8 Insane Modded and Customized Laptops

1. The Xbox 360 Laptop

Another work of artistic brilliance/insanity from Mr. Benjamin J Heckendorn, this is a laptop fashioned from an Xbox 360 (complete with a comedic conversation between him and the sales rep at the store he bought it from) and, like the rest of his stuff, actually works! Now you can show your friends just how “hueg liek ecksbawks” this laptop really is.

2. The Duke Nukem-style Laptop

Limited to just 300 units and mentioned a few years back (so most likely sold out), thiscrazy-looking laptop comes with a bunch of cool stuff to customize the look with, including stickers and wallpapers. Brought to you by NEC and Takara, the TYPE-N01 even comes with an “emergency” power-off button, which turns the laptop off immediately. Whilst I’m sure this was meant for when “intruders” try to hack the laptop whilst you’re on it, I’ll bet it was actually used to prevent embarrassing situations when someone barges into your room without knocking.

3. The Pimp-Yet-Kitsch Laptop

Customized by the seemingly-pretentious Testa Motari, this is a laptop which has been lovingly decked out in authentic Brazilian Rosewood with solid 18kt gold. The keyboard is laser-etched and gold plated, as is the touchpad and the mouse. Truly quite decadent, yet also leaves you with a feeling somewhat akin to “…meh”.

4. The Custom Laptop Shop

Not technically a laptop, but a place that customizes them. Based in Miami, NVousPC are willing to personalize a laptop in a number of crazy ways, including paintjobs (of just about anything) and engravings. It seems that for the design of your laptop, the sky is the limit as long as it involves putting a picture on the back of your laptop, which is pretty cool but not mind-blowingly epic.

5. The Do-It-Yourself Laptop

A person by the name of Torquil was fed up with the prices of computer parts, so decided to make one. Wanting to build a laptop that could be upgraded at any point as components grew too old and needed to be replaced. As you can see from the pictures, it seemed like tricky business, but the end result is a very shiny laptop that works, even if it is a bit big and resembles an up-market hairdryer.

6. The Wii Laptop

Another fantastic console mod from Mr. Heckendorn, but this time it’s a Wii console that gets the portable treatment. Sporting a 7-inch LCD screen, controller port, built-in power supply and even a short-range sensor bar, it’s possible with this to finally be able to randomly play the Wii console in the street.

7. The Wooden Laptop

Ok, so the whole laptop isn’t made from wood, which would (ha ha) be much more of a technological feat of awesomeness. However, the wood apparently comes from a case of Sicilian wine that the modder had to down in 1 minute in order to make the laptop casing. I may have made that last bit up. Combined with some more wood, silk, screws and leather, this is the final result.

8. The Guitar Laptop (or maybe the Laptop Guitar?)

Guitarist and all-round technical wizard Ben Lewry chopped up a laptop and smooshed itinto an electric guitar. The result is a lot more pleasing than the description makes it out to be. The awesome thing is that both the guitar and the laptop function, so Ben’s made it so that the laptop displays a strange audio/visualization program that reacts to whatever is being played on the guitar, a lot like that thing on windows Media Player.

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Google gobbling up $7 bn of taxpayers’ money every year: study

Online search giant Google, known for promoting free web-based alternatives to costly software products, has been charged with using 21 times more bandwidth than what it pays for, thus making the internet costlier for others and costing taxpayers about $7 billion a year.

On its part, Google has challenged the study labelling charges against it, saying that the report has been authored by someone being paid by phone and cable companies like AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner to be a full time Google critic.

The study, by Scott Cleland of the Precurser Group, a research and consulting firm specialising in the converging telecom sector, claimed that Google was by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth in the US and its bandwidth usage, which was rising rapidly, was greater than its payment for its cost.

The study estimated that Google has used 16.5% of all US consumer internet traffic this year and it is estimated to grow to 25% in 2009 and 37% in 2010.

However, the company’s payment to fund the US consumer broadband internet segment is estimated at $344 million for 2008, which is just 0.8% of the US consumer’s flat-rate monthly internet access costs of $44 billion.

“Thus, Google’s 16.5% share of all 2008 US consumer bandwidth usage is about 21 times greater than Google’s 0.8% share of US consumer bandwidth costs — on an implicit about $6.9 billion subsidy of Google by US consumers,” Cleland wrote in the study.

Cleland said that the findings of the study were important in the wake of Google being the driving force behind InternetForEveryone.org, which is pushing to adopt a national plan to bring open, high-speed internet connections into every home, at a price all of us can afford.

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MySpace-Google team up to connect more users

MySpace.com is teaming up with Internet search leader Google Inc. in a campaign to extend MySpace’s reach and counter the expansion of their common rival Facebook Inc.

The alliance, unveiled late on Monday in Paris, builds upon MySpace’s seven-month-old effort to make it easier for the 127 million worldwide users of its online hangout to connect with their social circles while they’re at other Internet destinations.

MySpace is trying to pull it off by making its login system, called “MySpaceID,” compatible with any Web site that wants to embrace it.

By working with a similar service offered by Google, MySpace is betting more sites will welcome its audience. Blogs and other small sites with limited technical help probably will find it easier to use Google’s system, known as “Friend Connect,” said Max Engel, who oversees MySpaceID.

The collaboration between News Corp.’s MySpace and Google represents their latest shot across Facebook’s bow. MySpace and Google previously joined forces a year ago to promote a service, called “OpenSocial,” that competes against Facebook’s warehouse of online software programs.

