A recent (still running) tradeshow called "Demo 2006" presents new products to make your mundane existence more pleasurable. Most of the products displayed seem to be in the "coming soon" category, but one that might be worth watching for is the:

USBGuitar

[quote]
The First USB-Enabled Guitar
Want to plug your musical instrument into your PC? Up until now, you needed a bunch of add-on devices to do so. The $800 iGuitar USB changes all that. It's a fully SID-compliant USB device that plugs into a PC or Macintosh and works with standard music and MIDI software. An on-board A/D controller samples the analog signals from the magnetic pickups and delivers a 48/16 signal (slightly better than CD quality). It also includes a DSP that converts notes into MIDI signals. That lets it drive notation software, allowing you to compose with the guitar. It also turns the guitar into any instrument through MIDI samples. I saw the founder play a harp, French horn and more, simply by strumming the guitar. It'll be available later this year.
[end quote]

Since we have a number of people involved in "small run" publishing, some of our folk might be interested in a new service(?) called "Blurb" that is also reported:

[quote]
Make Your Own Book at Blurb
Vanity press is expensive, so unless you're a famous author, you probably won't be making your own books. But with the new Blurb service you can. In this picture, Blurb sucked in a blog and converted it into a 175-page coffee table book for about $30
[end quote]

Links above are to all that's reported at the single "picture" for each of these items. If you'd like to look at all the other miracles of modern technology thus far cited in the report from this convention, you can try the PC Magazine Photo Blog

None of the "infobits" give enough information to be very useful, and I haven't tried web searching to see if there's more available. Just a "headsup" in case of interest.

John