Bonus coverage from DEMO 2006

Keith Shaw’s Cool Tools Alert

* Editor’s Note: Please note that as from next week, the delivery day of the Cool Tools News Alert will change to Thursdays. You’ll continue to receive the latest headlines from Keith Shaw’s Cool Tools world, but delivered on Thursdays. Thanks for reading.

LATEST COOL TOOLS VIDEOS: Bonus coverage from DEMO 2006

Keith talks with Multiverse about its multi-player game development tool and looks at Riya.com, a really cool facial recognition search engine tool.

LATEST COOL TOOLS COLUMN: Hard-drive power for your PC 

Most surge protectors are long, vertical strips with about six or seven power outlets that let you plug in various cords. But many power adapters are larger and eat up the space available for additional cords and adapters.

The PowerSquid takes care of that by extending its female outlets away from the base in a tentaclelike fashion. This lets you use every outlet and not having to figure out the best way to optimize the power strip, or daisy-chain multiple surge protectors in order to plug everything in.

Plus: Seagate External Hard Drive (400G byte, dual interface),. Like the product’s title says, it’s an external hard drive that offers 400GB of space for PC users. The system connects via USB 2.0 cables or an IEEE 1394 (also known as firewire) cable to provide connectivity to your PC.

PAST 7 DAYS ON THE COOL TOOLS BLOG:

Get big speaker sound from your Palm

Altec Lansing, maker of the inMotion portable speaker docks for iPod and other MP3 players, has come out with a new device aimed at people who want to listen to music stored on their Palm devices. The inMotion iMT1 Mobile Audio Dock is available now through retailers and the Altec Lansing Web site for $179.95.

Tripp Lite offers more screen real estate on its KVM console

There’s a new 1U rack mount KVM console on the block – Tripp Lite this week announced that its NetDirector 1U Rackmount KVM Console is now available with a 17-inch LCD monitor.

Apple’s Intel-based MacBooks to get even faster

Apple said today it will begin shipping this week its new 15-inch MacBook Pro notebook computer, which includes the new Intel Core Duo processor (up to four times the performance of the PowerBook G4, Apple says), a built-in iSight Web camera and its Front Row media experience and Apple Remote.

Seagate announces 12GB 1-inch hard drive

Seagate today launched its ST1.3 Series, a 12GB, 1-inch hard drive. The new drive offers 50% more storage capacity and 30% lower power consumption than Seagate’s current 1-inch drives, the company says.