It doesn’t get any more old school than this. (I pressed ffwd)

Incidentally, can’t believe I haven’t mentioned these guys yet. Machinae Supremacy use C64 samples mixed with fantastic (and occasionally orchestral) metal. Hands down one of my favourite bands, I highly recommend checking them out - they’ve got loads of excellent free songs for download though sadly their first album is not currently for sale.

Gotta love [H]ardOCP. One of their forumites took this to PAX in honor of this Penny Arcade strip. I love the quote:

It takes every ounce of manhood to stand in the doll section of the hobby store asking which markers make up a rainbow….

The Rio Karma really was just a bit special - it blew away the 1st gen iPods for features and battery life. Sadly, I just spotted on CNet that Rio is no more so we’ll never see the Chroma and I’m once again stuck deciding which MP3 player to eventually buy. Gapless playback, crazy battery life, ogg support, USB mass storage support, USB charging, colour screen… too much to ask?

Speaking of Benders, here’s one with a PC inside. His mouth is the CD drive, his chest opens up and his eyes glow, though sadly they’re not telescopic. Or is that just asking too much? (via boingboing)

Dubbed DisplayPort, this would replace DVI and VGA cables currently used. It’ll be very thin to fit subnote laptops (good), support even higher resolutions (good), include audio support (good) and support copy protection (bad). A display standard and video cable that supports DRM? Dear VESA - kindly get stuffed. (via TechReport)

Based on one of the most successful BattleBot designs ever, apparently. Go see.

Reminds me of the first UK Robot Wars series final. A smug team of Cambridge students and their £1000 robot lost to a cheap robot made of recycled junk. Brilliant. (via Gizmodo)

Creative finally announced cards to go with their X-Fi uber sound chip and they are not cheap. They’re going to have a hard sell on their hands, particularly as none seem to do Dolby Digital encoding. I was waiting for these but at that price I might just go for an X-Mystique instead. I’d certainly be intersted to hear output from an X-Fi card on quality headphones though, those are some tall claims but it seems they’ve got the hardware to back it up. (via ShackNews)

I wasn’t aware of engraving as a new case mod "thing", but it’s a subtle alternative to windows and neon. Here’s a great example of case engraving using Star Wars art, very nicely done.

No, not burgers, the Apple Mac mini. In a big case. With big fans. And more storage. Even so, the question is WHY? And, for once, "because we can" is not a good enough answer here, surely on Textmode Quake beats it in the League of Pointless Endeavours.

Sun are doing some really cool experimental interface work these days. First we had their window flipping, now we’ve got window folding. Watch the video, it looks like an extremely intuitive way of working around Explorer window overloads. You can even download it to try for yourself.

I love the idea, I pretty much bought a full laptop to do what these do. Sadly it seems the implementation isn’t perfect. Only 3-4 hours battery, rubbery keys and no ICQ support (even though it does AIM). All probably because it’s targeted at kids who use their parent’s PC too much for IMing, hence the reasonable price tag of $99. It’s getting a fair amount of Linux hacking too including controlling the Aibo. (via Gizmondo)

You know what I want? A Psion 5 running a 600mhz XScale, WiFi and the latest Windows for Pocket PC. The keyboards on those dinky things were lovely, utterly unmatched to this day and thus sadly missed.

Another case of stuffing technology into something from Star Wars. Honestly, I just can’t get enough of stuff like this. (Again, The Shack provides)