Barnes & Noble may be positioning the NOOKcolor as an eBook reader, but it’s shaping up to be a pretty versatile Android tablet for $250. Earlier this week, we saw the first third party apps make their way onto a rooted NOOKcolor, and yesterday Barnes & Noble released the official software developer kit so that programmers can write third party apps you’ll be able to install without rooting. Now we’re seeing what looks like the first custom ROM (or possibly just a tweaked version of the custom firmware) for the device.

YouTube member jacememes has uploaded a video showing the NOOKcolor running Android 2.2.1.

The eBook reader ships with a version of Android 2.1 with custom software running on top so that you normally won’t see the standard Android elements such as the stock Home Screen or program launcher.

The hacked NOOKcolor shows both of those things and more… including a phone icon, even though the tablet doesn’t actually have the proper hardware to make phone calls. Clearly, this is still a work in progress… but it’s pretty cool stuff.

The NOOKcolor, by the way, has an 800MHz TI OMAP processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen display, which makes it one of the most powerful Android tablets you can find for under $250.

You can check out the video after the break.

via reddit

The Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor is a 7 inch eBook reader with a 1024 x 600 pixel LCD color display. It runs Google Android and sells for $249, making it a relatively affordable Android tablet. The only problem (for people wanting to use it as an all-purpose tablet) is that out of the box it only runs a few apps including the Barnes & Noble eBook software and a web browser.

But the folks at the xda-developers forum have figured out how to gain root access to the NOOKcolor, which lets you install third party apps, and possibly eventually install custom firmware making all sorts of changes.

I suspect that for now, you’re still better off getting a tablet that was meant to run third party apps if that’s what you’re looking for. At the very least, I suspect you’ll void your warranty if you break anything while tinkering around with a rooted NOOKcolor. Still, this opens the door to a lot of interesting possibilities. I mean come on… that’s Angry Birds in the photo… on an eBook reader!

You can find another photo of a rooted NOOKcolor after the break.

via Gizmodo

As if Twitter weren’t already full of utterly bland, mindless codswallop, researchers from Hasselt University in Belgium are about to add the random, idiotic bleatings of a baby to the stream of nonsense. Worse, the baby won’t even know it is broadcasting its brainless, repetitive activities to the world.

Twoddler is a modified Fisher Price activity center, the kind that toddle rs have tweaked and poked for what seems like generations. The difference is that this one has its activities monitor ed by a computer and the activities are translated into Tweets. The example uses a baby called Yorin, and if he spends, say, a few minutes playing with a picture of his mother, this Tw eet will be forced on the world: “@mommy_yorin Yorin miss es mommy and looks forward playing with her this evening”. Further, if he an noyingly bangs on the bell, over and over, for far too long, the comput er will translate this to say &# 8220;Yorin is showing off his music skills with a new tune”.

The Twoddler uses sensors hooked up to an Arduino circuit and sends the information via the wireless ZigBee protocol to a nearby computer. This is where the signals are converted into human-readable (or at least parent-readable) “words” and sent off to the web using the Twitter API.

We imagine that these incessant, repetitive Tweets will swiftly become as annoying as the behavior which triggers them, negating the whole point of sending Yorin off to the day-care center. There is one advantage to Twoddler over having an actual toddler in the room with you. It may be a bit of a moral conundrum, but at least mom always has the option to un -follow her offspring.

Twoddler Project [Hasselt University via Mashable]

We’ll freely admit to having a love / ha te relationship with Christmas lights and decorations. The sheer gaudiness of it all often turn s our “bah hum bug” nature inside out, revealing the awe struck “inner child” we hear so much about from people like Martha Stewart and Oprah. Regardless, an artful DIYer’s taken the outdoor Christmas lighting game to the next level. Making use of an ioBridge IO-204 module, an Arduino Wave Kit, an Arduino Duemilanove board, solid state relays, and the Oracle Application Express for connectivity, he was able to get his internet controlled light and music show on the road. C heck out the final results — which feature 3,300 mini lights, 3 spotlights, an LED Rope, 4 LEDs, and one magical reindeer — in the video after the break. Hit the source link for full instructions if you want to get in on the holiday action yourself.

Mac cloner Psystar claims it has entered a partial settlement with Apple, which will prevent Psystar from selling PCs preinstalled with the Mac operating system. However, Psystar isn’t completely surrendering.

As part of the settlement, the Mac cloner said it will pay Apple an amount of damages that has yet to be specified. In the Monday f iling, Psystar argued to exclude Rebel EFI, a $50 piece of software that the company started selling in October, from any potential injunction. Rebel EFI is a program that enables ow ners of some Intel PCs to install Mac OS X onto their systems.

