Watch A $5,000 Game Controller Land A Plane In Las Vegas

Why spend mere hundreds of dollars on a fancy flight stick for your flight simulator needs when you can spend thousands on Saitek's Procedure Trainer, an insane collection of instrument panels, yokes and rudder pedals?

Mad Catz is showcasing the latest, impressively expensive Pro Flight controller set up from Saitek at CES 2011, a staggering pile of panels, switches and controllers that demands 18 USB ports and costs a cool $5,000 USD. The whole rig, as seen here, supports two flight yokes, up to 10 LCD instrument panels, two radio panels, a backlit information panel, rudder pedals and more for the ultimate in flight simulation at home.

Not included in that $5,000 fee is a TV or PC, however, so dig a little deeper.

Mad Catz's Alex Verrey walks us through the features of the Procedure Trainer while Nicki Repenning lands a Cessna at Las Vegas' McCarran Airport in Flight Simulator X.

Send an email to Michael McWhertor, the author of this post, at mike@kotaku.com.

Republished from http://kotaku.com

The Best New Blu-ray Player

They're the cornerstones of our home theaters—and there's always an ungodly number of them at CES. We scrutinized this year's more intriguing 3D Blu-ray players and found the one that looks like the king of the hill.

Samsung BD-D7000 This slot-loading Blu-ray disc drive is tiny. Like, external DVD drive tiny. But don't let that fool you. The BD-D7000 comes with some mighty loud bells and whistles, including faster disc load times, built-in Wi-Fi, and some passable 2D-to-3D up-conversion, too. You'll also get access to all the streaming media mainstays (Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Pandora, Blockbuster, and Twitter) and something Samsung calls Smart Hub—basically the company's answer to Google TV. Hopefully, it'll work better.

Runners Up

LG BD690 The BD690 is a networked 3D Blu-ray player and comes loaded with a little something extra: a 250-GB internal hard drive for media storage and playback. You'll also get an enviable list of streaming services, including Netflix, Vudu, and Hulu Plus.

Panasonic DMP-BDT310This Blu-ray player lets you make Skype video calls, comes with built-in Wi-Fi and even gives you control over certain 3D effects, like adjusting the picture's depth and "leaping effect." Use your iPhone to control it all.

Honorable Mention
Sony BDP-S780
Samsung BD-D7000
LG BP650

Send an email to Bryan Gardiner, the author of this post, at bgardiner@gizmodo.com.

Via Gizmodo

RSS5000 Let's You Browse the Full Page Content of Any RSS Feed

iPad: RSS5000 is a clever newsreader that lets you bypass viewing article snippets and browse the full article of any RSS feed.

We like to focus on free apps, but $5 for a good RSS reader on the iPad isn't bad—especially when it solves a really common, annoying problem. If you don't subscribe to our VIP feed, you've probably noticed how our other RSS feeds do not provide the full text of the article. Even if they did, you don't always get perfect formatting and embedded video can often be a problem. RSS5000 solves this problem by providing you with the actual web page of the article when you click on each feed, letting you see the full content every time. It works by downloading the pages ahead of time so you don't have to wait for them to load. It syncs with Google Reader and provides a simple, minimalist interface. If you're tired of dealing with article snippets, RSS5000 is a really great solution.

RSS5000 is available right now, for $5, on the iTunes App Store.

Via Lifehacker

Ivi.tv Streams Live Broadcast TV over the Internet

If you'd love to cut or eliminate your cable bill but still want to get the major networks' live feeds, consider Ivi.tv, an online-only alternative to retrieving over-the-air stations with an antenna or via ClearQAM over the cable network.

ivi.tv works by retrieving publicly available television signals over-the-air in several large markets, including Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago and then rebroadcasting them over the internet using their own custom software.

It is very cool (and useful!) to be able to pull in stations across the country in reasonable resolution. However the service does have some drawbacks. The first is the quality: it is not quite running at full framerate and the skipping of frames was noticable for me even on a 25mbit connection. The second problem is that the network stations are all suing ivi.tv for copyright infringement. ivi.tv for their part is rebutting them claiming that FCC must-carry rules state that they, as a cable network, must be able to retransmit any content that the networks offer for free via broadcast. It's a hot topic within the telecommunications industry, and it'll be interesting to see how things pan out.

Ivi.tv has basic subscriptions available for $4.99 a month with some upgrades that include $.99/month for the ability to DVR shows. For now, I've found that ivi.tv works and it is a great alternative if you want to watch live content from network stations that are not available anywhere else in streaming format on the network. Then again, if all you want is access to you local over-the-air HD networks, you can buy or make your own DTV antenna.

Ivi.tv

The author of this post can be contacted at tips@lifehacker.com

Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome

Are you tired of having to open a new tab every time you want to access those shiny new web apps? Now you can skip the new tab and directly access your web apps from the Context Menu using the Apps List From Context Menu extension for Google Chrome.

Just choose the desired web app and it will open in a focused new tab ready to go. If desired you can also have the menu display Disabled Apps by enabling the function in Options.

Apps list from context menu (Chrome Web Store) [via DownloadSquad]

Via How-To Geek

CES 2011: Samsung TVs

Last year, Samsung got mad at me everytime I tried to photograph their TVs. This year, I managed to get all the shots I could want without being yelled at. To prove it, here’s a quick tour of the TVs in Samsung’s booth.

A lot of the TVs were surprisingly not 3D, but just simple lines of LED HDTVs with very thin bezels. These are the ones you should expect to see lining Best Buys walls within the next few months. All very bright, with good picture on the brief time I spent to scrutinize them.

There were 3DTVs, including a wall of 3D video created by a number of 3D monitors, which was a bit overwhelming. Tucked i the corner of the booth was a 3D TV with a game of Crysis 2 being played on it, with a representative from Crytek (the development studio) helping people play the game. The game looked impressive on the TV, though you can’t tell from these shots. What you can see in the shots of the game is don’t bother trying to watch someone playing a game in 3D without 3D glasses on. No matter how pretty the game is, it will look very strange, and not leave a good impression on you, which is probably why Samsung didn’t want pictures of the TV taken.

Via Gadgetell