I’m not an electrician, nor do I play one on TV, but this I like. It’s a re-designed UK electrical plug, one that’s much thinner and far more friendly to today’s portable, hi-tech toys than the standard plug. Apparently the actual UK plug is a cumbersome jerk, and tends to be a drag on people’s laptops, phones, and other gadgetry. Who wants that?

As that photo shows, it folds, making it easier to store than that three pronged monster.

On the surface it may not seem like much, but only to our laymen eyes: it won some sort of fancy UK design award.

It’s going to take $40,000 worth of diamonds to get me to buy an iPad. So nice try, Mervis Diamond Importers. They’ve taken an ordinary iPad—not sure which model, I’m afraid—and added 11.43 karats worth of diamonds. Yup.

This particular iPad goes on sale on June 1 for the low, low price of $19,999.

Rumor has it that if Manchester City gets that fourth place spot, all the players will be getting one of them.

And to break the fourth wall: this is the type of post that’s merely meant to kill some time, and not particularly add any happiness to your day.

via Luxist

Angry Internet Man here with a chip on his shoulder and a shoot promo to cut. This pre-order “bonus” video game content bullshit has to stop. Lives are at stake.

The latest example of this chicanery is BioShock 2. If you pre-order the game from GameStop, den of sin and other bad stuff, you get two exclusive multi-player characters. Well, pardon me for being a jerk and buying the game from Steam (where the pre-order bonus is a free copy of the orignial BioShock, as if I didn’t already have that—twice). Now I have to envy all the other neighborhood kids who get said characters? You know, I always hated those kids.

Granted, the odds of me playing BioShock 2’s multi-player mode are right around zero, so it’s not a huge deal, but there is a certain principle at stake here: why the heck should I have to buy—and pre-order, no less!—the game from GameStop to get access to the entire game? Why punish people who choose to shop at a different location?

And this is a benign pre-order bonus, extra multi-player skins. Who cares? Let’s look at something far more malignant: EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Did you know that unless you pre-order the game from, yes, GameStop, you won’t be able to play a certain multi-player mode for an entire month? Let’s say Wal-Mart is the only store in town; you couldn’t shop at GameStop if you wanted to. So you go over there, ask the nice cashier for a copy, come home, plop it into your PS3, and find out, oh, hey, I can’t play a mode that I paid for for four weeks. Awesome! Thanks, EA and GameStop!

(I don’t even understand how that’s legal, buying ostensibly the same product from one store but getting a hell of a lot more with your purchase than the guy who bought the same thing next door. Imagine buying a car from one dealership that included working high beams, but buying it from another store you get jack-shit for lights.)

Dragon Age: Origins had some pre-order nonsense, too. Basically, you had to buy the game 18 different times to unlock every single piece of “extra” content. What?

Mass Effect 2 rewarded armor and weapons—not superfluous multi-player skins, then—to people who pre-ordered the game from GameStop. Again, tough cookies, kid who bought the game from Target. You should have done the decent thing and driven an hour and a half out of your way to pre-order the game from almighty GameStop.

Let’s be fair: sometimes all this “extra” stuff is made available to everyone via Xbox Live or PSN after a certain amount of time. In SmackDown vs. Raw 2010, which came out last October, for example, Stone Cold Steve Austin was a GameStop pre-order exclusive (notice a pattern?) for a while, but now he can be purchased for 80 Microsoft Points. The stupidity of having to pay for something that’s already on the disc (or that could just as easily be included on the disc) aside, I do applaud THQ for at least making him available. Well, “applaud,” more like kick up dirt and say, “Gee, you guys shouldn’t have, really.”

What’s the purpose of this exclusive content stuff anyway? So GameStop can send a press release to Kotaku and JoyStiq and Techland a few days after a game’s release touting how many copies it sold? See, investors, people still buy their games from us! Yeah, of course, because you’re strong-arming publishers to incorporate extra content deals lest you devote precious shelf space to some other game whose publisher played ball with us. (I have zero information to that effect, it’s just what it feels like.)

When I buy a game, I want to know that I’ve bought the game. I don’t want to find out on CrunchGear of all places that I screwed up because I didn’t buy it at Store A, and thus lose out on armor or weapons or whatever the hell else. Why is this so hard to understand?

So you have a choice, gamers: participate in this charade by genuflecting at the shrine of GameStop (and others), thus perpetuating the garbage of “exclusive” content, or take your money elsewhere. That’s the only way it’s going to stop, too: refusing to shop at these stores that offer “exclusive” content, which only serves to harm your fellow gamers.

To arms and so forth!

Game over, friends. NBC just released a statement saying it had reached a deal with Conan O’Brien that sees him bumped off The Tonight Show and bumped into a large sack of money worth $45 million. Of that $45 million, Conan will keep $33 million, the rest of which will go to his 200+ person staff as severance. Conan’s free to start a new show as of September, 2010. Oh, and Leno comes back to The Tonight Show on March 1.

For Conan fans—we’re all Conan fans here—it’s bittersweet. None of us wanted to see Conan leave The Tonight Show, but if NBC is going to be a jerk about it then he might as well walk away with a nice chunk of change. That Conan is differing $12 million out of his own pocket to help out his staff tells you what kind of man Conan is. A rarity in Hollywood, to be sure.

Conan’s manager told The Wall Street Journal the he wants to get back on the air as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we’ve offered Conan the opportunity to do a little bit of tech blogging in his spare time between shows.

As for Leno, yeah, he returns to The Tonight Show on March 1, after NBC airs the Winter Olympics. I don’t know how I, and others like me, can register my disdain. It’s not like I can watch Leno’s new Tonight Show less than I watched his old Tonight Show. You can’t watch less than zero.

Ron, from Ron and Fez on Sirius XM, said it best yesterday: Leno really ought to have moved on like a gentleman in 2004 when NBC first asked him to step aside for Conan. And what was Leno doing with the show? Jay Walking, something we’ve seen since the days of Howard Stern? (I said something positive about Howard Stern! Call the police, I must be crazy!) More wacky headline typos? Like, I’m sorry, but if you laugh at a newspaper typo you should be sent to America’s Gulag: New Jersey.

That is all.