Being a fan of the classic NES Duck Hunt, I have been anxious to test out this new live action mechanical version from Hammacher Schlemmer. I’ll say this: It’s fun while it lasts.

The Price

Available later this month for $30.

What’s Good

I've never hunted actual ducks, but I would imagine that the real experience offers up a similar (albeit more intense) mixture of fleeting thrills, unpredictability and satisfying violence as the game—except this way you don't actually have to kill anything. Plus the action sounds the gun makes when pumping the forearm and pulling the trigger are a nice touch.

What’s Bad

As I mentioned earlier, this game is fun in short increments. The typical flight lasted anywhere between 5 and 15 seconds depending on how I set the directional control pad near the tail. As you can see in the videos above, setting the tab for a straighter flight tends to keep the duck up in the air longer while setting it more to the left or right results in shorter, more compact flights. Either way, the flights were inconsistent and it was difficult to get hits before the duck glided naturally to the ground. They say you can play this game indoors, and that’s probably true if “indoors” happens to be a gymnasium.

You will break Duck Hunter. Seriously, even if you didn’t get tired of the game after a few hours of flying, you will probably break it well before that. The infrared gun feels cheap and the bird is nothing more than a piece of styrofoam with a few bits of plastic and wings that have about the same tensile strength as masking tape. Every time I pushed the duck down on the charging post located on the barrel of the gun I thought I would snap something. And that happens a lot because you need to charge it for 10 seconds after each flight.

The Verdict

The $30 price tag isn't a fortune, but that's probably more than you want to spend on something that will end up forgotten or broken in a few weeks. Early on, there was talk of a premium, $40 version that could be remotely controlled by a second person—I'm not sure what happened with that, but it might have been a worthwhile upgrade.

Definitely feels like a live action version of the Duck Hunt NES game.

Gun sounds and the mid-air “stumbles” when the duck is hit are a nice touch.

Flights are inconsistent. Patterns are hard to contain, so it is best used in a large open space.

The equipment feels cheap and fragile.

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The full Office suite will actually be installed on these computers, but it’ll remained crippled until whatever time the user decides to purchase an upgrade from their PC seller, who will simply hand them a card with a license on it. It probably sounds like good news to people who don’t really need Microsoft Office to do any sort of heavy lifting, but with so many good Office alternatives for those folks, it’s probably not going to be the best option out there, either. [Betanews]

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We’ve seen it teased, but now we’ve seen it in real life. No real details, but it is really effin thin, like it could slice a MacBook Air in half. And a belly shot, even closer:

Mozilla's popular web browser, Firefox, is quite a big name in the realm of the Internet. It's multi-platform, easy to use, and packs a extremely vast amount of add-ons to improve the user experience. In addition to this, it's about to get a new version. The newest version of the browser, currently in development, is 3.6; it's not a huge upgrade, as Mozilla plans to save the bigger changes for version 4.0, but it's still packing some nice improvements. According to The Register, the new version will come with tweaks which improve the TraceMonkey javascript engine, an "optimized session restore", plus additions to the CSS technology in the browser and improved page rendering speed.

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Winnipeg is back in the NHL rumour mill after a Hockey Night in Canada commentator speculated on the weekend that a group of investors in Toronto is interested in moving the Atlanta Thrashers.

NPD’s Household Penetration Study found a 3% uptick in Mac households for 2009. This makes sense! What’s surprising (or not) is that of the 12% of homes with a Mac, less than 2% are Mac-exclusive.

The 2% figure is extrapolated from NPD’s less direct assessment:

[A]pproximately 12 percent of all U.S. computer owning households own an Apple computer, up from 9 percent in 2008. While Apple ownership is growing, those households are decidedly in favor of mixed system environments. Of those 12 percent, nearly 85 percent also own a Windows-based PC.

At first glance, these stats almost seem wrong, but when you start think about it, they make sense: The survey polled "households," which, on account of grandma's Compaq or your roommate's gaming PC, clobbers the exclusivity figure. (I live in what any reasonable person would call a "Mac household"—three people who use Macs almost exclusively—but that little Acer netbook sitting on the table means we're not.)

Plus, PCs are cheap and they linger, and Macs, being pricier, tend to find their way into richer households, where more than one computer is almost a given. That, combined the fact that most Macs sold are laptops, and therefore a little more likely to be a supplemental computer, makes the 2% figure look a little less crazy, but still, 2%? Fanboys, you’re slacking. [NPD via Macrumors]

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Windows only: Portable application NirLauncher bundles 100+ of the best NirSoft utilities into a single launcher window, and even allows you to add your own utilities to make a killer flash drive toolkit.

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file, you can extract the contents into a new folder on your desktop or flash drive, and then launch the NirLauncher.exe application from that folder, which will give you quick access to the 100+ NirSoft utilities included in the package.

It's important to note that because of the system-tweaking, hacking nature of the NirSoft utilities, they sometimes come through as a false positive on your anti-malware utility—but that doesn't mean that they are infected with a virus. Depending on the type of system protection that you have installed, you might have to remove the files from the quarantine folder in order to use all of the utilities.

Tweaking the Launcher

You can edit the included NirSoft.nlp file in a text editor to add or remove the utilities that you prefer—or you can even create a new .NLP file with your own customized settings. Just make sure to use relative paths to the executable files to make sure that they will be portable when you put it onto your flash drive.

The NirSoft blog even provides a launcher file for the suite of awesome, portable, system-tweaking tools from SysInternals—simply download the launcher file and extract all of the SysInternals applications into a folder, and then use the Launcher -> Add Software Package menu to add the entire group into the application. Once you've got them there, you can switch between the NirSoft and SysInternals groups with the F3 key, or through the Launcher menu.

NirLauncher is a free download for Windows only. What applications would you include in your own portable flash drive toolkit? Tell us in the comments. Thanks, Scott!

Everything you need to feel smart again.

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