The 1.0.4 update for the Palm Pre just got released, but along with patching some security holes, kills the homebrew ability that made everyone so excited.

Why, Palm, when your SDK isn't available until late summer, would you go and patch the homebrew? At the very least, developers have the leaked SDK to work off of, even if it's not final. [Palm via Engadget]

Save yourself some wasted effort by checking on iPhone 3GS availability online first before you get in your car and head down to the store.

There's no such centralized interface for AT&T, so who knows how many they have. For a place that sells phones, they sure don't like to answer them all that promptly (in our experience). [Apple]

There have been lots of Steve Jobs sightings at Apple last week, but it's finally official that he's back at work.

"Steve Jobs is back to work. He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. "We're glad to have him back."

It's good that he's well enough to actually make it into the office. If I had any kind of transplant, I'd milk that for at LEAST six months of recovery time. [CNN]

Image probably isn't accurate, seeing as he had a LIVER transplant.

Sure, brain wave-controlled robots, music, cell-phones, and games give us tech lust, but Toyota's announcement that it's developed a way to control a wheel chair—without the need for movement or voice—fills me with equal amounts of awesome.

Seeing technology applied in a field that has the potential to help so many makes for a nice change sometimes, ya know? The breakthrough comes from scientists at the BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, which teams various groups including Toyota Motor and the mostly-Japanese-government-funded RIKEN
research unit).

At this stage, the system centers on an electroencephalograph (EEG) scanner cap that the wheelchair user wears so their brain waves can be scanned and analyzed by a computer. The result is the ability to make movements almost in real time. Stopping is reportedly a little harder, with the user having to puff up a cheek to trigger a detector worn on the face. Still, that's pretty freakn'cool. [Jalopnik]

Remember the Neurosky mind-gaming headset we tried earlier this year? The one that actually worked? It's getting a free SDK.

This means both developers at large studios as well as dudes in their basement can make programs and games that do things with the data generated by the headset. And you generate data just by thinking a certain way.

What kind of stuff can these developers do? Well, for larger companies they can make this an additional controller to supplement their normal games, such as reloading just by concentrating or lifting boxes and "setting crap on fire." Independent developers can make weird one-off games that can really stretch the limits of what the Neurosky Mindset can read from your brain. Or porn games. [Neurosky]

Paul Fryer's Vacuum Tube Chess set—one of only seven made—actually have pieces that light up when they're plugged in to the board. Now you'll know exactly when someone picks up a piece from the board. [Allvisualarts via MAKE via BBG]

We don't know what the LED X found on the side of this Asus Blu-ray drive is supposed to symbolize to the people of Earth, but we aren't ones to argue with pointlessly glowing aesthetics.

The Asus SBC-04D1S-U External Slim is one of only a few USB-based Blu-ray drives that reads BDs at 4.8x, plus it can read/write DVDs as well. (Sadly, it's tray-loading.)

While there's no price/release date at this time, keep in mind that USB drives like this one tend to rely on your computer for the actual Blu-ray decoding. So while the SBC-04D1S-U will technically play Blu-rays, it's up to Cyberlink software powered by your processor/video card to render the data. [Asus via EverythingUSB]

If we were to make a wireless doorbell from an NES controller, we'd actually take advantage of its eight different buttons and have each one make a different chime. Instead, the creator made all eight do the same thing. [TechEBlog]

Here's what happens when you give a 13-year-old from 2009 a Sony Walkman—the tape kind—and ask him to figure it out without any outside help: incredible confusion.

To the kid's credit, he was able to deduce that the tape had two sides (took him three days) and that you could switch between two kinds of tapes fairly easily. He was also given weird looks on the street and allowed to listen to music in class because of his teachers' nostalgia.

But in the end, which did he like better: his Walkman or his iPod? The iPod, of course, except for the fact that the Walkman had two headphone ports for easy music sharing. [BBC via Engadget]

Sitting in the typical recliner has become the weeknight sex of the furniture world—a comfortable task for your body while your mind focuses on TV. The Soyuz Chair hopes to break the mundanity with vintage Soviet space craft design.

Intended to "accurately reproduce" the three stages of a Soyuz rock launch, the you recline, put on eyewear/headphones and input your requested ride into the control panel (should they prefer a single stage or full-out rocket launch). The chair then rattles its way from a mundane home to...well, it doesn't go anywhere. But maybe you won't realize that until you take off the mask and return to Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. [Design Interactions via Core77 via OhGizmo!]