If you heard, George Takei married his boyfriend of many years recently, and William Shatner was not invited. Takei gave the reason that they didn’t have enough space for more guests, and so Shatner was left out as Takei didn’t like him anyway. Takei said that Shatner always tried to make Star Trek all about him during shooting, and he was a primadonna every time they worked together.

Shatner replied with the following video on his youtube channel, that shows that he can’t deal with all that:

I take Takei’s side on this because I can tell how Shatner operates. Even his friend, Leonard Nimoy, doesn’t seem to take him that seriously. When we saw both at the Star Trek 40th anniversary a few years back, Nimoy was making fun of Shatner on stage, and I could tell that it was not all for good fun — although Nimoy does cares for Shatner. It seems that Nimoy knows that Shatner is just a big kid, and so he just goes along with it. Others are not as tolerable, and don’t understand his psyche, and so they shun him away. That’s my take anyway.

A few weeks ago, Shatner said to the press that he was not invited to act on the new Star Trek movie, but JJ Abrams replied that he did invite him to have a cameo, but Shatner wanted to have a large part of the story be about him. When Abrams refused, Shatner didn’t want anything to do with it. But Shatner kept insisting that he was not invited. When I read their public dispute about this, George Takei’s talk about Shatner’s need to be the focus of each movie came to mind (George said that months ago). I don’t particularly like JJ Abrams, but I take his word on this. Shatner is in the red here for one more time. Too much ego.

Geeks.com is carrying some computer parts, so here’s a review for some of them: An Archos mp3 player, a Trendnet wifi router, a Wiimote charging station and a camera carrying case.

* Archos 105 2GB MP3/WMA/WMV Digital Multimedia Player w/1.8″ OLED

This 2 GB Archos mp3 player is one of the most promising iPod Nano competitors. It has an OLED screen, 160×128 resolution, support for WMA, MP3, WMV and JPEG. All operations are carried through via its 4-way joystick and 2 extra buttons. There is no hardware “key lock”, you can only lock the keypad by long-pressing one of the extra buttons. Audio quality was top notch, but the video support could have been better: the software is over-sharpening and over-saturates the video during playback, and so that creates some really unnatural-looking video. On the plus side, the player is really fast to load, and usability is not too bad; it’s not iPod quality, but it’s good compared to other cheap players — and it got better after I upgraded the firmware. Battery was at around 15 hours. The only real complaint I have about this device is that it only has 2 GBs of storage, because it’s large enough (compared to an iPod or even other players) to contain 4 GBs.

Rating: 7/10

* TRENDnet TEW-631BRP 802.11n Wireless N Firewall Router

Linksys and Netgear are flooding the WiFi router market the last few years, but this TrendNet model has a few aces up to its sleeve. It supports all the latest technology: IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE 802.11n Draft, Hardware AES/TKIP, 64/128-bit WEP (Hex/Passpharse) 802.1X/ EAP: EAP-TLE,EAP-TTLE/MSCHAPv2, PEAPv0/EAP-MSCHAPv2, PEAPv1/EAP-GTC WPA: WPA/WPA2(EAP/802.1x), WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK and WPS. It comes pre-configured for VoIP and it offers excellent coverage. However, its support for IP multicast is where it shines. With multicast, if your ISP also supports it, you can receive streamed video much faster and without drops, because the source website doesn’t send the video individually to each viewer, but to ISPs, and then the ISPs send the streams to users — resulting in cheaper bandwidth usage for the video providers and better experience for the user. But for this to work, you also need a router at home that supports it, and so far there aren’t many routers (or many ISPs) that do. For me, who likes video, that’s a big feature. Other than that, the router performed as expected, there were no crashes as we usually get with our Netgear router. The user interface was tolerable too.

Rating: 8/10

* Penguin United Quad Charging Station for Nintendo Wii

If you have a big family that plays Wii games together, this is a really cool gadget. It can charge four Wiimotes at once, and also includes four rechargeable batteries for that reason. It also comes with four (strong) hand stripes, which have different colors each, so family members get to recognize which Wiimote belongs to whom. The only little problem with this gadget is that you don’t want it at the same room you are sleeping, as its charging LED is very strong at night!

Rating: 9/10

* Panasonic Digital Camera Nylon Carrying Case

This black nylon Panasonic-branded digital camera case has enough space for some of the largest non-DSRL cameras out there. It has “secret” pockets to store SD cards, and it securely fit around our Panasonic LX2 camera. One thing that could have been done better though would be to feature a bigger Velcro, so if your camera is smaller, you can still close the case securely.

Rating: 9/10