Your Roku box just got a whole lot more interesting. Roku, if you remember, makes the Roku player, a small device that sits next to your TV and plays Netflix, Amazon Video, and MLB selections. Roku has just added ten new channels to that line-up and built a fascinating platform for adding more down the line.

The current channels will include: blip.tv, Facebook Photos, Flickr, FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, Motionbox, Pandora, Revision3 and TWiT. More channels will be available here shortly.

It’s… a self-rolling ball
Customized streetmap clocks from FluidForms
USB-powered Alien figure with illuminated tongue

If you ever sit next to me on a plane you will notice that I have a small ritual that I prepare every time I reach cruising altitude. I begin by pulling out my iPod touch and then my Movie Wedge. The Movie Wedge is a little bean bag with a lip for holding up MP3 and video players. That’s it. It’s amazingly great.

We talked about the Movie Wedge a while back and we’re happy to report that they’ve decided to give us 10 to give away to all and sundry.

Good afternoon, readers! What does Santa have in his bag for you today? Interestingly enough, he was unable to bring his bag because this printer is far too big for it. We present, for your inspection, the Kodak 5250 all-in-one: a scanning, printing, faxing, photofinishing machine that can best the big boys in the printer race.

Best of all, the 5250 has built-in WiFi so you can stick the printer on your network and print from any computer in the house. Take a look at Kodak’s 5250 product page and then click through to figure out how to win.

Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.

I’m teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We’ll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.

Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the Wii-holder. The Charge Base IC is a $34.99 induction charging device for Wiimotes and looks like something out of a Frank Lloyd Wright sketchbook. The base sits firmly on the ground while sweeping cantilevered arms reach out to cradle your Wiimotes with magnets. It’s almost graceful, this amalgamation of clear and white plastic, the glorious sense of weightlessness, the architectural stability with just a touch of grandeur.

But darn it if the lights on this thing aren’t too bright.

Velcome, darling! Look what we have for you! Sergey Brin wearing VFF KSOs, CrunchGear’s favorite – as Greg calls them – “crazy monkey shoes.” He wore them to the ChromeOS event and Michael took a few candid shots of him. I’m personally a VFF convert and I’m very impressed that Sergey is willing to walk around in these.

Embiggen after the jump.

While you won’t be able to sense it at first, expect to feel a high frequency buzz from the direction of Redmond in the next few months. That’s the Windows 7 and Office group fearing the rise of a new juggernaut on low-cost computing hardware, ChromeOS.

ChromeOS may not be powerful, it may not play Far Cry and it may not run Microsoft Office but it’s a game changer. The underpowered laptops that limped along under Vista, XP, or 7 will fly under a new ChromeOS regime and thin-and-light laptops will fall below the vaunted $199 mark as the so-called “Microsoft Tax” – basically the small cost manufacturers pay for OEM licenses – disappears.

In the end, everything will have an app store. Take the Pulse smartpen from Livescribe, for example. The company, whose pen is quite cool (it records what you write and can “remember” things on page, allowing for paper-based calculators and control panels), has just launched an app store for its 2- and 4GB Pulse pens.

The store offers multiple games, tools, and study aids for prices that range from free to about $2. You can download apps here and then upload to your pen.

I’ve suffered much when it comes to digital photo frames. I purchased a number of frames from multiple manufacturers for multiple members of my family with the expectation that I would, for time immemorial, be able to email said frames images, thus allowing family members the opportunity to see new photos without having to drag them over from the computer. Alas and alack each one of these frames (Damn you, SmartParts!) has failed and their attendant services have gone out of business.

I’m an optimistic fellow, however, and they say digital picture frame usage after being burned by picture frames in the past is a triumph of hope over experience. Well fool me again, picture frames, because I’m going to talk about the eMotion Social-Connect Digital Photo Frame with LifeGoRound.

Cisco has confirmed that the next version of the Flip Video camera, everyones favorite tiny video camera, is getting Wi-Fi. The model is described as having “a large screen that slides to reveal the record and menu buttons underneath.”

Pocket-lint is also reporting there won’t be a touchscreen. You can, however, upload video that you take over Wi-Fi.

Sorry for the short notice but I thought it might be fun to toast to Turkey Day and the launch of our our Gift Guide.

I’m teaming up with Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV for an impromptu CG meet-up in New York. We’ll be meeting at 7pm Friday at Heartland Brewery, 35 Union Square West, in Manhattan. We should be able to commandeer the back of the pub for our purposes.

An anonymous tipster send us in this image of an e-reader running Android OS and explained that it came from a company that has never been in the tablet/e-reader business. Interesting…

I suspect this is some sort of music device for composers/performers because of all the musical notes on the top of the screen and some things we saw in the background of the image. Any guesses as to what this could be?

It is officially on: we’re running our super duper, extra sassy Holiday Gift Guide from now until the end of time, giving you the latest in hot gift ideas for you and yours. Why are we doing this so early? Because we have so much to give away this year it’s scary. That said, let’s hit the slopes and shush our way into Gift Guide Nirvana.

What do you need to do? Well, first you have to click through to our gift guide and keep your eye on daily posts for news of what we’re giving away. We’re starting off with the five days of Peek Pronto: five full days, one Peek Pronto each day. How do you win? Just comment using your actual email and we’ll pick a winner a day from this post. We’ll also run other giveaways concurrently with this one, so fear not.

Here are some stories from the past week on CrunchGear.