Facebook also is peddling its own universal login service to create more ways for its roughly 130 million worldwide users to share their personal profiles and favourite applications wherever and whenever they want on the Web. The privately held company expanded “Facebook Connect” last week after seven months of testing.

By loosening their grip on the personal information stored on their own sites, both MySpace and Facebook are vying to shape and steer even more social interaction than they already do.

In the process, they hope to become the command centers of their users’ online activities. By extending their networks on to other sites, Facebook and MySpace also could emerge as more alluring marketing vehicles, particularly as they glean more information about the interests of individual users.

Google is keenly interested in tapping into the advertising potential of social networks, but the Mountain View-based company has had little success with its own online hangout, called Orkut.

MySpace already relies on Google to sell some of its ads, so the companies are natural allies.

Palo Alto-based Facebook, in contrast, has aligned itself with Microsoft, perhaps Google’s biggest antagonist. Besides relying on Microsoft to sell some of its ads, Facebook also sold a 1.6% stake to the software maker for $240 million last year.

Facebook also has rankled Google by hiring some of its top employees. The defectors include Facebook’s current chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, who oversaw global online sales.

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Facebook cuts ties with Project Playlist

Project Playlist, which allows users to upload music and create and share playlists, is being sued by the RIAA and three major music labels for alleged copyright violations

Washington: Social network Facebook has severed ties with Project Playlist, just days after rival MySpace cut its links with the fast-growing music-sharing startup over copyright violation fears.

Facebook’s move came a day after the Palo Alto, California-based Project Playist announced its biggest coup yet -- an agreement with Sony BMG to make its library of digital music available to users of playlist.com.

Project Playlist, which allows users to upload music and create and share playlists, is being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and three major music labels for alleged copyright violations.

Just days after MySpace made a similar move, Facebook on Tuesday said it was removing a Project Playlist application from the social network.

In a statement obtained by several technology blogs, Facebook said the RIAA “initially contacted Facebook last summer requesting the removal of the Project Playlist application for copyright violation, and recently reopened those communications.

“We have forwarded the RIAA’s letters to Project Playlist so it can work directly with that organisation and music labels on a resolution,” Facebook said.

“In the meantime, the application must be removed to comply with the Facebook Platform Terms of Service,” it said.

Project Playlist has more than 40 million users according to online research firm comScore and recently hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta to head the startup.

Announcing the agreement with Sony BMG on Monday, Project Playlist founder Jeremy Riney said he hoped the deal would lead to similar agreements with other music labels.

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Microsoft Patch Internet Explorer (Again) - Is It Time To Switch?

You have probably heard of the AZN Trojan which has been causing havoc in the Internet world over the last week, but if you haven’t you really should so read on. But for those who have, you will be relieved to know that Microsoft has released a patch for the vulnerability which should stem the problems occurred when browsing using Internet Explorer (IE). This is great news for those IE lovers out there who have been using an alternative for the last week, or the more foolish ones that have been using IE regardless.

Those that are ignorant and righteous may be laughing at those stupid enough to download dodgy material, and thinking that it couldn’t happen to them. But they would be horribly wrong because this exploitation of invulnerability means that all you have to do is go on infected website to “contract” the virus, and suffer the consequences of it.

And the results of this have been fairly devastating; an estimated 10,000 websites are infected, and Microsoft says that over two million Windows users have succumbed to this Trojan. It has in fact been touring the web since the beginning of December, but was only last week that it was brought to the public attention due to its devastating consequences. The reason for this is that it can record keystrokes allowing the Trojan to record all your credit card details, any information about you and every password that you use. This is obviously a massive problem, and understandably has brought a very quick response from Microsoft.

The response comes in the form of a patch that contains more than 300 distinct updates which Microsoft hope will irradiate this threat, although they still retain that it is by no means over and are encouraging people to download and test this solution. Although so far we have only seen it effecting IE7, it would appear that its predecessor and successor aren’t safe either with them both being labelled “potentially vulnerable”.

So what are your options now? Well you could put complete trust in the Microsoft security department and continue to use IE regardless, but to be honest that isn’t a good idea until it has been proven to work. Personally I would advise moving to a different internet browser and this opens up a whole new world of choices.

You may be surprised at how many different programmes do the same job as Internet Explorer especially if you are the kind of person who only uses IE because it comes with Windows. You could use PhaseOut, Deepnet, Avant, Flock, Maxthon, Safari, Opera, Chrome or Firefox all of which have different strengths and weaknesses – Safari for example has slightly inferior security whilst Avant has a large start up time. But really that is too many to look at, so we will narrow it down to IEs biggest two competitors: Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Google Chrome Browser is built on an entirely different system regarding tabs, meaning that one slow tab does not slow your whole window down, and also looks very nice and is dead easy to navigate. It is also very quick, but there is that niggling feeling that you are helping Google onto world domination, and it also doesn’t work very well with Hotmail.

Firefox also has a nice layout, and is normally rated slightly higher than Chrome due to the fact that you can customise it making it unique to you – a very nice feature. However make sure you get Firefox 3.0 and not 2, because following the recent update (aimed to prevent what happened to IE) they have promised not to continue support or patches for Firefox 2.

So maybe you were already using these, or maybe you are new to this world of choices, but either way it is probably best to steer clear of IE for a bit or you would end up out of pocket. If you want my personal opinion I would say you should install both and use Firefox for e-mail and Chrome for everything else – it is not a bad idea to have your details split over two internet browsers, it makes you less subject to vulnerabilities. Any way good luck and Merry Christmas!

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