If recent reports are to be believed, Apple’s second generation iPad will begin shipping somewhere around the end of February 2011, which is around 100 days from now. Initial shipments will range between 400,000 and 600,000 units from Foxconn, which is Apples manufacturer for the iPad 2.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect hacks have been plentiful, but here is a very original one that is almost guaranteed to impress. A Japanese coder by the name of Takayuki Fukatsu posted a video showing Kinect’s “optical camouflage” effect that he created with openFrameworks. He didn’t explain how it works but it appears to be a filter that removes his body from the frame in real time and replacing it with the image behind, which would have been taken beforehand. The mismatch of the images near his outlines are a good indication its a before image being replaced over the top of the current one.

Graviboard is a cool new Cydia tweak developed by Conradev. Once activated, it will make the your homescreen icons loose gravity. There are a few different settings of gravity to choose from such as Earth, Moon, and Zero Gravity.

SBRotator is a jailbreak tweak that brings iPad like landscape homescreen to the iPhone, as well as allowing all apps to work in landscape view. The tweak allows you to fully customize your homescreen any way you like and it is now fully compatible with iOS 4.x.

Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect sales has surprised the world of gaming, with the latest figures suggesting the sales rates of the Kinect have now surpassed that of the Apple iPad and Nintendo Wii console. Microsoft’s goal for the end of the year is 5 million units, after selling 2.5 million units in 25 days we would say they are well on there way.

iSHSHit is a new Cydia app that is an alternative to Tiny Umbrella. It lets you save and backup SHSH blobs directly off your iOS device. It also has the original functionality of being able to send your saved SHSH blobs via email, which is a very handy feature. It also automatically uses the Cydia On-File service, meaning that your SHSH blobs will also be saved on the Cydia servers.

Few weeks ago we reported about a new tweak available in Cydia called Parallax that allows you to use Android style panoramic widescreen wallpapers on your iPhone / iPod touch which scroll horizontally as you move along icon pages. But with a new app called 360 Panorama available on the App Store, you can now take your very own panoramic pictures which can also be used as iPhone wallpapers.

With a new tweak available in Cydia called Fake Operator, you can now rename your operator / carrier and put it as whatever you desire. Similar to the MakeitMine application that was released after the first-ever jailbreak, but with this new tweak you can do so without a dedicated app, oh and it is fully support on the latest iOS 4.2.1 firmware.

The recently released PwnageTool / Redsn0w jailbreak tools for iOS 4.2.1 requires you to transfer iPad’s 3.2.2 baseband to your iPhone 3GS & 3G in order to unlock it using Ultrasn0w 1.2. This has resulted in poor battery performance as has been experienced by many users. Some users have also complained about their device becoming very hot when in use.

PhotoAlbums+ is a great Cydia tweak which gives you the ability to create albums and organize photos from the native Photos app on the iPhone or iPod touch. It allows you to create new custom photo albums, move photos in and out of camera roll, and even allows you to create password protected photo albums.

ChatPic is a new jailbreak tweak that puts a little photo of your contact beside each incoming chat bubble, a simple mod that gives the Messaging app a little more personality. It takes the photo stored in the Contacts application, and is compatible with Facebook photo sync, which is a utility in the Facebook app itself that downloads your friends photos and matches them to the contacts on your iPhone.

If you own an iPod touch 4G, you would already know that the camera cannot take widescreen 720p photos. With a tweak called HD Photographer available in Cydia, you can now enable widescreen photos using the built-in camera app on the iPod touch 4G. This adds more pixels to the photos you take but at the price of losing the default 4:3 aspect ratio. Technically, this tweak increases the iPod touch 4G’s rear camera from 0.7 megapixels (960×720) to 1.0 megapixels (1280×720).