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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