CrunchGear wants to kiss you this Holiday
NSMB Super Skills Trailer
Thanko’s USB powered, Dinosaur foot-shaped slipper keeps your feet warm

When the Motorola Droid launched this month everyone was amazed that a company so down on its luck was able to put together a well-designed phone running a powerful, “brand new” OS. The whole package – hardware, software, and marketing – seemed flawless. In fact, phones running Android 1.5 now look hopelessly outdated and with 2.0’s gesture, CDMA, and search support you’d wonder why handset manufacturers like HTC, LG, Kyocera, and Samsung are using 1.5 at all.

The reasons have more to do with Google than any decision on the carriers’ part. In fact, according to a source close to the handset business, Google’s Android team directly assisted Motorola and Verizon in building the Droid’s software from the ground up and is currently assisting another, unknown, handset maker in Korea to create a finely-tuned hardware and software combination. Most important, however, is that this is sort of assistance most manufacturers do not receive and, in the end, they are dinged for running an “older” version of Android.

When I bought a webcam for my front door – mine is the Linksys WVC54GCA – I was faced with a predicament. The built-in motion detection software bombarded my email inbox with images of an empty frame. It was set off by the motion of a leaf or a reflection, rendering one of the most important aspects – notification of trespass – ineffective.

At an impasse, I decided to build a cyberbiomimetic AI using a cockroach brain and a vat of amino acids. The resulting system, while effective at spotting intruders, eventually threatened to become self-aware and so I had to shut it down. Finally, I tried Vitamin D.

Problem, as they say, solved.

Ladies and germs: the Chumby One. Hot on the heels of its soft, leathery older brother, the Chumby One goes for a more non-nonsense aesthetic with hard edges and a more clock-radio feel. As you recall, the device costs $99.95 and allows you to play back little widgets on a tiny touchscreen. It is at once banal in its simplicity and amazingly unfettered in the amount of content you can stream to the device.

Our Chumby One came pre-installed with a few widgets including our own news feed and Twitter, which lets you view your Tweets whenever the widget rolls around. I’m going to place this thing on my desk and treat it like a third screen in order to really test the value of this wee fellow. More soon.

Fox News held a fair and balanced debate over Modern Warfare 2, the popular new FPS that lets you play a CIA operative tasked with helping Russian agents clear terrorists out of an airport. In the game, it turns out that the Russian had turned on you and forced you to kill innocents in the airport. It’s a depiction of USA-funded terrorism. It is not a murder simulator.

The debate here, if it can be called that, seems to rotate around the correlation between video game violence and real violence. The old man in this debate mentioned an American Association of Pediatrics statement.

Video and commentary after the jump.

It’s a new day at Palm. The Pixi, Palm’s Treo-esque addition to the WebOS line-up, is getting new commercials without Miss Crazy Face and her magical Pre. Instead, you get hot people taking pictures of each other and having fun.

This is the kind of commercial that I call the McCafe (or Devin’s lifestyle in Seattle) – excited people doing something exciting. It’s a big departure from Palm and a points to a move towards the mainstream.

Video after the jump.

Back in the olden days, long before the advent of electric light, our forefathers dreamt of a better place. They dreamt of running hot and cold water in their wash rooms, wireless telegraphy, and the rise of the horseless carriage. They dreamt of threshing machines that could tie down an acre of millet an hour and helioplanes that could transport humans from one place to another in comfort and style. But what was the dream that drove our forefathers to strive for better things, always? What dream sustained them through a Depression and two World Wars? What was the silent prayer they mumbled nightly to the heavens from their pinched and chapped lips? Friends, they dreamt of a website that lets you mix your own trail mix and cereal. And that dream is now a reality.

Mojamix is an online granola manufacturing system. You select your base, then add dried fruit, seeds, and nuts. They package up your foodstuff and send it to your home via first class mail. The average 12-ounce bag costs about $12 and there is the possibility of adding chocolate-covered cashews to the mix. This last part is what clinched it for me.

Come back with me to the turn of the century, about 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn’t uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape’s bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed “about:mozilla” in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got:

Here are some stories from this week on CrunchGear:

Japanese company announces Dragon Ball headphones
Toyjector: Cute mini projector to be released in Japan
Choken Bako: Cute Japanese piggy bank

The dawn of the 21st century brought us a problem: we had lots of data, but no real way to bring that data into the real world. We could feasibly lug laptops and phones around, but did they ever do exactly what we needed them to do? Don’t answer that.

Manufacturers, in their wisdom, decided to do something about it and so devices like the Peek – for email – and the CueCat – for nothing – were born. Here’s a look at ten “avatar” gadgets, gadgets that brought a web service into the real world, for better or worse.

Twitterpeek – We should be nicer to the Twitterpeek. This standalone device, designed specifically for Twittering, mirroring our own obsession with the microblogging service and, if anything, we willed it into existence with our collective desires for always on Twitter. Does it work? Eh. Is it a good idea? Eh. Is it for us? Probably not, but what do I know?

Another day, another Android phone. I believe we will soon come to a day when Android phones will be looked at with the same jaundiced eye as, say, the latest LG Chocolate, but since that day hasn’t come, I’ll share a few observations with Verizon’s new $99 Hero-alike, the Eris.

The Eris is basically a mini Hero. It’s slightly thinner and clad in all black and but the Sense UI is in place and all of the things that made the Hero great – responsive OS, apps, and social networking connectivity – are here. One thing lacking, however, is the “latest” version of Android with its superior navigation application and multi-touch.