It was a big night for Hollywood Sunday night, what with the biggest stars and best films being celebrated at the 80th Academy Awards.

It was a funny moment, and in keeping with Stewart’s contemporary wit.

During the Academy Awards Sunday night, host Jon Stewart came back from a commercial break playing ‘Wii Tennis’

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

And while Nintendo must have known about it in advance–otherwise, how could the Oscars possibly have gotten ahold of a Wii–I’m sure it was a thrill for the game company’s people to see their hit device get a moment in the sun during such a global event.

At one point in the show, as the broadcast came back from commercial, host Jon Stewart appeared on-stage playing tennis on the
Wii, with the game displayed on the Oscars’ giant screen.

But, unexpectedly, it also turned into a big night for Nintendo and its popular Wii video game console.

From time to time I’ll post deals on refurbished/recertified items, which are sold at a discount because they didn’t meet a manufacturer’s quality standards or were returned (for one reason or another) and can’t be sold as new. What do you think of these deals? Have you had good luck buying refurb gear, or did you end up regretting it? I’d love to hear your stories–and so would your fellow Cheapskate readers.

The replacement’s packaging was equally atrocious (seriously, the TV was wrapped in a single layer of bubble wrap inside the box, nothing more), but it appeared to be intact. Most importantly, it worked.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

(Credit:
Apple)

Yeah, I made a few mistakes along the way (the big one: buying a TV with a built-in DVD player. Those things always break), but it’s the only bad experience I’ve had with refurb gear. How about you? Hit the comments page and share your own tales of woe (or satisfaction).

In fact, it worked for 15 days, at which point the built-in DVD player refused to play any more DVDs (leaving my poor wife scrambling during a business presentation). And, naturally, the vendor’s return policy for refurbished items expired after–you guessed it–14 days. I thought they’d cut me a break, but no, they sent me to the manufacturer for repairs (bad vendor, bad!).

I’ll kick things off with one of my own. Last year, Mrs. Cheapskate needed an LCD TV with a built-in DVD player. I found a great deal on a 20-inch refurbished model. When it arrived, however, we discovered that the stand had broken clean off the base of the TV as a result of shockingly poor packaging. To the vendor’s credit, they picked up the busted set and shipped a replacement with a minimum of fuss.

So, while the criticism seems valid enough, it’s also part and parcel of Flickr’s emphasis on sharing and community over tight user control of their creative product. When picking Flickr or any other photo site, it’s important to understand not just its pricing scheme, reliability, and how well their user interface works but, as importantly, the underlying priorities that drive all sorts of design choices.

Over at Plagiarism Today, Jonathan Bailey notes:

Or, perhaps more accurately, Flickr has apparently decided either deliberately or as a matter of generalized neglect that providing its users with more sophisticated and granular tools to protect their content isn’t a priority.

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Speaking personally, I still use Flickr anyway. The price is right–$25 per year for a Pro account which gives me unlimited storage and uploads. While I would prefer to secure my photos a bit better, doing so isn’t really all that important to me given that I don’t sell them.

I would have thought the answer was obvious. No.

While there is much that I like about Flickr, it’s simply not the best service if you want to carefully control who accesses your photos and exactly how they can access them. SmugMug and PhotoShelter are two services that have put far more thought and effort into this aspect of their respective sites.

A recent post by photographer J.M. Goldstein raised a very interesting question about Flickr and its API, namely whether or not Flickr was policing its API well enough and doing an adequate job protecting the rights of photographers and artists that post to the service.

The bag’s made from water-resistant nylon; uses weather-sealed YKK zippers on all outside openings; has monopod straps, protective rubber bottom treads, and a front-mounted phone/audio pouch; and includes Tenba’s fast-deploying WeatherWrap rain cover.

I haven’t used or tested Tenba’s bags at all, but if anyone has, please let me know what you think. This one looks pretty freakin’ sweet.

Tenba makes a lot of bags for all kinds of cameras and equipment. Featured in the video above is the new $103.95 Shootout Sling, which for a bag fetishist such as myself is simply dreamy. It’s designed for immediate access to your camera and to keep gear organized (a given), but is also quite capable of swallowing a dSLR with a mounted 300mm telephoto lens, just by removing some of the interior padded walls. Watch the video to see what I mean.

Correction 7:50 a.m. PST: The lower-end model is the Stylus 850 SW.

Olympus cameras are shown here frozen in a block of ice.

Olympus announced the two waterproof models, the Stylus 850 SW and 1030 SW, earlier in January.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

On another, a handful of cameras were frozen in a large block of ice.

LAS VEGAS–I can’t speak for their optical quality or performance, but I like the idea behind Olympus’ shockproof and waterproof compact cameras–and I liked the publicity stunts the Japanese camera maker used to show them off at the Photo Marketing Association trade show here.

The 850 SW should be on sale now for about $300, and the 1030 SW in March for about $400.

