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Panasonic and LG won’t be the only ones with Skype-enabled HDTVs, though we peeped it in the specs earlier, Samsung has officially announced its new 7000 and 8000 series televisions will also include access. Accessible through the embedded Samsung Apps service, it appears it will work with the new HD video processing webcams just like the others, so users can log in to or create an account with the remote then make video or voice calls away from the PC. We heard at CES those cameras could run as high as $200, check out the CES 2010 demo from Panasonic to see if couch videoconferencing is worth the additional expense.

Samsung makes Skype for new LED lit HDTVs official originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Warner CEO: iTunes price increase led to lower sales, recession might also factor in originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has had problems with the state-of-the-art LED-backlit displays on its king size 27-inch iMacs. Now, HardMac is one of the sites reporting that, “According to one of our sources, the company completely stopped the iMac 27-inch assembling lines.”

The big Macs had, according to many customer posts on the Internet, exhibited two kinds of problems. First, the displays were seen to both flicker and flash, and to distort the onscreen desktop image.

Customers then began reporting that their 27″ displays had a yellow tinge that they could not ignore.

The models affected sell for $1,700 to $2,000 base price. Netbooks they are not. Apple is normally known for the well-above-average quality of its displays. So customers expect flawless performance. The display problems are bad enough for the company’s reputation that ceasing production until they are fixed seems the smart move.

The rise of digital media has led to many a battle between the old guard—record labels, television networks, movie studios, and book publishers—and the companies that sell their wares to the public. The latest skirmish between the two erupted over the weekend when Amazon stopped selling all books published by Macmillan, noting only that they are available through third parties.

On Thursday, Macmillan CEO John Sargent met with Amazon representatives to discuss the pricing of the publisher’s titles on the Kindle e-book reader. Negotiations didn’t go so well, with Sargent wanting to exercise absolute control over the prices of e-books sold through Amazon. According to the New York Times’ sources, Macmillan wanted Amazon to raise prices from $9.99 to $15.

Judge Michael Davis is the senior federal jurist in Minnesota. He presides over the gleaming 15th floor courtroom where, earlier this year, P2P user Jammie Thomas-Rasset was slapped with $1.92 million in damages for sharing 24 songs. Davis made no comment on the amount of the award and showed no emotion as it was read out.

But now we know how he rely feels about the jury’s work in that case: it led to a “monstrous and shocking” damage award that veered into “the realm of gross injustice.”

Davis used his power of remittitur today to slash the damage award by 97.2 percent, from $1.92 million down to $54,000—and he suggested that even this lower amount was too high.

It’s frustrating to not be able to get your DVDs onto your portable devices or media server. Last week we looked at the best tools for ripping your DVD collection and we’re back to announce the winner.

Handbrake led by a healthy margin and took home 34% of the vote and with good reason. It’s free, cross-platform, and has grown easier to use with each new release. Following Handbrake was <a href=”DVD Shrink“>DVD Shrink (23%) and <a href=”DVD Fab“>DVD Fab (15%). Rounding out the Hive Five was AnyDVD (11%) and DVD Decrypter (13%). It’s worth noting that as awesome as Handbrake is, it doesn’t include any tools for actually circumventing DVD encryption, so you’ll need to pair it with one of the other solutions in the Hive Five. Check out the full Hive for additional information about each contender.

Have a topic you’d love to see covered by the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips @ lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line and we’ll add it to the list!

Last week we asked you to share your favorite tool for tracking goals. We rounded up your nominations for the Hive Five and now we’re back with the results.

Photo by Peter Kaminski.

Pen and Paper led by a wide margin, showing that the most technical solution isn’t always the best or the one people turn to for simple tasks. Following pen and paper was Evernote—many people already use it and the ubiquitous capture makes it simple to photograph and document your goals. Rounding out the five was Excel, Joe’s Goals, and Friends and Family. Check out the full Hive Five for additional information and poll results.

Have a topic you’d live to see covered by the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips @ lifehacker.com with “Hive Five” in the subject line.

If you want to really add some flair to your New Year’s Eve cocktail and wine glasses, this DIY tutorial will help you make simple LED wine-charms for your glasses.

Over at the DIY tutorial site Instructables user BillR has put together a guide to turning an LED and a battery into a light-up charm for your glasses. The design requires a tiny bit of soldering but it’s about as simple as any electronics project could be and technically, if you had LEDs with long enough wire leads, you could skip the soldering all together.

If you wanted to be extra crafty you could find some way to temporarily affix the led to the stem, directed upwards—a band of black electrical tape perhaps?—so that the light diffuses through the stem, glass, and liquid inside. If you like the idea of having a colorful way to mark glasses but don’t want to bust out the soldering iron to do so, use window markers instead. Have a clever way to help people identify their glasses?

If you’re looking to add some polish to your home theater setup, this guide to creating a DIY clone of the Philips Ambilight technology will give your videos a backlight that changes colors to match the on-screen action.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Ambilight technology, it’s a backlight system in some Phillips televisions where the color of the screen is transmitted to LEDs behind the television set, so that the background lighting matches the color on the screen. Fans of the technology claim it reduces eyes strain and enhanced the theater experience.

DIYer Fun3 wanted to recreate the effect on his television. His solution was to wire an Arduino to a series of LED strips and and control the color by a USB cable hooked up to his HTPC. Check out the video below to see it in action.

Check out his site for schematics, code, and a ton of tips and tricks for calibrating your LEDs to your home theater. If you’ve experimented with back lighting your home theater—color changing or otherwise—let’s hear about it in the comments.

Lobbying is a fast and furious game, one where the lobbyists must make every attempt to present things that benefit their industry as if they are a triumph of dispassionate reason—even when their positions seem to contradict one another.

The wireless phone industry filed a document (PDF) Tuesday with the FCC that led us to ponder the mysteries of the lobbyists, because the document amounts to a well-written plea for identical treatment when different technology platforms accomplish the same goal. But the wireless industry only wants consistent regulation when the consistency helps it out. Apply the consistency principle consistently—especially to network neutrality—and suddenly the industry has a bazillion reasons why it’s “different.”