We've seen wirelessly-enabled fish tanks, gardens and even sprinkler systems, so it's about time we saw a solution to blast out aromas in less-than-pleasant areas without having to wander in there with our poor nostrils exposed. Air Aroma's Arologic claims to be the world's first wireless scenting contraption, giving owners the ability to control a network of scent diffusers remotely. Within multiple "scent zones," scenters (that's what the cool kids are calling 'em these days) can "activate a scent, vary the intensity or even change the aroma." Regrettably, there's no pricing information to mull over just yet, but Arologic should be available in most of the firm's diffusers sometime in Q3.

You heard that right, folks. Supposedly, AIBO is back... with a vengeance. According to rumors, the feisty-but-killed robo-dog from Sony is making a comeback with a new paintjob and whole slew of fresh features. First and foremost, the re-upped model will be tailored to interface wirelessly with your PSP and PS3, will have a built in headcam which utilizes a motion sensor and facial recognition, and can stream its POV video over WiFi to your system. In addition, you'll apparently get to remotely trigger the bot with your handheld and control its movements, plus you can set it to "guard" your house (though we're pretty sure most enterprising burglars will just turn the little dude on its side if provoked). Of course, right now this is speculation -- Stuff Magazine's piece on the subject (above) gives the rumored bot a 53-percent chance of becoming a reality -- but there certainly seems to be some meat behind these murmurs. C'mon Sony -- the pup deserves a second chance.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Granted, Telekinesis is fine and all if you're dealing with a Mac at home, but for those trying to get a little remote access to their PCs through the iPhone, this solution ought to do the trick. Natetrue -- who was apparently frustrated by the mobile's inability to talk to his Wintel remotely from day one -- has taken the TightVNC client and apparently modified the application to play fairly nicely with Apple's handset. More specifically, you can use the iPhone's zooming and panning capabilities to move around your desktop, and all the clicking, typing, and drag 'n drop actions you'd expect from such a program are all being reported as fully functional. Best of all, all the code and insight you need are available gratis, so be sure and hit the read link to get your download on. Oh, and do share how things work out, wouldya?

[Via The Boy Genius Report]

While there's certainly a variety of options to keep watch and protect your property from curious intruders, the latest branch of vCrib gives a new meaning to being on guard. Crafted by the designer of the Virtual Crib home automation software, the USB BB gun sports automatic firing, manual reloading, and the ability to fire based on commands given remotely on a PC. Moreover, the weapon actually packs a webcam on the barrel, allowing users to login via computer, tilt / swivel the gun with simple mouse flicks, and fire away if you spot any intruders within its broad line of sight. It shouldn't need mentioning that we'd make absolutely sure our landlord was cool with mounting a remotely-controlled weapon in the window, but if you need to take home security into your own hands (without actually being at home), be sure to click on through to see this controversial creation spittin' hot fury.

If your remote access setup just ain't cutting it, RingCube Technologies has developed software that allows your iPod, external HDD, USB drive, or other fancy form of storage to be utilized as a "private and portable PC." MojoPac manages to cram your Windows XP desktop, settings, accounts, and even programs and preferences onto any portable storage medium to be accessed as a virtual desktop. The software essentially relocates your data to an on-the-go device, while it borrows the resources from any other Windows XP computer you manage to locate. RingCube touts the software's ability to run "side-by-side" with the host PC, allowing you to work in both domains while keeping all of your private info secure; since all data transmissions reportedly occur on your MojoPac-equipped storage device, no traces of your work (in cache form or otherwise) are saved on the host PC. Of course, the utility of such a setup is greatly reliant on the speed of your storage device, so attempting to render a Photoshop document from a USB 1.1 thumb drive would likely create a fair amount of frustration. Nevertheless, satisfying your curiosity here won't cost a dime -- MojoPac is currently available for a free month-long trial, after which the "introductory price" is $29.99 for the initial license ($14.99 for add-ons), while the late bloomers will pay nearly double that.

[Via SiliconValley]

Despite Major League Baseball's disdain for the practice, place-shifting is a hot feature that will only get more popular as it becomes easier for people to stream their content -- and software company SageTV is at the forefront of the movement to make that happen. Less than two months after adding the feature to its media center package for Windows, the company is supposedly on the verge of offering similar "slinging" functionality to open-source fanatics, with GigaOM reporting that we can expect to see SageTV Media Center for Linux V5 announced within the week. Until the official unveiling, not much is known about this product save for its Media Extender support, although we've also learned that Mac users will be getting their own version at some unspecified future date. There are certainly other ways for the Linux faithful to place-shift their content -- we recently saw a rather convoluted how-to on Engadget Mobile which uses MythTV -- but if you're willing to pay for commercial software, it sounds like Sage's upcoming solution will be the easiest way to go.

Those of you who do the home theater thing from your PC and are for some reason unhappy with the free streaming service offered by Orb now have a new way of "slinging" your content to a remote computer with SageTV's Placeshifter add-on. The $30 software, which requires the $80 SageTV media center package, offers remote access to videos, music, photos, and if you have a TV tuner card or USB device, both live and recorded programming. Cnet got a "first look" at Placeshifter in action, and reports spotty but acceptable performance, with the delays and artifact-infested video we've come to expect accept from these remote streaming services. While we're pretty happy with our free Windows Media Center and Orb setup, if you already own SageTV, the one-time fee might be worth it to free your content with the knowledge that someone's there to troubleshoot the inevitable problems.

[Via PVR Wire]