With the price of original ASUS Eee PC 7xx-series netbooks so low on eBay these days, it seems a great idea to revisit the concept of modding one into a small touchscreen UMPC. That’s just what EeeUser forum member Mark has done, turning his 701 into a handheld with 2GB of RAM and draft-n WiFi.
Photos of an MSI Wind Top AE1900 all-in-one touchscreen nettop prototype have emerged, showing the PC devoid of its rear casing. Of interest to anyone considering modding their nettop, the images show a somewhat untidy setup but a few areas that could be tackled.
Yesterday’s review of the Acer AspireRevo nettop might have cast some doubt over its Atom processor while simultaneously praising NVIDIA’s Ion GPU chipset, but it didn’t really touch on upgrade potential. Small-form-factor (SFF) computers are usually no-go areas when it comes to most modifications, but bit-tech have discovered there’s a surprising amount of room inside the AspireRevo’s casing.
Sentry robots like WowWee’s Rovio are all well and good – wandering around your house while you’re away, and allowing you to log-in remotely and make sure nothing amiss is taking place – but they generally fall short when it comes to actually dealing with a problem. That was the starting point for RoboCommunity member Colt45, who hacked his Rovio into a remote fire extinguisher.
In the days before the iPod touch, an iPod was for music and maybe video, but certainly not GPS or internet access. That hasn’t stopped some owners of earlier iPods looking to get such functionality onto their media players, and while Ben Kokes’ hack won’t have you surfing the web, it does give him basic GPS functionality on his first-gen iPod nano.
ASUS have been gradually transitioning to chiclet-style keyboards on their Eee PC netbooks, with the latest model to get the new style being the Eee PC 1000HA. If you’re an existing owner looking longingly at the new layout, meanwhile, and specifically have an ASUS Eee PC 1000H, you can fudge your own update with the keyboard from the Eee PC 1000HE.
Pleo’s fate may be decided by a bankruptcy sale, but the robot dinosaurs already out in the wild are too busy being hacked to worry about IP. Modder Andrey has developed a system which allows him to remotely-control his Pleo via a Wii Nunchuck, with the head, tail and basic movements all mapped to the Nintendo controller’s buttons and motion-sensors.
Video demo after the cut
It’s not pretty but it’s certainly clever: tired of trying to play Virtual On on the Xbox 360’s standard controller, one nifty modder crafted his own dual-joystick interface out of candy packaging. Of course, there’s more to the controls than just upright ’sticks, so a spot of wiring moved the control buttons too.
Google have never been shy when it comes to their plans with Android, and consumers should prepare to see it on more than just cellphone screens. The next big market for the open-source platform looks to be the netbook; over at NetbookNews they’ve been playing with an i-Buddie Atom N270-based netbook running the latest build of Android.
Video demo after the cut
The iPhone Dev Team have released a beta version of redsn0w, their free tool to jailbreak an iPod touch 2G. Currently it requires running from the command line, but the team are working on including it in their GUI applications.
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