Okay all you Blu-ray holdouts — your excuses for not jumping into the crispiest, cleanest, best-sounding video format yet are wearing thin. Here’s the cheapest Blu-ray player we’ve seen short of Black Friday insanity and refurbished models: the Curtis Mathes CMMBX72 is on sale at Target, fetching a mere $170. Sure beats the thousands of dollars they were selling for a couple of years ago. And this one’s still packing the goods, with Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, remote volume control, HDMI, and that sweet, sweet 1080p-ness that drives the gals wild. Hot stuff. Be careful, though, recession bargain hunters — this Curtis Mathes guy sounds like somebody’s girlfriend’s brother. Make sure you can return it for a refund — this low price is making us suspicious. But pretty soon, they’ll start giving the players away, as long as they can keep gouging us for $25 per Blu-ray disc. Target and Amazon , via Gearlog

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Blu-ray player prices dropping; here’s one for $170

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Palm posts net loss of $95 million for Q3, reaffirms that Pre is on schedule

Similar to the Asus model we just reviewed, Shuttle’s X50 is another nettop all-in-one. It too has a touchscreen 15.6″ display with a 1366×768 screen resolution, 1 GB of RAM and an Atom CPU from Intel. I has a 160GB hard drive, a webcam, gigabit ethernet and WiFi, and is sold with Windows XP. There are 5 USB ports and a memory card reader. How, then, does it differ? Where the Eee is round, the X50 is square. And it has a handle. Shuttle x50 [Slashgear]

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Shuttle’s X50 touchscreen all-in-one

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Teens take pictures of space with balloon, Nikon Coolpix camera

Remember that time you hit the “Send” button, and suddenly changed your mind, frantically clicking and closing stuff on your desktop in a futile attempt to stop your fiery diatribe? Funny how clicking one final button focuses the mind, after it’s too late. Now those clever Gmail programmers have a little routine that fixes that, giving us “Undo Send,” a Google Labs setting that lets you call back your emails. We’ve loaded it and tried it out for you. After a quick enabling of the feature on the Gmail Labs Settings page, there it appears just after you send a message: Undo. And hey, it works perfectly. There’s a catch, though — you can only recall an email for about five seconds. But this is a whole lot better than nothing. Thanks, Google! Now go figure out how to recall email messages 24 hours later and erase all memory of them. Gmail users, find the experimental feature here , almost at the bottom of the page, and don’t forget to click “Save Changes.” Via Lifehacker and Obsessable

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Gmail’s Undo Send lets you recall your temper tantrums, no harm done

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Engadget’s recession antidote: win a Razer Arctosa gaming keyboard!

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Nokia E71x arriving at AT&T stores, due out next Tuesday

Ostensibly this essay by Bruce “Is Loose (The)” Sterling in Metropolis is advice to industrial designers on what to design in the whirlwind markets of 2009, but I don’t actually understand what he’s saying. I tried Googling some of the products he used as examples and I can’t even find them. Except for cheap cell phones, which the global poor truly dote on, the lowest billion rarely buy appropriate objects designed for them by soft-hearted liberals. But formerly rich guys buying up-market peasant products? Man, that market should boom! Its high time for designers to plunder and upgrade the vernacular technologies of the Third World: wheelbarrows, bicycle rickshaws, rainwater barrels, window boxes, awnings, and mosquito nets; or weird and whimsical wind toys, bamboo-and-Mylar windup shortwave radios. If theyre cheap and blithe, you cant go wrong here. You want to vividly display a host of eye-catching solar gizmos, while quietly installing some humble weather stripping, which has a terrific ROI.

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Bruce Sterling gets high on industrial design

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JAKKS Pacific, of all firms, nabs Walmart’s Vendor of the Year

It’s the golden jubilee of Fisher-Price’s Little People toys, even though they’ve been around in some form since 1950. They didn’t become the little peg-bodied Little People we know today until 1959, however, with the launch of the “Safety School Bus”, which included six figures that could removed from the bus, although the driver stayed inside. (His head was attached to a mechanism that caused it to move back and forth as the bus was pulled. Despite being a child of the ’80s, I recall playing with this bus. I had no idea it was so old!) The two Little People sets I recall playing with the most as a kid, the “Play Family Farm” and the “Play Family House” were introduced in the late ’60s. I’d always presumed mine were new—and perhaps they were, as the line wasn’t redesigned until 1991 (and again in ‘97), with the Farm in production until ‘85—but it’s possible that I could have inherited them. Looking at the little chickens and dogs and farmers now in Fisher-Price’s faux vintage photographs makes me wistful; I remember the personality I had imbued in every one of those little pegs. After the jump, some vintage commercials for Little People, as well as some trivia about the line that I cut-and-pasted from a Word doc. Video: Play Family Farm commercial (1960s) Video: Play Family Farm System commercial (1971) Q: Of what material were the first Little People figures made? A: Wood. The first plastic figures were introduced in 1968 they had plastic bodies, with wooden heads. Q: How many different types of Little People animals have there been? A: Since 1959, Little People has created over 80 different animals, from alligators to zebras! Q: What was the first playset for Little People? A: The Little People Farm in 1968. It was one of the hottest toys in the industry that year. Q: For how much did the first Little People playset retail? A: $9.99. Q: In what year did a Little People playset feature its first licensed characters? What were they? A: 1975. Sesame Street. Q: How many Little People products have been sold between 1959 and today? A: More than 1.5 billion. Q: When were Little People figures redesigned with more real-life features? A: 1997. Q: What are the names of the most popular Little People figures? A: Sara Lynn and Eddie. Q: What Little People figures were the first to be based on fairy tales? A: Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Q: When was the first Little People seasonal toy introduced? What was it? A: 1997. Santa & His Sleigh.

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Happy 50th Birthday, Fisher-Price Little People