An excerpt from the court document [pdf] filed Monday by Psystar follows:

Psystar and Apple today entered into a partial settlement that is embodied in a stipulation that will be filed with the Court tomorrow. Psystar has agreed on certain amounts to be awarded as statutory damages on App le’s copyright cl aims in exchange for Apple’s agreement not to execute on these awards until all appeals in this matter have been concluded. M oreover, Apple has agreed to voluntarily dismiss all its trademark, trade-dress, and state-law claims. This par tial settlement eliminates the need for a trial and reduces the is sues before this Court to the scope of any permanent injunction on Apple’s copyright claims.

….

The summary judgment in this case turned on the manner in which Psystar assembled its Open Computers.  It turned on such things as the use of the Psystar imaging station and what this Court found to be the creation of multiple copies and derivative works of Mac OS X along the way….  No ne of these same facts is involved in Rebel EFI.  Rebel EFI is entirely a software product.  It does not i nvolve the assembly by Psystar of any computers…. Nor does Rebel EFI contain or include Mac OS X.  A Mac OS X DVD does not even accompan y sales of Rebel EFI.   Rebel EFI consists solely of Psystar software availabl e for sale and download through Psystar’s website.  In particular, whether sales of Rebel EFI are lawful or not depends on whether Psystar’s end users have a defense under 17 U.S.C. § 117.  This issue has not been litigated in this case at all.  Psystar’s end users do not engage in commercial use of Mac OS X and their use would qualify as use for “internal purposes” even under the standards articulated by Apple in its summary-judgment briefing.  If Psystar’s end users are protected by § 117, then Psystar cannot be violating the DMCA by selling Rebel EFI because Rebel EFI, as used by the end users, does not facilitate infringement.

In short, Psystar wishes to continue providing a DIY solution for owners to make their own Mac clones, thereby shifting the responsibility (i.e., breaking Apple’s End User License Agreement) onto the consumer.

However, it’s unlikely this workaround w ill pan out for Psytar. In 2008, W ired.com reported on a company called Open Tech, which said it would sell PCs bundled with instruction kits for consumers to install Mac OS X themselves. However, Carole Handler, an intellectual property la wyer with Wildman Harrold, told Wired.com th at Open Tech would be subjecting itself to contributory infringement of Apple’s end-user agreement.

“Making the user instead of the company the perpetrator of any violation will not avoid the issue of a new company’s con tributory infringement and/or vicarious liab ility for what it facilitates and enables the user to undertake,” Handler said in an e-mail interview. “This kind of workaround is not a bar to Apple bringing contributory infringement or vicarious liability claims.”

Though slightly different, Psystar’s solution could also be considering aiding the consumer to break Apple’s EULA, which reads, “You a gree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.”

Psystar, a company based in Florida, opened its Mac clone business in April 2008. Three months later, Apple filed a lawsuit alleging Psystar was committing copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap license infringement. Judge William Alsup in November ruled that by selling PCs hacked to run Mac OS X, Psystar had violated Apple’s copyrights.

Additional details regarding the settlement will be filed today, according to Psystar.

See Also:

Mac Cloner Psy star Sold Fewer Than 1000 HackintoshesPsystar ‘Rebel EFI’ Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any PCMac Cloner Psystar G uilty of Violating Apple’s CopyrightJudge Dismisses Mac Cloner Psystar’s Bankruptcy

Photo: Psystar

The best hacks are often the simplest. FourEyes3D is one of these, and it takes a pair of standard w ebcams and uses them to make a stereo video, letting you beam your ugly mug in three glorious dim ensions to anyone who can be convinced to watch.

Hook up the cams and the software (Mac-only) combines the two feeds into one stereoscopic image. The trickiest part is the actual positioning of the cameras, as the developer tells us: “The finicky part is mounting your matched pair of ge neric USB webcams 90 millimeters apart (the same distance apart as your own eyes).”

Best of all, you don’t need any fancy displays to view the 3D vide o. All you need is to send mom a pair of red/cyan specs and she can peek at your z-axis over your next iChat video call. This is because the stereo images from the cameras are converted to the old 1950s-style, headache-inducing anaglyph method. I think this would be a lot of fun, especially on my weekly family Sk ype calls. Just whether it would be $30 worth of fun is another matter, but there is a demo available.

FourEyes3D Product page [b-l-a-c-k-o-p]

W hen PC lover Will Urbina was finally forced to switch to a Mac by market forces (he’s a video editor, and most everyone these days wants you to use Final Cut Pro), he didn’t give up easily. In fact, he spent the next few months kicking and screaming his way through a rather painful process, a process which finally gave birth to a mutant: The OS Xbox Pro.

Faced with “the distasteful choice of either setting foot in an Apple store” or buil ding his own, Urbina went the home-made route, building a PC into a first-gen Xbox Dev Kit he picked up for pennies, and then hackintoshing it. The case of the Dev Kit is taller than the retail box, which turned out to be helpful: Urbina wanted to match the specs of a $2,500 Mac Pro.

