Way back on March 8, 1979, the Philips electronics company held a press conference announcing some sort of crazy new invention called the Philips Compact Disc.  It wasn’t until three years later that the first CD, Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, was released to the general public.  Nearly 30 years later, the CD has bested the vinyl record, the cassette tape, and the 8-track to become the premier physical media for music.  If you’ve ever wondered why CDs are the way they are, Mental Floss has 10 great facts about CDs, including why they’re the length they are, the first million-selling CD, and the ultimate in CD sound quality.

Even today, with digital downloading on the rise, the CD is still the de rigeur format for music and looks to be this way for the foreseeable future.  Given how things are working, the CD will probably remain the physical format of choice for music until people no longer want physical copies of their purchases.  So, basically, forever.  Or at least until people start buying Blu-ray discs featuring entire musical collections from certain bands no longer recording.

If you’re looking to pick up a Blu-ray player for your home theater system, then Marantz has a deal for you.  If you pick up one of Marantz’s Blu-ray players, they’re offering a free Roku box for your purchase.  Not only will you be getting your Blu-ray and DVD on, you’ll also be able to stream content from Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, and more!  Best of all, it’s a Roku HD player, so you won’t miss out on the picture quality.

You can check out the Marantz Bly-ray player line-up here, but bear in mind that Marantz is the top of the line in BD technology.  That means you’ll be paying out a pretty penny for your Blu-ray, from $6000 to about $550 for the cheap version. That’s a nice bonus if you’re in the market for a Marantz, but otherwise, you’re putting down a lot of money that you could spend on other things.  For example, here’s some Blu-ray comparisons.

A new Roku HD box is only $99 at Amazon.  A new PS3 is $370 at Amazon.  Or, if you’re really looking to save some cash for this feature, you can get an LG BD 370 networkable Blu-ray player for $170 that both plays Blu-ray discs and streams Netflix and other on-demand video.  For $270 plus tax you could have the same setup that would cost you $550 via Marantz.  For $470, you can have the same setup with the ability to play video games.

The PS3 is supposedly still the best Blu-ray player on the market for the price, according to some guy I talked with at Best Buy this weekend, so shop wisely.

Have you ever wondered how people woke up in the old days?  I’m not talking about the 80’s, either; I’m talking the 1880’s.  You know, waking up for work isn’t a modern invention, but the older generations had some pretty clever ways of getting up in the morning, most of which still work today.  Mental Floss put together a list of 7 ways older generations got up on time.

Among the more ingenious methods (that still works today) is overdrinking.  Basically before bed, you drink a bunch of liquid and in a few hours, you’ll wake up to use the bathroom (or wake up wet, depending on how heavy a sleeper you are).  I knew people in college who did that to wake up for tests and such.

Today, I have no less than five alarms to make sure that A) I wake up on time and B) I don’t just turn the alarm off and go back to bed without knowing I’ve done so.  My alarms are set for 5 AM, 6:15, 6:45, and 7:00.  Now that I’m used to get up early, waking up at 5 isn’t so hard, but it still helps to make sure I’ve got backup plans in place, just in case I can’t drag out of bed in time.  They’re all digital alarms, though; there’s not a clepsydra in the bunch!

Right now, I’m in the horrible process of looking for a house.  I imagine it’d be easier with a Realtor on my side, but I’ll get there eventually.  Right now I’m just trying to score something good for as cheaply as I can, even if it needs work.  The one good thing about that is, when it needs work, I can pretty much do whatever I want with the place.

Maybe I can take a cue from the Burntwire Brothers from the Acaeum D&D forums, who took two years and built their own epic Dungeons & Dragons room.  Just check out these images of this awesome room.  Yes, it looks cool, but that’s not the half of it.

While it looks rustic, the room is actually high tech.  The lights come on when someone enters the room via a hidden motion detector hidden behind the keyring by the door (you need the skeleton key to get out of the room).  There’s a dimmer switch.  Within those pillars, there are hidden speakers and a surround sound system in the walls.  There’s also a hidden fog machine and a strobe light to set the mood for the games.  How cool is that?!

