Disk Inserted

Sony may not shed a tear for the 3.5-inch floppy disk when it meets its maker in March, but you’d better believe the company’s crafted a retirement plan for the format that propelled it to fame: the compact cassette. To be fair, the CFD-A110 CD / cassette boom box above isn’t actually a new product — it’s a relabeled CFD-A100TV from 2003 minus the nigh-obsolete analog TV band — but if you’re rocking magnetic mix tapes we’re guessing you’ll welcome this blast from the past. For your projected ¥20,000 (about $215) you’ll get a pair of full-range speakers, 14 AM/FM presets, an external microphone port for karaoke and a remote when it launches in Japan this June 21st. What that won’t buy you, however, is an obnoxiously large gilded chain, a beefed up left shoulder for carrying it around, and a time machine needed to actually fit in while using this. Ya heard?

Sony’s last cassette-blastin’ boom box is precisely how Ruff Ryders roll(‘d) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 08:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We wanted to do something fun with car technology for the 2010 New York Auto Show… a little change of pace for BGR. This year, we’re doing some segments on all the different technology that goes into the latest and greatest vehicles currently available, and those that are about to hit the market. Buick has graciously sponsored our New York Auto Show coverage this year — they’ve even dropped off a Buick LaCrosse so we could see what kind of tech it’s pushin’. Look for our Auto Show coverage segments coming real soon, but for now, here’s a quick look at the 2010 Buick LaCrosse from a technology perspective.

This post is part of our “Live Like A Genius” content series sponsored by Buick and the all-new 2010 LaCrosse.

We won’t actually comment on how the car drives since that’s not what we’re really interested in, but as far as the interior goes, it ranges from pretty boring and bland, to pretty amazing. We’ll keep this really short, but here’s some of the stuff we’ve loved after playing with the car for over a week:

• The car has a 40GB built-in hard drive and can rip your MP3s right from the CD and store it in the car.
• What’s even cooler though, is that the same hard drive is used for caching the radio stations you’re listening to. That means you can literally rewind live radio up to 20 minutes in case you missed a song you wanted to hear, a contest — whatever.
• The LaCrosse is the first car we’ve seen to show a full visual weather forecast, and damn does it look nice.
• Bluetooth is a breeze to pair your phones with, and our iPhone connected perfectly to the built in USB port.
• The car features some great advancements like an air quality filter which continuously monitors the quality of the outside air and will automatically switch your A/C to recirculation, a great rear camera back up system with visual guidance, and a really solid and straight forward user interface.

Some of the stuff we weren’t too happy about?

• The car has this weird wrap around console that literally goes from the rear doors, all the way up the front, and continues onto the dash. It’s kind of futuristic looking, and makes you feel like you’re about to lift off. Cool at first, but the blue lighting kind of gets old quick. Plus it doesn’t really match with the Buick brand all too much, but maybe that’s just us…
• While the Bluetooth pairing of our phones went oh-so-smoothly, unfortunately, we couldn’t find a way to sync our address book with the car. Worse than that, there was no recently called, missed, or most frequently contacted lists anywhere we could see.
• Is it bad we’re hoping for capacitive navigation screens in cars? The screen on the Buick was probably just as good as any other, but we had a couple mis-fires and it was a little bit frustrating when trying to get the weather or enter in a navigation point.

Click on over to our Buick LaCrosse technology gallery!

Good news for Nero fans! You can now download Nero 9 absolutely free. Yes, we are not talking about any trick to download the Nero 9 as free. Instead, Nero has released a free version of its famous Nero burning software that gives you the best-in-class burning experience. Although there are many free applications available as an alternative to Nero, very few applications come close to Nero as far as the overall performance and features are concerned.

The only catch with this Nero 9 free version is that it comes with only data burning and disc copying features for CDs and DVDs. To get the additional features you need to upgrade to the Nero 9 full version.

Don’t forget to deselect the Ask toolbar installation option during the installation if you don’t like to install only Nero 9.

While Nero 9 free version comes with very few features, its size is still 54MB! You can download it from the link below.

Download