While you were busy back-to-school shopping, robots have been busy colonizing our world. As usual. We’re so glad that your kid has some new pencils, a fly laptop, a new haircut and a trapper keeper, but that ain’t gonna save us from our future. You need to be putting little Timmy into a John Conner bootcamp so he can learn the fine art of killing things with no souls. Well, you can lead a human to water, but you can’t make him think. Here’s some of what we covered over at Botropolis this week:

Simon: A deceptively cute harbinger of doom.

MIT’s Robot Fish: The seas shall run red with blood. Yours and mine.

Robots Kissing: The revolution won’t be televised, but robot kissing will.

Phasma Insect Robot: A swarm of robot locusts will soon block out the sun.

Altec Lansing has released the MIX IMT800 for the iPod and iPhone. It’s designed to resemble a retro boombox and features a built-in Universal Dock, horn-loaded silk dome tweeters, two mid range drivers, a 5.25” side-firing subwoofer, 5.25” tuned passive radiator and integrated digital FM radio.

It even gives you the choice of powering it using AC power or eight D batteries, which will give you some expensive portability. It also includes an LCD tracfor track listings, artist, album, and station, a seven-band graphic equalizer, dual top-mounted auxiliary inputs and a clip-on remote control.

Looking for a reusable bag so that you can be environmentally helpful? These wooden iPod speaker bags from Japanese artist Yoshihiko Satoh are perfect. They function as actual bags and play music from your iPod while they carry your goods to and fro.

They’re available in dark wood or maple and will cost about $335. Sure, that is one expensive iPod dock, but just think of all the geeks you will impress while you’re out and about pumping tunes. Plus you aren’t contributing to still more plastic bags in landfills.

Sony’s DPF-D72N/BQ digital photo frame looks like it was halfheartedly attacked with a bedazzler in order to make it look like one of those fancy cowboy shirts. Swarovski crystals aside, the frame features a 7″ LCD WVGA display at 800 x 480 resolution, 1GB of internal memory and an Auto-Resizing adjustment system that will downsize photos without much image deterioration.

It will accept a wide range of popular memory card formats and also sports a USB port. You’ll also get a calendar, clock and a few different view modes. The Auto Rotation sensor lets you display images in either landscape or portrait mode.

One of the coolest products for digital cameras that I have played with in a long time is the Eye-Fi line of Wi-Fi equipped memory cards. These little SD cards can automatically upload images you take to Facebook without you having to do any work.

Eye-Fi has announced that the manager software has been updated and will allow all Eye-Fi cards to work without any issues with the new Mac OS Snow Leopard. The company is offering its latest SD card, the Eye-Fi Geo for $59 via the Apple store and at other online retailers.

A few years ago the need for network storage really only existed in the business world. Today businesses still need network storage, but many consumers also need network storage devices to hold the glut of digital files the average consumer has today.

Iomega has announced a new high-performance four bay NAS enclosure called the StorCenter ix4-200d. The device is based on the EMS storage technology and offers users up to 8TB of storage space. The device features multiple RAID configurations, remote access and management, and IP security camera support.

At some point every gamer or music fan out there needs a good set of headphones. The gamer needs headphones so they can play without bothering everyone else nearby. The Music fan needs headphones so they can hear all the nuances of their music.

Tritton makes some nice headphones for gaming and music and the company has announced two new sets of headphones for Best Buy called the AX 180 and the AX 720. The AX 720 headphones are Dolby 5.1 surround headphones that work with the Xbox, PS3, and PC for simulated 3D audio.

Kid’s gadgets are getting more and more interesting each holiday season. I know school just started back for most of the country, but manufacturers are already gearing up for holiday sales with the full shopping season only a few months away.

Jakks Pacific has some of the coolest gadgets for kids around. The company offers the EyeClops Mini Projector that connects to a TV to project games and other images on the wall or ceiling. The coolest gadget is the EyeClops Night Vision Goggles.

The Hercules Dualpix HD720p may look huge, but it’s just a close up. Thank god. You wouldn’t want a gargantuan webcam like that in your face. The webcam is HD 720p capable, complete with an autofocus lens and integrated microphone.

It articulates in two different ways, so you can rest assured that you will get yourself in the shot, or show off more things behind you. The 1-megapixel CMOS (1280 x 800) can capture 30fps 720p video, or interpolated pseudo-5MP stills, and it hooks up to your XP/Vista/Windows 7 PC via USB.

HANNspree has unveiled two HF series widescreen LCD monitors: The 20-inch HF207AP and the 23-inch HF237HP. The HF207AP supports a native resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels, along with only two connectivity ports including D-Sub and DVI.

The HF237HP offers a higher resolution at 1920 x 1080 pixels and throws in an extra connectivity port, giving you D-Sub, DVI and HDMI. Both monitors have a 5ms response time, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness and two 1W speakers. Both LCDs feature a high gloss, black mirror finish and curved slim frame.

ViewSonic has introduced a wireless video streamer and a portable SVGA projector. The WPG-350 wireless video streamer can stream 1024 x 768 presentation slides over a Wi-fi network and you can even watch video on a remote VGA device on a remote system.

Next up, the PJD2121 is an advanced ultra-portable DLP projector built with BrillantColor technology that features a 800 x 600 resolution with 400 lumens and a 1,800:1 contrast ratio. The ViewSonic WPG-350 retails for $199 and the ViewSonic PJD2121 retails for $449.

If you have a love of all things grenade, then check out this Grenade USB drive. It measures in at 60mm x 30mm x 30mm and weighs just 15grams. What it lacks in explosives, it makes up for with 4GB of storage space.

The Grenade USB drive is available in black, white, blue and orange and they look totally fake. Of course that doesn’t mean you can safely put them in your luggage and take them to the airport. They frown on all fake weapons.

You can find a vending machine for almost anything these days. We’ve seen our share of strange vending machines, from weird to just practical. We aren’t sure which category this one fits into.

I suppose it would come in handy for the traveler who has soiled his Jeans and has to look presentable in a hurry. It’s from Hamburg based Closed jeans who set up a vending machine in Florence, Italy to test the concept. If it goes well, they will introduce it in train stations across Europe.

BGR has gotten their hands on all the information you really want to know about the Samsung Rogue. So we now have all of the little details and specs that may or may not sway you to go Rogue.

First of all it sports a weird keyboard layout that includes directional keys as well as 6 physical function buttons on the sides. We aren’t sure how you can hold the thing without pushing them. The complete specs are shown in the photo above.

Books. Who needs ‘em in the age of the Kindle? You may as well do something with these relics right? Maybe put a flatbed scanner inside of one for instance. That’s what datamancer did. It’s much cooler than your boring grey scanner or the one attached to your printer.

You can now copy pages from within a book itself. I think the world just imploded and created a separate reality that seems no different, yet is.