The windows are stained glass, there are four hidden closest behind those portcullis gates, and the room is also decorated with framed D&D artwork and props from the first Dungeons and Dragons movie.  Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got the ultimate geek playground.  I’m completely green.

I know you guys can’t wait any longer, but you’re going to have to.  If you’re one of the many Mac heads looking to get your grubby little paws on Apple’s long-awaited iPad, you’re just going to have to cool your jets.  While there are a lot of questions still yet to be answered about the iPad, we do know a few things for certain, thanks to an Apple press release.

For starters, the iPad will be officially launched on April 3, 2010.  Preorders will start on March 12th, so this time next week it’s time to get to the Apple store, presumably early.  At least for the wifi version, anyway.  Apparently, the 3G version has been delayed by a month for some unexplained reason (probably to soak early adopters twice for the same product).  Late April is also when the rest of the world is going to get their iPads released, too. Maybe that’s got something to do with it.

Either way, now you know when you can get in line to get your hands on the next new revolutionary product from Apple.  Well, okay, not revolutionary, just next product from Cupertino.

These days, the incandescent light bulb is soon to be a thing of the past.  More and more, people are turning to LED lights and compact fluorescent lights to illuminate their home.  They use less electricity and are generally cheaper to produce.  They don’t provide the same type of light, but they’re better than candles.  Unless, of course, that candle is shaped like an incandescent bulb!

The light bulb candle comes from systemdesignstudios, a great group of designers.  The faux lightbulb is very well designed.  The wick burns on the inside of the bulb, allowing the bulb to keep its shape all the way to the bottom.  The candle’s light coming through the bulb allows it to cast light more like an actual bulb, rather than a candle.  And, of course, the bottom is screw patterned, in order to allow the bulb-candle to fit into any standard lamp.

I’m not sure how the wax would harm the lamp, but if I had a cool old lamp I couldn’t rewire, I’d definitely do this.

Full Infographic via Pingdom.

Okay, so the Playstation 3 outage from yesterday wasn’t actually related to Y2K, but it may as well have been.  After all, the big fear of Y2K was that date processing difficulties involving the flop-over from 99 to 00 would permanently disable and/or damage all manner of computer software, most of which involves keeping the date properly.  The thing that disabled the PS3 yesterday?  A calendar error.

For some reason, the old-style Playstation 3 console believed 2010 was a leap year.  So when 2/28 became 3/1, the internal clock of a lot of PS3s said 2/29 which caused those Playstation 3 consoles not to connect to the Playstation Network.  It also disabled the offline game-playing abilities of a lot of other PS3 games.

The glitch was a pretty bad one for Sony, as it hit PS3 units world-wide before mysteriously correcting itself.  Why did it resolve itself?  Nobody really knows, and Sony’s not explaining matters.  They probably reset the secret Sony fail timer on the old units.

You know, it could be easy to treat this video extolling the virtues of the Creative Technology keyboard as a joke, but at the end?  This guy gets really good.  Impressively good, in fact.  As it turns out, rock and roll is easy.  Well, not for me, because I can’t play anything, but for this keyboard salesman.

So are you interested in obtaining a copy of Beatles: Rock Band?  Well, don’t pay full price; Amazon’s got a deal for you.  Specifically, the Deal of the Day.

The Beatles edition of Rock Band is on sale:  PS3, PS2, Wii, Xbox 360… whatever system you want the game on features a version of the game that’s on sale.  There’s both a deal on individual games and on the bundle packs, the limited edition bundles, and, well… pretty much every hard copy version of the game has seen its price slashed for this daily deal.

When I say daily, I mean daily.  This deal expires at Midnight Pacific Time tonight, so if you’re interested, you’d best hop on board.  I’ve not played the game yet, but at this price it’s definitely interesting.  I still wish I could pick up the guitar only, though.