Both are dustproof and can withstand temperatures as low as 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The 10-megapixel 1030 SW has a 28-102mm equivalent zoom, can be dropped from 6.5 feet up, and will work as deep as 33 feet underwater, and the 8-megapixel 850 SW has a more stylish design, is equipped with a 38-114mm lens, can be dropped from 5 feet up, and will work as deep as 10 feet underwater.

An Olympus Stylus 830 SW splashes into water after banging down a pegboard.

In one demonstration, the camera drops down a pegboard, banging off several on the way down before splashing into a tray of water.

And several cameras were positioned in a number of aquariums decorating the company’s booth.

The section is a sort of catch-all for stories related to each candidate. It also displays friend counts of each candidate and people who have effectively “dugg” them. Of those numbers, Obama currently has the lead with nearly 20,000 people following him. John McCain comes in at a mere 2,019. Nader on the other hand clocks in at just 10, which goes in tandem with a story Dugg about his running announcement that received nearly unanimous votes of disapproval from commenters.

Today Digg pushed out an update to its popular candidates section, the part of Digg that tracks all things politics.

Also introduced today is a dedicated section to Olympics news which is currently devoid of any stories.

While mostly a house cleaning move to get rid of campaign dropouts, there’s some fun data to play with using the four other listed candidates alongside John McCain and Barack Obama. One of them being Ralph Nader’s unpopularity with the Digg community.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Whose campaign reigns supreme? Diggers like Barack.

While the befriending feature on Digg is not a clear indication of either candidate’s ties with the community it’s a sign of how much they’re focusing on their social-networking campaigns. Other social news services like Twitter have gotten interest from the candidates, but none of them have the supercharged community Digg does, albeit its echo chamber that leans towards less publicly popular candidates like Ron Paul.

(Credit:
AT&T)

Palm Centro for AT&T

As expected, today AT&T announced the addition of the Palm Centro to its lineup of smartphones. Unlike the Sprint’s red and black models, AT&T’s version comes in white and features lime green buttons. And while it carries the same affordable $99 price tag (with a two-year contract and after rebates and discounts), you do lose the 3G speeds and have to settle for ho-hum EDGE. However, it does support the carrier’s push-to-talk service and AT&T Music. Otherwise, the GSM version of the petite Palm smartphone is very much like its CDMA cousin. You get a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 1.2, preloaded instant messaging clients, and push e-mail capabilities with support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Good Mobile Messaging, and Xpress Mail. You can get your hands on the white-hot AT&T Palm Centro starting today.

Is Apple TV the only way to get Apple’s HD video rentals?

(Credit:
Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

What do you think? Did I miss something? Is this how Apple plans to sell more Apple TVs, by making the HD rental feature exclusive to the product?

(aa) Movies are viewable only on your
Mac or Windows computer (using iTunes 7.6 or later),
iPhone, video-enabled iPod (iPod touch, iPod nano (3rd generation), or iPod classic), or on TVs using your Apple TV. Movies in high definition resolution (HD) are viewable only on TVs using your Apple TV and must be downloaded directly to your Apple TV. Movies are viewable only on one device at a time.

Now that post-keynote reality is starting to sink in, it’s occurring to me that Apple’s HD movie rental announcement has a big string attached named Apple TV. In order to rent HD-quality iTunes movies, it seems that you’ll have to buy an Apple TV. People who just want to rent HD iTunes movies to watch on their PCs (or send to their TVs using non-Apple hardware) are left out, and will instead need to buy an Apple TV and then transfer the content to their laptop or
iPod. While it makes sense that most users will only want to play HD movies on their big flat-screen TVs, users content to watch movies on their computer’s high-resolution screens appear to be left out of the equation. I mean, the standard 640×480 iTunes video quality is fine and all, but having the option to rent in HD would be nice.

update: The folks at Daring Fireball have pointed out some language in the new iTunes Store terms of service that pretty much confirm my suspicions.

On Friday morning, Blinkx shares were trading at 36.75 pence, their highest value since September. That puts the company’s valuation at 102 million pounds, which is equivalent to $199.2 million.

Reuters is reporting that shares of Blinkx, a publicly traded video search site based in the U.K., climbed 50 percent on Friday following rumors that corporate giants Google and News Corp. may be vying for an acquisition.

Blinkx has been publicly traded since 2007, when it merged with search engine Autonomy. As part of a clause in its initial public offering filings, Autonomy is slated to receive $50 million in the event of a buyout–and that clause expires on May 24. That may have fueled the acquisition rumors.

Google could potentially want the video search technology to fuel its YouTube property.

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Motorola quietly released a series of new Linux-based mobile phones this week. There’s been a lot of noise around Symbian moving to open source and Google’s Linux-based Android mobile platform, but both open-source Symbian and Android are still just press releases and talk.

Motorola’s new ROKR line, however, is available now. You don’t have to wait to buy a Linux-based phone. You can start calling with one today.

Who is behind these phones? The LiMo Foundation, which has been releasing a slew of new handsets and signing up new partners. By the time that Symbian and Android arrive at the party, will it be too late?