It’s a one-stop morning machine.  With one wireless unit, you can crank up the morning weather report, check your email, AND make your morning cup of coffee.  It’s the iMac Coffee Sub casemod from designer Klaus Diebel, and it combines a coffee maker, a Mac Mini, and a JBL wireless sound system (complete with subwoofer) in one recycled iMac case.  Each one is hand made and completely designed to your specifications, which makes the price worth it.  Just head on over to the official website and start working on your personalized iMac CS!

I’d much rather have a mini Windows (or even Linux) machine inside the iMac case to save a lot of money off the initial cost, but the old iMac case is perfect for this kind of design.  It’s plenty spacious, yet it has a sleek design and keeps all the pieces together with no mess.  I wonder if I could order the iMac CS, hold the Mini?  It’d be a whole lot cheaper that way, that’s for sure!

The earliest movie theaters were able to lure customers in just by having moving picture images projected on screen, but since then it’s gotten harder and harder to put rear ends in seats for the biggest blockbusters.  While a big draw for 1940’s audiences was ice-cold air conditioning, once the novelty of AC spread to homes and television grabbed the world’s attention, the movie theaters had to turn to increasingly strange gimmicks to capture ticket dollars.  One of the first of these was 3-D, but 3-D has changed a lot in the past 50 years.

One thing I can safely say is that I’m so very very glad the polarized glasses of the 1950’s are an anachronism.  While I enjoyed watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon with them on, when I took them off to rub my eyes the blurry color bleed effect on screen gave me a massive headache.  Plus, you kind of look like a goof with those Elton John specs on.  However, the increased manufacture cost of modern 3D glasses gets passed along to the consumer in ticket surcharges, which I intensely hate.

So, I’m kind of torn on the issue.  If I’m going to see a movie, I want to get the full effect, so I’ll grudgingly pay for a pair of recyclable plastic sunglasses.  I just wish I could reuse the same pair over and over again and save on the cost of the screening!

The netbook has been the big trend in computer buying this year.  I mean, can you blame people for wanting one?  I sure don’t.  It’s portable, uses a lot less energy than a laptop, and can do a lot of computing on the go for a small investment and a small footprint.  You can just stick a netbook in your backpack or purse and not even know it’s there until you need it!  That said, they’re not perfect.  If you’ve gotten a new ultraportable computer for the holidays, here are a few tips for getting the most out of your new netbook.

Of the many tips listed, the most important one to do immediately is upgrade the netbook’s RAM to 2GB.  The second is to uninstall whatever antivirus free trial that comes with your netbook and to install AVG Free.  After years of struggling with crappy Norton and McAfee coverage, AVG is the one for me.  I’m also a Firefox user, but it’s not exactly a necessary as the new Internet Explorer works as well as FF these days (maybe better).

The other changes are personal things, aside from the netbook skin.  That one is probably important since you don’t want a big protective shell on your tiny netbook.  The one I don’t agree with is the use of the Dragon speak and type software, but that’s because I’ve used it previously and found it inaccurate.  Still, it’s a good guide for the new netbook user.

Did you get a Kindle this year?  If so, you’re not alone.  In fact, according to Amazon, the Kindle was the hottest selling item on Amazon, and the Kindle outsold all physical books during the holiday season.  It was the most-gifted item ever!

That’s not all the good news from Amazon.  They’ve amassed quite a collection of random facts and figures about the holiday season, but none of them are quite as eye-popping as Amazon’s biggest sales day.  On December 14, Amazon moved 9.5 million items worldwide.  That means they sold 110 items every second of that day.  Even more impressive is that 99 percent of the items sent arrived on time.

Did you have a good holiday sales season?  I only ordered a few things online, and I’m not sure if they arrived as expected or not.  Given that I waited entirely too late to order my Christmas goodies, they may not have hit their respective destinations yet.  They’re due today, so I imagine they’ll arrive in the proper post boxes sometime this afternoon.

