ColoWare does the Segway

Getting your personal gadget of desire touched up by ColorWare can be pricey depending on the amount of customization and the gadget at hand. Though if the gadget in question is a Segway, the minuscule cost (all things considered) to have it primped and primed all GQ-like seems rather moot, wouldn’t you say?

On the order of customizable parts, get ready: handle bar, upper leansteer, lower leansteer, leansteer hub, center console, front bumper, rear bumper, front battery, rear battery, fenders, inner hubs, wheels and hub caps can all be tweaked how you see fit. Quite the options list, huh? I’m pretty sure no two ColorWare Segways will ever look alike.

So for those where money falls from trees, hit up ColorWare and have at it.

Tony Hawk’s “Ride” skateboard controller follows it’s calling…

I never once jumped on a wheel-less Tony Hawk “Ride” controller and felt tricked by it’s realism. If anything, it was gimmicky without any real value outside of the game. Sure it was fun and all, but are you really going to jump all over your room at two in the morning? Yeah, a normal controller will suffice. But this — this is something I can appreciate.

The clever individual responsible for the real Tony Hawk Ride skateboard used nothing more than a drill, a couple of screws, and some miscellaneous skateboard parts to create the coolest skateboard mod I’ve seen yet.

Leave to the truly creative to make take life’s water pistol and turn it into a nail gun (figurative of course). Video after the jump…

Gargantuan solar farm to power 20% of Europe by 2050, rest of the continent sometime thereafter.

Talk of massive solar farms powering anything larger than a small city has until now, been left to science fiction. From what we’ve seen so far, there just hasn’t been enough space to build a solar farm big enough to consume all the energy of a given city or town. But that could all change, thanks to a gargantuan 6,500sq. mile solar farm being built in the Sahara desert…

Devs save the day twofold: HTC Evo 4G 30fps cap removed and HTC Aria rooted!

We have not one, but two great Android happenings to share with your this morning. First up — the Evo 4G’s sad tale of capped video performance. Or as we should now say it — the lack there of. XDA brain work is behind the hackery yet again. Contrary to popular belief or what HTC has said on the matter, the Evo 4G is plenty capable of 30+fps if you have the coding knowledge to unlock such power, that fact captured by the image above. With that said, if you’re an Evo 4G owner in search of more raw fps, check out this little thread over at XDA and get yourselves acquainted with the ongoing discussion.

But Evo 4G users aren’t the only ones having all the fun. Wouldn’t you know it, that unnaturally crippled HTC Aria that AT&T half-assed out of the gate can proudly stand from here on out as an unshackled, rooted device. Thank you notes and monetary donations can be sent to popular HTC hacker ” Eugene373″ for all of his valiant efforts. The whole HTC Aria root process isn’t exactly “easy”, though it won’t wrap your head into a pretzel either. Just make sure you follow this guide over at XDA and you should be golden.

As for motion picture goodness, hop inside for a duo of videos going into rather geeky detail of the whole Evo 4G fps debacle…

PTT comes to Android: TiKL brings walkie-talkie communication to the masses.

I would never advocate switching to Nextel. As a gadget junkie, their lineup is abysmal. Though in the corporate world, they’re all the rage these days, especially with little nuggets such as PTT (push to talk). Beyond Nextel though, there really hasn’t been much draw towards PTT in general, save for Verizon’s dabbling in that area here and there, mixed in with a few oddball carriers getting creative from time to time.

But the whole idea behind walkie-talkie/PTT is quick and concise audio messages — pretty much an audible text message if you will. Talking on the phone I hate. Text-based communications however are a completely different story. Blend the two and you get PTT which somehow is kind of fun.

After all that I said above, I’ll conclude that the “fun factor” of PTT is no where near enough to turn me into a Nextel user. In regards to Verizon, I wouldn’t pay extra for walkie-talkie features either. Kind up that creek everyone’s heard about and somehow manages to traverse without a paddle, huh?

That may have slightly bothered me in the past, but now it doesn’t have to. Thanks to TiKL (Touch to Talk — beta) for Android, all the glorious one-liners and impromptu conversations can now be made for FREE! The app is free. And the data…well, you already pay for the data. But that’s the good part — no minutes are used. So yak it up.

It’s rather small and insignificant. But given that TiKL has actually made me enjoy voice-based communication in the 20 minutes I’ve had it has to mean something, right?

Intel gettin’ all chop happy on processor prices this summer.

There’s nothing more satisfying than a good deal, especially on once pricey PC components. We don’t all have endless amounts of cash to blow on kick ass custom computers, so frugality is something we commoners look out for. And wouldn’t you know it, Intel has something just for us by way of cheaper prices.

The most eye opening change is the price of the I7 950 processor clocked at 3.06GHz and currently sitting at $562. By the end of this summer however, you can expect to pay a fair amount less — $294. That’s directly in-line with the cheapest 9xx-based i7, the i7 930. Expect the latter to receive at least a small drop in price as well.

Moving on, dual-core lovers will like that the i3 550 (3.2GHz) is being dropped down to $17 while a newer, i3 560 (3.33GHz) swoops in to take it’s place at the $138 price point.

After that, it’s all econo-procs like Pentium E series and Celeron mumbo jumbo from there on out. Good for the ultra affordable PC builder, but just not something I’d call “exciting”. (Exciting would go something like this: 6-core Core i7 980x now dropping down to $500!) Yeah, that would be pretty awesome. But don’t hold your breath.

Whataya say folks, did Intel do alright? Larger snapshot of the price list just inside…

Google Voice exits invite-only stage. Now available to all!

If you’re one of the handful of people who haven’t managed to snag a Google Voice invite yet, your wait and frustration are now over. Google has officially taken the “invite-only” status off of Google Voice. You know what that means? STOP paying extra for visual voicemail add-ons from whatever US carrier you currently have (assuming you have a smartphone that is), since Google Voice is ultimately leaps and bounds ahead of said options as well as pulling off that feat completely free! Add on the fact that SMS and email transcriptions are also available for Google Voice subscribers as well as the ability to have up to 10 separate numbers/devices ring/alerted when your GV number is called.

Ok, the transcriptions might be sketchy at best. But there’s no denying the usefulness that Google Voice offers. If you have the option to install Google Voice on your device, now is the time.

Oh yeah — US only for now. Sorry folks.