a 2.5-inch drive offering a maximum capacity of 500GB. The small drive is designed for silent operation, cool running, and low power usage. The rotational speed of the drive is 5400 rpm and is uses Hitachi SmoothStream technology to enhance digital video streaming applications.

When many consumers start to move from the world of point-and-shoot cameras into the DSLR realm, they look for some of the most cost effective cameras for their first foray. Pentax has long made some of the cheaper DSLRs you can get including a couple models in its K-series.

Pentax has announced price cuts for its K20D and K2000 DSLR cameras. Pentax is offering shoppers looking for the K20D a $100 in store instant rebate that is good on either the K20D body only or the K20D body and lens kit. Also offered on the K20D is a three year warranty rather than the one year standard. The offers are good through the 22 of this month.

Slacker has announced a version of it’s free internet radio app for the smartphone, with 100 expert-programmed Slacker stations, over 10,000 artist stations or tons of custom stations. You can even listen to music without a network connection using Slacker’s station caching, which is exclusive to BlackBerry devices

It lets you store your favorite stations on a memory card instead of streaming them over the network connection you’re using. That way you have access to them even when there’s no signal. Slacker claims that it will also reduce battery consumption by as much as 5x.

Check out this great innovation in the world of packaging. Shown at the Nepcon world expo in Japan, a company named Sealedair demonstrated the ‘Pack in instance’ packing system. It looks like a perfect way to pack delicate items for shipment and it can be used no matter what product or box size you’re working with.

Just insert the packing material, inject the gel and you have a perfect mold of the object where it rests comfortably. It may just be the future of packing materials. I assume the real trick would be to make it cheap enough to be affordable to use.

Now here’s an entertaining 8 minute video that will have you thanking god you didn’t work for the big N in 1991. I can’t imagine being made to actually watch this stuff because it was my job. It’s a customer service training video that shows employees how to handle all kinds of customers who want to return merchandise and also happen to be stereotypes.

You’ll see a bald dude try to get his money back for an NES that’s encrusted all over with some sort of mega-funk that makes it stick to the employee’s hands, a nerd that can’t work a gameboy and some nice lady who learns how to plug the controller into port 1 and likes to bake pies as thank you currency.

You want to be a Guitar Hero, but you don’t know any songs. Just attach this Maestro device onto your guitar, load a music file of the song you want to learn and it will point out the frets you need to hit, using lasers. As any rock god will tell you, guitars and lasers are an awesome combination.

But just be warned, if you suck, no amount of lasers are going to stop you from sucking. You still have to strum and finger the frets. But it does seem like a great way for guitar players to learn songs quickly. If this concept ever gets made, it would probably do really well.

Since the very dawn of pizza, when it’s mighty cooked aroma filled the air for the first time, the pizza cutter hasn’t changed much. But now some genius, and I’m not being sarcastic, has come up with the ultimate pizza cutting tool.

It’s the manliest, most hardcore pizza cutter ever. And though it won’t rev up like a real saw and cut both your pizza and the counter-top beneath, you will find yourself mimicking the powerful sound of the saw as you slice and dice and accidentally cut it into a million pieces due to fun overload.

So, what can we take away from this image? I think it says that hot women love ridiculous gadgets. In pink. Shaped like a Flipper. I think we can also safely say, judging by this image that, should a woman slide her phone into a flipper shaped case, cleavage will follow.

If you hit the link, you’ll see some more hot women who worship the stupidest phone case ever, as well as some happy looking douche that looks like he should be on the beach trying to bum some money off you. Oh, and there’s also a shot of this thing hanging from your belt loop and looking oh so hip.

I know you’ve been waiting with bated breath on the 17-inch MacBook Pro. Sadly, it’s now delayed until at least February 19th. Apple is emailing all of it’s pre-order customers, “wrapping up the new 17-inch MacBook Pro is taking a few days longer than we projected,” and they say that orders won’t ship for another two weeks.

It must take some special time consuming busy-work to keep that sealed battery in place. Maybe they’re just taking a two week break in preparation for a busy time down the road, when all those MacBooks come back needing new batteries.

If your iPod is out of room and you don’t want to do the necessary surgery on it yourself to upgrade the hard drive, some pros are now ready to do it for you. Rapid Repair just announced the first 240GB iPod upgrade, which is available for all original iPod Video models.

They can replace your hard drive with a Toshiba MK2431GAH 240GB 8-mm hard drive, which gives your old iPod double the current iPod classic’s space. Apparently, they’ll do it for the iPod Classic and Zune 2G too. There’s no price listed yet, but since they’ll charge you $189.99 for a 120GB Samsung SpinPoint N2 hard drive, you can do the math.

Yesterday we took a look at LG’s somewhat familiar Arena KM900 phone, and now more details are available, though LG is still keeping a few things to themselves.

Looks like this one will feature GSM/UMTS/HSDPA connectivity, a high-resolution 3-inch 800×480 touchscreen display and mobile TV. Apparently the phone measures only 11.5mm thick, just a tad slimmer than the iPhone. Folks in Europe may get it as soon as next month from T-Mobile Germany. Stay tuned for more on this one.