It’s Christmas day, so we’re asking you to go a little easy on Peek here, but we’ve got a sneaking suspicion that our request will be cutely ignored in comments below. This week’s episode of How Would You Change features Peek’s latest handheld — you know, the one that only does Twitter. We didn’t find the creature too incredibly useful / valuable during our time with it, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be molded into a pristine object of desire. Speaking of which, how would you go about tweaking or overhauling the TwitterPeek? Make the screen resolution higher? Change the user interface? Add support for apps, email and calling? Make Peek pay you to use it? Sound off below!

How would you change the TwitterPeek? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Dec 2009 23:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Windows/Mac/Linux/and more: XBMC is a killer open-source, cross-platform media center, and today they’ve released XBMC 9.11, introducing a whole new default look and feel, and it’s very friendly on the eyes.

Called Confluence, the new look blends some of the best features of XBMC’s previous default skin (PM3.HD) with several other popular skins for pretty impressive results. It’s definitely a different look from what we’ve seen in the Boxee beta, but the two media centers continue to deliver really impressive (and most importantly free) offerings.

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(See all the images on one page here.)

If you’re a BitTorrent lover but aren’t too keen on all the pop-ups, racy ads, and clutter that’s everywhere on most torrent sites, new BitTorrent site Nerrot is the cleanest, most bare-bones torrent site we’ve ever seen.

Just head to the homepage (this is also the only page on the site), type in the most accurate search you can come up with, and submit your search. Nerrot searches for the closest match with the highest ratio of seeders/the healthiest swarm, then automatically downloads what it determines to be the best torrent file for your search.

Want a better shot at getting a lost digital camera back? If your finder has any heart at all, a multi-frame photo message will give both motivation and instructions. Check out Andrew McDonald’s smirk-inducing series as an example.

Children’s author and blogger Andrew McDonald never deletes 25 photos on his camera’s memory card—presumably kept in a separate folder from the standard image outputs. Flipped through on a camera viewfinder, they offer a pretty amazing personal story about the importance of that camera, the unique humanness of the owner, and, most importantly, an email address for coordinating a camera return.

If the San Francisco Department of the Environment gets its way, starting as soon as next month Bay Area residents might start noticing the radiation levels of cellphones displayed prominently next to their respective price at retail outlets. This is, of course, despite no definitive research that the handsets cause harm and the FCC’s insistence that the devices sold to consumers are safe. The proposal is being endorsed by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who as it’s noted is not about to stop using his iPhone anytime soon. Not to worry, Maine, you’ll still keep the top spot for most ridiculous cellphone warning label.

San Francisco considers displaying phone radiation levels next to price tag originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 02:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ever since Jeff Han demoed his Multi-Touch Workstation at the 2006 TED Conference, the world has been waiting for a high resolution sensory work experience. As a generation of hunched night creatures with intimate knowledge of our chiropractors, we’ve suffered and conformed to our traditional interfaces for too long. Touch was the future of workstations. But as articulated by ReadWriteWeb, the upcoming Apple tablet is not the workstation of the near future. It simply isn’t practical. For those of us who still want to gawk at the cool regardless of its practicality, here is an assortment of 2009’s most interesting interfaces.

What a crazy 10 years, right guys? It’s really flown past; the highs, the lows, the stuff in the middle that didn’t seem very impressive one way or another. For our final Engadget Show of the decade, we asked site founder Peter Rojas to join us for a look back at our picks for the most important and / or interesting gadget developments since 2000. A hardcore crowd came out just after a gigantic snowstorm to witness the proceedings, and now you get your chance to see how it all went down. This is a long one folks, so grab some popcorn and settle in for the show!

You’re probably aware that 64-bit and 32-bit versions of your operating system exist, but apart from ascribing to a bigger-is-better philosophy, you may have no idea what separates the two. The question: Should you use a 64-bit version of Windows, and why?

More and more frequently, users are installing the 64-bit version of their operating system of choice over the less capable 32-bit version. But most people don’t really have a full understanding of what the difference really is. Below, we’re taking a look at the most important differences so you can better understand what you gain (and potentially lose) if you upgrade to the 64-bit version of your OS. (The post focuses on Windows.)

We hate to be the bringers of bad news, but it looks like the Archos 9 might be serving as a bit of a morality tale, showing why and how PC hardware and software might not be quite ready for the large form factor tablet experience. That’s not to say there aren’t some plusses to the device pointed out by UMPC Portal in its review, like the great build quality and style of the tablet, the sensitive, flush touchscreen, and some great connectivity, but the sum seems less than its parts. The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the 1.1GHz Atom Z510 processor, which is sluggish and single-threaded, and Windows 7 Starter, which is lacking in the standard Windows 7 tablet functionality. We don’t know all the reasoning at play here, but the result is a slow computer with a hacked-on touchscreen keyboard at a $550 pricepoint that doesn’t the hit handheld UMPC size sweetspot and can hardly stand against a netbook in cost or utility. Sounds kind of mean when we say it like that, doesn’t it?

Archos 9 reviewed: too big, too slow, too ‘Starter’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Mixer Labs, the company behind GeoAPI.com. GeoAPI is a service that allows developers to easily add geolocation data to their apps. Twitter just launched its own geotagging API a few weeks ago. Even though a number of mobile and desktop Twitter apps like Seesmic Web and Birdfeed support Twitter’s geotagging API, only a very small number of users are currently making use of this feature.

Sponsor

According to Twitter founder Ev Williams, the company “will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities.”