Panasonic’s cute battery-lovin’ mascot is at it again. Last time, he was showing off his abilities by scaling a Grand Canyon cliff. Now EVOLTA is back and he’s still all about breaking records and the hearts of fan-girls everywhere. This time he will be riding a mini tricycle in order to set a world record for distance traveled by a robot.

We’re rooting for the little guy, but we aren’t so sure he is gonna make it. I mean EVOLTA isn’t exactly fast is he? The bot does have some upgrades from his previous version however. He can ride a bike and follow an infrared path set up by his human handlers.

LaCie just updated their LaCinema HD media streamer lineup with the new Play and Record models. The former can playback media while the latter can also function as an HD DVR. Both are wireless and can stream 1080p media from the network to your TV and upscale standard def movies to 1080i.

They come with either 500GB or 1TB of internal storage. The Record has added DVR capability for anyone looking to get rid of the set top box entirely. Looks like prices will start at $430.

Check out this sexy looking automatic turntable from Denon. Available in silver or black, the DP-200USB comes equipped with a USB port and an integrated MP3 encoder that will allow you to transfer all of your vinyl collection to MP3 audio tracks without using a computer.

It’s pretty easy to use. Just need to push a button and it does the rest. The Trans Music Convertor will create MP3 files in 192kbps quality and the Gracenote metadata services will add info to your files. It will cost you about £199.99.

The economic crisis has taken it’s toll on many industries, but not Netflix. Consumers are happy to sit on their butts and escape through a goods movie. The streaming and mailing movie rental company is doing just fine. They closed 2008 with 9.4 million customers and today they announced that they’ve broken the 10 million mark.

The company has added 600,000 net subscribers since January 1st alone. It’s likely only going to go up as customers choose their service over theater tickets or going out on the town to eat.

Let’s say you still have a huge library of cassette tapes for some reason. Maybe you just hate to part with them. Maybe you’re cheap and treat yard sales like your own private iTunes. Whatever. Here’s a quick way to digitize those old tapes into MP3 formats.

It’s the TapeLink from Alesis. The recorder will do more then just make a copy. It will virtually remove all hissing or other abnormalities in sound quality and convert them to MP3’s. Just plug it into the USB cable on your Mac or PC and you’re good to go. The bundled EZ Tape Converter makes transfer easy and convenient. The files can then be retrieved via USB on your computer to store on any device you want.

Imagine how many times great musicians have lost masterpieces just because they didn’t have a way to document it. That’s where the iDea guitar from Ovation comes in. It’s the first guitar to feature a built-in MP3 player for just such occasions. There isn’t much info on specs, but it probably has a decent amount of flash storage so you can record anything on a whim. It features a control panel on the side with an LCD display, mic input and a USB connection. It also has an easy to use 4-way controller for menu navigation. If that’s not enough, you get a set of basic EQ sliders for the bass, mid and treb.

It will let you record the guitar, mic or anything else that’s connected to the aux in jack. You can even mix those features together or use the pitch-stable variable speed playback option to slow things down for practice.

In what could be the first step toward recording your dreams, researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor. That means it won’t be long before you can share your thoughts and dreams with others the way you share your flickr pics. They’ve successfully displayed simple images produced in the human brain on a computer screen.

The device converts electrical signals sent to the visual cortex into images that can be viewed on a computer screen. In the experiment, they showed test subjects the six letters in the word neuron and successfully reconstructed the word on screen by measuring brain activity. So, is this awesome or scary as hell? I vote scary.

Just look at that robot face on the Brionvega RR226. Who wouldn’t be charmed by that retro 60s ‘design? Both the RR226 and its 1965 counterpart, the Radiofonografo RR126, earned the nickname “musical component robots” due to that face, with it’s dials and speakers.

But it isn’t all about looks. Brionvega is known for creating superior decks with quality components. This one is no exception, combining a phonograph, radio, record player and a CD/DVD drive. In fact, the new model looks like a copy of the original, aside from the inclusion of the CD and DVD drive. No word on price yet, but we probably can’t afford it anyway.

Imagine yourself a modern day Mozart. The only place you can clear your mind is out in the wilderness somewhere. You have the beginnings of a masterpiece in your head, but the problem is you have nothing to jot it down on. If you had the Compose Music Tablet, you could take it anywhere and get it all down. It’s only a concept for now, but surely creative types would be willing to pay for the convenience.

The pen is also a mic that you can sing into and then dock in the tablet to hear what you’ve got. You can also write music directly on the display and it holds a built-in library of classic tracks for the entire orchestra. Before you know it, you’ll be singing in a venue other then your shower.

The Iocell Contents Phone looks pretty cool, but it has a big mouth, like that one friend of yours. It doesn’t keep things to itself, since it contains within it a hard disk which can be used for sending your conversations anywhere on the web.

Sure, it has an awesome look and will give you music on hold, record your conversations and play background music while you talk, but just remember, even if you don’t own one, the person you’re talking to might own one. In other words, be careful what you say from now on. Good looking phones are looking to snitch on you to the internets and hang you out to dry. From now on I’m just saying yeah, uh-huh and bye.

Here’s a cool repurposing idea. It’s not very environmentally friendly, but it’s still awesome. You can reuse CDs as records. A guy named Aleks Kolkowski was at the UK’s Futuresonic festival last week and he brought his vintage record-cutting machine to carve sound tracks into old CDs and DVDs.

All people needed to do was bring an old disc and a sound file and he’d “overwrite” the CD with a track that can be played on a turntable. Pretty cool. Kinda pointless, sure, but it gives old turntables something to do.

Here’s an useful gadget. It’s a radio with a removable MP3 player. With this device you can record content from the radio so you can listen to it from wherever and whenever you want. This should come in handy for fans of talk and AM radio.

Of course, similar devices for satellite radio already exist, and it does seem a bit odd that the MP3 player doesn’t include an FM tuner of its own, but it is what it is. An MP3 player docking in a radio mothership.