A group of geeks got together and pooled their Duct tape and created a pretty cool “duct tape” computer case…

Want one of your own?  Got a grip of duct tape and nothing better to do with an evening?

well… here you go [ instructions ]

Sony getting back into Interactive TV. What are they thinking? Also the company is going to roll out a 27-inch OLED set. Will Disney buy Tivo? Maybe! The Belgian news story keeps chugging. Google Gears becomes Gears. Ok, whatever. Yahoo suing Nigerian scammers? How do they find them? How about blocking the spam? Norcal man uses cartoon character names to open online brokerage accounts. Ha. Blogger breaks news! Stop the presses. New Dell laptop.  Intel getting into flash business.

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If you look longingly at the MacBook Air, for no other reason then the super cool SSD (Solid State Drive), then you need not be green any longer …

[ ExperCom ] has released, for immediate purchase, SSD upgrades for the MacBook and the MacBook Pro.  They will even handle installation and data transfer for you.

Prices :

60GB  – $599
120GB – $899

If you’re looking to make a MacBook purchase, you can also buy directly from them with the drives pre-installed.

Sixteen members of a smuggling gang in China and Hong Kong have been arrested for rigging a 300-metre long cable to send contraband goods across the heavily-policed border, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The gang had initially used a crossbow to shoot the cable across the fenced-off border between the two sides, before stringing it from the top of a Chinese high rise down to a village house in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post reported.

Investigators said the gang had likely been operating for two to three weeks, using a zip wire and pulley system to whisk small batches of goods along the cable, mostly at night.

Leo Sin, a senior Hong Kong customs’ intelligence officer sai

“They took 10 to 15 seconds to smuggle goods weighing 3-5kg, such as 20-30 mobile phones each time,”

Electronics goods worth more than $770,000 were seized, including 3,300 mobile phones and 2,100 computer memory cards, the paper reported.

The newspaper said it was the first time such a method had been deployed by cross-border smugglers, who have in the past dug tunnels to ferret electronics underground and to pump contraband diesel between the two sides.

Twelve people from mainland China and four from Hong Kong were arrested.

The Phoenix Lander has successfully begun to deploy its robotic arm, which will allow it to dig into the Martian surface and deliver samples of soil and ice to scientific instruments on the lander for analysis.

Due to the earlier problems with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter NASA is currently using the Mars Odyssey to relay the Phoenix’s commands.  Investigations are still underway to determine why the MRO experienced difficulty.

After freeing the arm from the pins, that were used to protect the arm during transport, the arm moved itself out from under a sterile wrapping called the bio-barrier, which prevented the arm from being contaminated with Earth microbes prior to launch.

NASA sent commands to Phoenix on Wednesday morning PDT (Wednesday afternoon GMT) to unhook the robotic arm. The arm’s complete deployment is scheduled to unfold over a period of two days, finishing up today.

If everything goes well, the arm could start digging by early next week,

Unlike the Mars rovers, Phoenix cannot move across the Martian surface. So the Phoenix team is very carefully planning how it will make use of the area within reach of its robotic arm.

Due to the lack of new commands on Tuesday, Phoenix got a head start on assembling a color panorama of its surroundings. But it will still take two to three weeks to finish and send back to Earth.

Finally, a portable drive that packs a desktop drive size..

The new 1 TB desktop models sport a USB 2.0 interface, a 7,200 rpm drive mechanism, at least 8 MB of onboard cache, and come pre-formatted with the NTFS file system. (The drives are still usable by Mac users, though: just reformat as a journaled Mac OS Extended volume). The drives are available in three colors—black, red, and blue—also ship with a download-only license to EMC’s Retrospect HD backup software. Although some of Iomega’s portable eGo hard drives can be powered off the USB bus, the desktop version require a separate AC power adapter.

Iomega says the 1 TB desktop eGo drives are available now at a suggested price of $269.95.

The key communication link with NASA’s Phoenix lander has been restored, after an outage delayed the mission’s progress by one day.

Phoenix does not communicate directly with Earth, but are relayed between Phoenix and Earth by two NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars.

The problem occurred when NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) UHF radio failed to relay a sequence of commands from Earth, intended to guide Phoenix through the second day of its mission.

Because Phoenix did not receive any fresh instructions, it performed what is known as a “run-out sequence”, which amounts to a continuation of the previous day’s activities.

On Tuesday evening, MRO’s UHF radio started working again and successfully relayed images and other data from Phoenix back to Earth. MRO’s radio apparently went into a standby mode, for a still unknown reason.