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How Did Animals Escape Tsunami?. Wild animals seem to have escaped the Indian Ocean tsunami, adding weight to notions they possess a sixth sense for disasters, experts said Thursday. Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found. "No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit," said By noemail@noemail.org (Albert Ip). [Random Walk in E-Learning] 4:03:27 PM

StroboPick The StroboPick is a tiny strobe light guitar tuning pic, designed to let you tune your guitar visually by shining red and green LEDs on the string until they line up. While strobe tuners have been around for a while, the StroboPick is considerably cheaper than conventional $200 models, ringing up for just $35. And if you've got pickin' and/or grinnin' on the brain, they also sell a banjo model for the same price. While I think $35 is a reasonable price for such a product, it also looks like a perfect candidate for a homebrew kit. How about it, Strobotron? Product Page [Strobotron via MusicThing] - lev (tips@gizmodo.com) [Gizmodo] 4:00:44 PM

Samsung's iPod Killing Phone Concept: "Thor" A trio of Samsung concept phones have slipped out onto the web which give us a good idea of what to expect from the company in 2005. Code-named "Thor," this phone includes a 3GB hard drive and an iPod-like jog shuttle for navigation. Said to run the upcoming version of Microsoft's Smartphone operating system code-named "Magneto," the GSM phone supports a variety of music and video formats, as well as stereo Bluetooth streaming. It's totally an iPod Phone, and it's yet another reason we should expect a similar product from Apple and Motorola this month. Details on the other phones in a moment. Samsung Thor - Concept Camera Phone [CameraphoneZone] - lev (tips@gizmodo.com) [Gizmodo] 3:43:03 PM

AMD Alchemy Chip with TiVoToGo AMD has announced a new chip called the 'Alchemy' Au1200, designed to power portable video devices of all sizes. The hot heat about the Alchemy is two-fold: first, it can resize almost any major format video into different resolutions on the fly (upscale and downscale, it seems), meaning that devices that use the chipset won't have to have video transcoded to its native resolution before copying it over; also, the chip will power portable video players that will be compatible with the just launched TiVoToGo service that will allow you to copy recorded content from Series2 TiVos to portable devices, such as the newly announced GoVideo and FIC's video players. (Thanks, Dimitri!) Alchemy Product Page [AMD] - lev (tips@gizmodo.com) [Gizmodo] 3:27:31 PM