Slipknot promise to play 'biggest and most emotional'

The 'Spit It Out' group will return to performing for the first time since bassist Paul Grey died of a drugs overdose last May, and although they admit it will be hard without him, they will put their all into their shows.

Percussionist Shawn Crahan said:"I'll be in tears before I even hit the first stair. And I need it very much - and we need it. So I'm looking forward to it, but it's gonna be very hard."

Drummer Joey Jordison added: "I've been in rehearsal over the last few weeks with our new bass player, Donnie Steele, and my feeling is that these will probably be the biggest and most emotional shows that we've ever had.

"I'm just speaking for myself and the rest of the band that we can't wait. Everything's on fire right now."

The pair also confirmed they are hoping the group will continue, write more material and release a fifth album after the tour is done.

Shawn said: "Do I want another Slipknot record? Absolutely. I'm not a fortune teller. Do I know if that will happen? I don't know."
Joey added: "As far as I'm concerned, yeah. I personally have, now- I don't know, probably over 17 songs."

Slipknot will headline the Sonisphere festival, which takes place in various countries across Europe, this summer.

On the rocks alert: More Bachelor noise.

Publications: Weekly Life & Style, OK!
Date: 9 May 2011

After Teen Mom, the reality TV series the tabloids love the most that annoys me the most is The Bachelor. These romances almost never work out and we get rehashes of the debris for months and months after the show goes off the air.

Even Kendra Wilkinson doesn't bug me as much as these clowns.

Anyway, here are the headlines.

• OK!: Emily: Why I gave Brad his ring back
• Weekly Life & Style: How Brad betrayed Emily

Okay, okay. We get it. He's a heel and she's a flake. Let's move on, shall we?

On the rocks alert: Sandra betrayed again.

Publication: Star
Date: 9 May 2011

Once again, Jesse James is back on the cover of a supermarket rag and he blames Sandra Bullock for the fact he can't keep his penis in his pants. Pretty much the exact same story won Meanest Story of the Week way back in August of last year.

I didn't even think about nominating it for Meanest Story this week because it is such old news. Jesse is fading from the spotlight and the faster that happens, the better.

Panasonic, Yahoo, more admit defeat, sign deal with Klausner

It's easy to mock the little guy when he takes a handful of giant corporations to court. Such litigious overzealousness usually gets tangled up or tossed out altogether -- Klausner Technologies, however, is laughing all the way to the bank, with a stellar track record taking on some of tech's biggest names over the past few years. To date, the company has scored wins in visual voicemail patent battles with Apple, Google, Verizon, LG, and Vonage -- the company also struck a deal with Sprint, though presumably with less teeth-pulling. This week, Klausner added four more big wins to the list, inking deals with Panasonic, Yahoo, Qwest Communications, and Avaya in the wake of suits against the tech firms. The company still has ongoing battles with RIM and Cisco that will hopefully stay civil. We'd hate to see someone send a visual voicemail they'd regret later.

HBO Go mobile app hands-on (video)

HBO Go has been live on the iTunes App Store and Android Market for just a few short hours, but we've already put it through the paces, poking and prodding on our iPad and iPhone, to see what all the hubbub's about. We're pleased with the hefty amount of video that HBO's offering up here, and the interface is pretty intuitive as well. Still, browsing through the myriad content on the iPad's larger screen is definitely a bit more leisurely than on the iPhone's 3.5-inch counterpart. Both apps sport the same feature set, so searching for content, saving things to watch later, and blasting updates to Facebook and Twitter will work well on whichever device you choose. To make the deal even sweeter, it's free for current subscribers, so there's really no reason to not check it out for yourself -- unless you don't have HBO, in which case we have a video walkthrough embedded after the break.

Update: Sorry Android users, but it looks like the only supported versions for the Android app are 2.1 - 2.3.3. However, we're getting reports that it does function in the browser -- so long as you've got Flash installed, of course. We're also told that the HBO Go site works just fine on the PlayBook as well.

Love Bird Alert™: Jen's falling for Bradley Cooper!

Publication: In Touch
Date: 9 May 2011

Jennifer Aniston and her stunningly bad luck with men is one of the stories the supermarket rags will never abandon. This week, In Touch has her head over heels for Bradley Cooper. Here are the headlines.

• Jen falls for Bradley: Yes, she's in love!
• From steamy texts to talks of their "future together", why friends fear Jen's moving too fast… again!

Both commenter #1 Karen Zipdrive and I have our somewhat exotic theories as to what has made Jen's love life a shambles, but maybe that second sentence explains the situation more simply.

She's really, really clingy and nobody likes that.

LCD-equipped Cisco REN301 Residential Gateway stops by FCC, reveals all its dirty secrets

Ah, the all too familiar WiFi troubleshooting dance: the network goes down, you dig through the closet for an Ethernet cable, saunter over to the router, jack yourself in, type in the IP address, and start poking around at your settings. Cisco's REN301 Residential Gateway (a fancy way of saying "router"), which just passed through the FCC, could make things at least a little bit easier thanks to its built-in LCD screen and capacitive touch controls. Wave your hand over the display to bring it to life and you can check the status of your connections, modify some basic settings, and peruse a log of calls that have come in over the SIP VoIP phone jacks. The REN301, which has a single band 802.11b/g/n radio, can also turn USB drives and SD cards into NAS storage -- the company even throws in a 32GB card to get you started. We don't have a price or release date, but since it's been splayed open for federal regulators we probably won't have to wait long. There's a couple of pics of the router's UI after the break.