With some literal hacking and rebuilding, he managed to squeeze in four hard drives (a pair of 7200rpm, 500GB drives in RAID 0 conf iguration for Final Cut, plus slower 160GB drives for bot h OS X and Windows 7), external USB SATA, and Firewire port s and even a rather odd-looking Apple logo on the top. The hackintoshing aspect was taken care of by the amazing EFi-X dongle, a little plug-in widget that lets you install a retail copy of OS X onto any PC hardware.

Urbina made a few curious decisions, especially gi ven th at OS X 10.6 is moving towared moving much of its heavy lifting to the GPU, or graphics card. Because the case is so small (even an optical drive was left out), Urbina had to use a 300 Watt power supply, 100 Watts short of the juice needed for his chosen NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT card. Instead, he popped in a lesser card and beefed up the CPU to an Intel Core 2 Duo Q9550s. This reliance on the CPU to do the work clearly shows his PC bias. The specs:

In tel Core2 Q9550S @2.93GHz

Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR

Sparkle GeForce 9800http://www.willudesign.com/OSXboxPro/osxboxpro9.jpg GT

8GB Crucial Ballistix 1333MHzhttp://www.willudesign.com/OSXboxPro/osxboxprotopless1.jpg

Highpoint RocketRAID 26401

2x 160GB 5400rpm Seagate Momentus HDD

2x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Momentus HDD

16GB 1.8” Super Talent MasterDrive KX SSD

EFiX USB V1

Not bad for $1,500. Urbina says that the equivalent Mac Pro would run to $4,500. We think it a little odd that a professional would go down such a route to build a work machine, though: If yo ur wages rely on a working machine, a hackintosh is a little scary. Still, thi s thing looks awesome, and wit h all that hardware inside such a tiny case, we imagine that the fans will stay true to the noisy, leaf-blowing Xbox original.

OS Xbox Pro product page [Will U Design]

See Also:

Psystar 'Rebel EFI' Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any P CEFiX Dangles Hacki ng Dongle Before Apple’s Lawyers

The story keeps getting worse for Psystar, a small Florida-based startup that was selling Mac clones. In its court battle with Apple, a judg e recently found Psystar guilty of violating Apple’s copyrights. What’s more, the payoff for being a rebel was meager for Psystar: the startup sold only 768 sy stems, according to an economist App le hired to analyze Psystar’s business records.

On top of that, Psystar told investors that it projected it would sell between 1.45 million and 12 million machi nes in 2011. The small company opened shop in April 2008; Apple sued three months later. 12 million units? Talk a bout absurdly optimistic.

768 shipments is a puny number, but I’m not all that surprised. Back w hen I worked as an editor at Macworld, I remember how difficult it was for us to order a Psystar desktop for lab testing. Only after numerous attempts did our order go through; the process felt shady from start to finish. Also, I would imagine that the people who are nerdy enough to desire — and put up with — a PC hacked to run Mac OS X would take it upon themselv es to build a Hackintosh of their own (like Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel and I did with our netbooks).

Plus, I can’t imagine man y would opt to throw money at a company that’s battling Apple’s legal sharks. That circumstance brought the longev ity of Psystar, and its ability to provide customer support, into question. Psystar’s spin for investors is even more bizarre: Psystar argued that its leg al battle with Apple would frighten off other potential competitors, thus insulating its success. However, plenty of businesses offering Hackintosh solutions have emerge d throughout the course of Psystar’s fight with Apple.

ComputerWorld, the first to report this story, happened upon a slide presentation containing the shipment projections, which Psystar showed to venture capitalists in 2008. Get the f ull story there.

See Also:

Psystar ‘Rebel EFI’ Patch Installs Snow Leopard on Any PCPsystar Marches Forward With Beefy Mac CloneApple, Psystar File to Protect Secrets Before Battling in Court …Judge Dismisses Mac Cloner Psystar’s BankruptcyMac Copycat Psystar Gets Ammo to Countersue ApplePsystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way …Psystar: Apple Is Paranoid for Alleging Conspiracy

Photo: Psystar

The Vaio X, aside from being thin and light, is notoriously d ifficult to mod — simply put, there’s not much room in there to play around! Besides, when you’ve spent well over a grand for a machine, you’re not necessarily going to be gung-ho about digging in with your soldering gun. Still, when InsanelyMac forum member Asama was struck by inspiration (in the form of a Vaio P OS X image) he followed his heart — and, much to the world’s amusement, it installed on the Vaio X with few complications. Sure, it wasn’t a flawless operation: the WiFi card is unsupported (as you probably guessed) but, that said, this is definitely an item of note for all the Hackintosh freaks in attendance. Indeed we ‘re looki ng forward to seeing Psystar get sued over a similar hack at some future junction. Get a close r look after the break.

We’ve thought before how nice it might be to have some powers of magnification on the iPhone’s cam… but are we going to go out and mod our unit? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t admire someone else’s work. Taking various lenses and attaching them to the lid of a jar, the modder quite carefully built a contraption that looks a little “hobo Steampunk” to us, but we’re still fairly impressed with this little gadget. Hit the read link for full, detailed instructions and more pho tos if you’d lik e to make one of your own.