Hold onto your dollar bills, y'all -- the WhiteKnightTwo is set to be unveiled (and swooned over) on Monday. We knew the fabled space tourism vehicle was set to be unwrapped this month, but knowing that said event is merely hours away just gets our juices flowin'. Richard Branson and "other dignitaries" are preparing to officially launch the ship at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California (a short drive from Zzyzx, we hear), and we're still being led to believe that test flights should begin as early as this fall. Hey, at least you know what you're doing next year if your ship comes in.

[Via The Register]

If you're one who likes to roam solo, but still yearns for that oh-so-knowledgeable tour guide when strolling through historic landmarks or animal havens, Bar Z Adventures has just the thing to quench your curiosity while on the trails. The GPS Ranger (and self-explanatory Zoo Ranger) handheld devices are being aimed at historic sites, monuments, national parks, cruise lines, and zoos in hopes of giving tourists of any tongue the chance to soak up information about the area they're in without having to play follow the leader. The Windows CE-powered unit sports a 3.5-inch outdoor viewable LCD, 4GB of storage, and integrated GPS that allows a plethora of content ranging from movie / audio clips to lines of text to be displayed when the user encounters certain geographical coordinates. Multimedia tidbits describing statues, animals, battlefields, and essentially anything associated with a given attraction can be triggered when approaching a given landmark, and the device also packs support for a multitude of languages to cater to those international visitors. While we aren't sure how much these tour enhancing gizmos will inflate your activity costs (or how many jobs they'll replace), we can't wait to see the movie clip that gets queued up for these guys.

[Via jkOnTheRun]