Ending a long period of speculation, LG revealed that it will have new TVs of the extra-large, super duper high-res variety to show off during CES next week. While that's not really a surprise, one thing we should note is that all of them are flat -- no anti-curved glasses necessary here. Spanning eight different product lines (UC9, UB9800, UF9500, UF9400, UF8500, UF7700, UF6800 and UF6700), LG's Ultra HD TVs have more than just the quantum dot and webOS 2.0 Smart TV updates we've heard about. They're also thinner than ever (of course), with promised upgrades for the color balance and black levels. The embedded 4K video decoder can handle 30fps or 60fps inputs and is "future-proof" for future standards, but we haven't heard specific details about things like expanded color depth.

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Samsung has tackled just about every kind of speaker you can imagine, but it hasn't had an answer to hot-selling 360-degree speakers like the UE Boom. Well, that changes today: the Korean firm has unveiled the WAM6500 and WAM7500, its first compact one-piece speakers to promise room-filling sound. Both center around a "ring radiator" that pipes audio in every direction while supposedly striking a careful balance between bass and treble. If you ask us, though, they're as much about the "premium" styling as anything else. The portable 6500 (above) looks like the kettle from an avant garde kitchen, while the tabletop-oriented 7500 (below) could easily double as a 31st-century desk lamp. Samsung hasn't divulged pricing, but these fashion-forward designs will likely command a premium.

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Getting to and from your New Year's shindig can be an expensive hassle, even if you're not driving: you're either competing for a conventional (and thus costly) taxi or bracing yourself for the surge pricing of ridesharing services like Uber. Flywheel may have a relatively cheap solution for that night on the town, though. The app-based taxi service is running a promotion that charges you a flat $10 to get to or from your New Year's party in Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco or Seattle. The only stipulations for this low fare are that you travel between 8PM and 3AM, and that your ride wouldn't normally cost more than $50. You may not get from one end of the city to the other on the cheap, then, but the deal could save you from starting 2015 with a gigantic credit card bill.

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It's no secret that we live in an increasingly disposable world. Where once we would spend hours or even days repairing and customizing our gadgets and home appliances, now we just replace them when something breaks or fails to live up to expectations. Danielle George, professor of radio frequency engineering at the University of Manchester, may sound like a bit of a crank when she complains that people under 40 expect everything to "just work," but she has a point. If your Nexus 4 starts seeming a little slow, most people don't wipe it out to get a fresh start or install a lightweight ROM. They just go out and buy the Nexus 6. If your laptop battery barely lasts an hour, you don't crack open your MacBook Air and swap in a new one; you use it as an excuse to pick up the latest generation of Apple's ultra-light machine.

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Apple's still the king of Christmas when it comes to gadgets, but new holiday data reveals some intriguing new trends. iPhones and iPads accounted for over half (51 percent) of new devices activated during Christmas week, but Microsoft's Lumia devices actually made a decent showing as well with the third place spot (5.8 percent of activations), according to mobile analytics firm Flurry. Samsung, naturally, came in second with 18 percent of activations, while Sony and LG just barely made it into the top four with under 2 percent each. Both Samsung and Android remain the top smartphone maker and platform overall, respectively, but the holidays seem to indicate that, for most consumers, if you want to get someone a nice gift you're more likely to go Apple.

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We have a soft spot for all things outer space here at Engadget, so naturally an EP of tunes constructed entirely with audio clips from said exploration caught our eye... and ears. NASA recently released a massive library of sound files on SoundCloud, including rocket engine sounds and radio transmissions -- even President John F. Kennedy makes an appearance. Two musicians found the collection while working on another space-related project and decided to make 80UA: a four-track EP of "space music" that's constructed using only the space agency's collected audio. Of course, the clips were tweaked to fit each song, but all of the source material comes from NASA's archive. After roping in a few pals to help, Davide Cairo and Giacomo Muzzacato released the effort for free via Bad Panda Records, and as you might expect, SoundCloud was the appropriate landing spot. Head there to download the tracks, or jump past the break for a quick listen.

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Before Wiis and PlayStations, before you boasted about how many bits your console had, and before Ralph Baer's Odyssey first hit Sears shelves, a bored physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory cobbled together a little digital diversion called Tennis for Two. Those early days of gaming were spent lobbing a lurid green ball back and forth across a tiny oscilloscope screen, so it's only appropriate that you can now tear through Quake's corridors on a similarly screwy screen. Finnish programmer/artist Pekka Väänänen runs through the process of converting an intensely visual game into a series of sounds that an aging Hitachi oscilloscope interprets as the building blocks of a world here. The end result? Well, it's nothing short of mesmerizing, a simultaneously foreign and familiar take on an experience most of us have long since committed to memory. Don't just take our word for it, though: There's video evidence waiting for you after the jump.

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Kim Dotcom has been touting development of a secure chat service for more than a year, but it looks like those plans are finally firming up. He now claims that the project will launch "soon," and suggests that it might be named MegaChat. Whatever it's called, it still amounts to a more NSA-resistant alternative to Skype. You'll get a "fully encrypted," web-based chat and video calling service that lets you quickly send large files (through Mega, naturally). That's all well and good, although it'll be better when Dotcom has something you can actually try -- it's easy to make big promises, after all, and this internet mogul won't recover his lost fortunes without a real product.

[Image credit: Thierry Ehrmann, Flickr]

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If you're reading this, then you might not be watching HBO Signature's The Wire HD marathon as it covers season four, which some consider to be the best in the series. Of course, you can jump in anywhere you want with the remastered version thanks to HBO Go, although series creator David Simon points to the 4x3 DVD release as the best way to see the show as originally intended. This week there's the usual slew of New Year's Eve celebrations and bowl games (with the addition of a new playoff wrinkle), ABC is kicking off 2015 with its new show Galavant, and PBS has season five of Downton Abbey. Netflix's introduction to 2015 starts with every episode of Friends (but watch Bad Boys, The Breakfast Club, Spaceballs and Happy Gilmore before they fade out Wednesday night), while on Blu-ray we have Denzel Washington in The Equalizer and Kevin Smith's horror flick Tusk. Gamers can dig in to the Halo 5 beta, but there's not much else new out there for now. Look after the break to check out each day's highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).

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Aphex Twin (aka Richard James) is known for creating original, complex sounds whenever he can, but his next creation might just take the cake. He tells Groove that he hired a programmer to develop music software based on mutation. Once you give the app an audio sample, it automatically generates six variants on that and asks you to pick your favorite before going on to create more variations -- think of it as natural selection for sweet beats. The software still "needs to be tweeked," and there's no mention of a public launch, but the early output reportedly sounds "totally awesome." Don't be shocked if one of James' post-Syro albums uses this software to create some truly one-of-a-kind tunes.

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