Headsets getting some cachet

digital eyewear
Digital eyewear is slowly becoming suitable for public viewing. In other words, headsets such as the Myvu Crystal are slim and colorful enough that they might be taken for a pair of over-the-top Gaultier frames instead of an assistive device.

The ear buds hanging from the arms of the Crystal are a dead giveaway that something "smart" is going on behind those shades.

Like the original, less sexy looking Myvu models, the Crystal (about $300 at myvu.com, starting next week) creates a single image you can see inside the translucent lenses.

There is enough space above and beneath the lenses for you to find your seat on the Green Line, if you are too cool to take the glasses off.

The colorful Crystal (whose lenses look like they were dipped in amber) also offers the best picture yet for Myvu. It has a full VGA quality picture and a larger field of view than any of the other Myvu frames.

If you are more concerned about how you look on the outside, rather than what you see inside your frames, I recommend Myvu's less expensive but hipper looking Shades 301.

The Shades (about $200) have that heat-shield look, so you might be taken in public for a Blackwater mercenary - a sight some folks might find comforting.

However, the Shades lack the picture resolution of the Crystal.

If you wear glasses because you need to, you will find the Myvu frames don't fit over them. Myvu sells tiny clip-in frames (for certain models) that your optometrist can fill with your script.

Internet radio

This clock won't prettify nightstand

The perfect radio, in my book, receives thousands of Internet streams and shortwave and has a gorgeous wood cabinet made from sustainable resources. It also has stereo speaker outputs. I haven't seen my radio yet.

Aluratek's Internet Radio Alarm Clock with MP3 Player does hit a couple of my marks. But it won't be the prettiest thing on your nightstand.

The Internet Radio gets more than 10,000 stations via the vTuner Internet service, subscription-free. It gets FM stations, too. The Aluratek comes across as a plain-looking clock radio, however, resembling the cheap clocks piled high in chain pharmacies.

You can connect the Aluratek to your home Wi-Fi router, of course. But it also has an Ethernet connection through which you can stream Internet radio. You use the USB port to listen to MP3 and other music files on a music player or hard drive.

You can listen to your media via the clock radio's single speaker, plug in some ear cans, or send the tunes out to stereo speakers.

The most appealing feature is probably price: about $200.

Video games

Safari on the Wii, without tsetse flies

Majesco Entertainment has a new Wii game for budding zoologists who prefer the safety of a suburban living room to a battered Range Rover and a wild-eyed tour guide.

Wild Earth: African Safari (about $40) would not be Teddy Roosevelt's idea of an African adventure. Rather than knocking down bulls with heavy shot, your job in this sim is to take pictures for a bossy travel journalist, without disturbing your subjects or their habitats.

Your targets, which you access on foot, on wheels, and from the air, include giraffes and elephants, vultures and hyenas - more than a dozen animals, all told. There are 11 photo missions. You can also see things from some of the animals' points of view.

If you do break the game's Prime Directive of noninterference, you lose points of some sort, and eventually "lose" the game.

So shame on me for trying to provoke the great elephants into a stampede. One bull turned on me, and I thought I'd be flattened. He simply roared, and I lost points.

For all of its color and zoological notes, Wild Earth has the feel of a game farm: Everything seems to be just a few yards. The world music in this game doesn't help, either. Even if it has strands of authenticity to it, the melodies sound too slickly produced, as if from an LA studio.

Innovative last week

A hospital noise monitor for newborns

Not every baby goes home the day he's born. Some must spend time in the NICU, an acronym and a place that many parents know all too well. The NICU can be a bright and noisy place (not to mention scary), and some studies suggests this excessive stimulation can damage a baby's nervous system. However, a new device that hangs from a crib can help calm the racket around newborns. Called the Sonicu (sonicu.net), it listens to environmental noise and flashes green (green is good), yellow, or red as noise reaches levels that the device's makers have deemed dangerous to newborns.