Image: Wired

In the spirit of the season, everybody here at the various Shaks wishes you and yours a happy and healthy holiday season.  So, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, joyous Kwanzaa, or a wonderful whatever you celebrate.  If you don’t celebrate anything, then… hey, it’s Friday!  Happy Friday!

Want to know where Santa is right now?  Just use the official the official NORAD Santa Tracker, powered by Google Earth!  Right now Santa is over Russia, and he seems to be making good time.

The tradition of NORAD tracking Santa Claus’s flight over the Earth dates back to 1955, according to this BBC article.  Due to a misprint in a Colorado advertisement, people phoning a Santa hotline were actually calling the Continental Air Defense Command, the predecessor to NORAD.  An official at CONAD took the calls and pretended to be Santa Claus, and the tradition took off from there!

Tracking Santa is high tech.  You can ask questions of NORAD volunteers by emailing noradtrackssanta@gmail.com, check the Santa tracking Facebook page, browse the Picasa photo album, install a browser plugin to keep tabs on St. Nick, subscrube to the official NORAD Santa Twitter feed to track of his progress and give interesting facts about the stops along the way, and even get SMS updates of Santa’s progress sent to your cell phone!

Santa Claus is delightfully old-fashioned.  From the furry clothes to the big beard, he’s definitely showing his roots in medieval times.  However, the thing that ages Santa the most is his reliance on a sled pulled by reindeer.  I mean, yes, it’s a magical sled and magical reindeer, but he could do with an update, couldn’t he?  I mean, get with the internal combustion engine, Santa!

That’s why the folks at GE have gotten together and given Santa a new 21st Century sleigh that takes advantage of all the groundbreaking modern building methods that most of us don’t even have in our cars!  There’s carbon fiber for the body, self-powered OLEDs for the headlights, a special coating to prevent ice from forming on the sled in flight, and all kinds of other green goodies for St. Nick!  Time to trade that tattered old list in on a 500gb holographic disc, Fr. Christmas!

Santa’s now lighter, more efficient, and with a much smaller carbon footprint!  Now if only they could do something about his weight problem, then we’d have a good holiday role model.

Some times, it feels like preparation for Christmas is like slaving away in a mine for a bunch of evil robot overlords, doesn’t it?  Well, it’s not all bad, as sometimes even robots can give you presents.  For example, that giant metal Santa Claus on the corner might just give you a Soylent Green pie.  Plus, there’s all the snow.  It might be flakes of ammonia, but still!  That’s better than nothing, right?

Before anyone asks:  no, I’m NOT ready for Christmas.  I still have presents to get.  Yeah, last minute is the way I have to do things, and no, I don’t know why.  I try my best to *not* be this way, but… ugh.  When I have time to waste, it always gets wasted.

Are you guys ready?  I can’t be the only one not ready, can I?

What’s more in the holiday spirit than to highlight a spectacular series of wonderfully cheesy 1980’s ads?  In this case, we’ll go to the United Kingom for a series of 1980 Prime (or Pr1me) Computer adverts featuring one of the many actors to play Dr. Who, Tom Baker.

Coming to you via Mental Floss, let’s make with the unintentional comedy, shall we?

One of the good things about texting, as I’ve discovered, is that you’ve never got to have someone repeat themselves.  You don’t have to write yourself notes about whatever was discussed on the phone, either.  It’s right there, in your text history, just waiting for you to refer to it again.  Whether it’s addresses or evening plans, there it is.  Of course, how do you do things that need two hands while keeping your phone handy?

That’s the quandary solved by the Texthook, a hands-free phone caddy that hooks onto the stroller, shopping cart, piece of luggage, or whatever you’ve got.  It fits the BlackBerry, the iPhone, the Droid, the iPod Touch, and any number of exciting new fancy phones as listed on the compatability chart.  Given how many people I see during the day trying to do things while still texting, well, this is definitely going to be a big deal.

You know where this would be good?  Attached to the car somehow.  I tend to charge my phone in the car, but it slides around a lot.  If I had a compatible phone and a Texthook, it’d be great to keep the phone from skidding around crazily (or just getting the thing out of my pocket for awhile).

Image: Engadget