Have any Asus? Is it your Pride?

Here’s a contest by Asus for all Asus owners. Apparently there’s lots of “Pride” in this poster, which means Asus want you to show off your rig with their name in a photo and a video, alongside a ‘fairytale and happy ending ever after’ story at their site. But what’s in return? Apparently, a chance to win the next Asus Intel chipset motherboard (probably P67) including the processor, and that’s not all. You’ll also get either a ‘Republic of Gamers’ 3D notebook, or the grand price of an all-expenses paid trip to Asus HQ in Taiwan!

P/S: You only have about a week’s time to do this, as the deadline is 7th January 2011, before 23:59:59. For more info, head over to the source.

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SurfCube gives Windows Phone 7 the 3D browser

Now who says Windows Phone 7 isn’t fun and dandy? Now they’re getting 3D browsers, whether you like it or not (and whether you need I or not). This comes courtesy of SurfCube. SurfCube turns the browser into a ‘fake’ 3D experience of sorts, with favourites on “top,” and history and settings on the “sides,” while the front face of the cube is the browser itself. You can get around with swipes and flashy tilt gestures, and for $1.99 on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace you won’t need to rob a bank to have 3D browsing on your phone.

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PS3 private cryptography key hacked, mass Bluray disc coming!

Linux on every PS3 ever sold. Possible? Yes, and it’s coming probably next month, as a group of hackers called fail0verflow has just claimed to hacked the PS3 to reveal its own private cryptography key, the all important thing that allows people to sign their own code. But that’s not all; they also revealed that Sony didn’t bother generating any random numbers to secure the blasted thing, thus the cryptography always generate a same number all the time. The group intends to generate a proof-of-concept video tomorrow, and release the tools sometime next month, which will allow installation of Linux onto PS3.

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Cheap method to keep on cycling, in the snow

It’s snowing, and your car can’t move, but what about your bicycle? It should be the same, right? Well not really. If you don’t have stud tires, then a bunch of zip ties should do the trick. One of the cyclists at Dutch Bike Co. was caught without studded tires when it started snowing in Seattle. However, with some MacGyver trick, the problem is solved.

“I can accelerate, brake, and corner with aplomb, even on the vile snowpack/sheet ice mix the plows leave in the bike lanes. The zip ties dig nicely into the hardest packed surfaces, but they’re thin enough not to bounce the bike around at low speed or on short pavement sections. “

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Intel’s new SSD 310 is eight time small than your notebook’s HDD

Intel has announced a new SSD. Nothing fast that’ll kill SandForce, but something that’s extremely small which Intel hopes to give a fight to Toshiba. Intel’s just announced a new SSD 310 line that offers spectacularly minimal 51mm by 30mm by 5mm dimensions, while retaining X25-class performance (up to 200MBps read and 80MBps write speeds).

To give you an idea of what those measurements mean, the industry-standard 2.5-inch form factor, an already diminutive footprint, is eight times larger than these new-fangled storage chips. 40GB and 80GB variants of the SSD 310 are shipping out to OEMs already and Lenovo has confirmed it plans to roll these into its next refresh of the venerable ThinkPad laptop line.

Prices are set at $99 and $179 (depending on size) when bought in batches of 1,000, though direct sales to end users are predictably off the table for now, as expected. The next SSD might be more expensive, and you’ve been warned.

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ASUS teases Eee Pad and Eee Slate ahead of CES launch

Last time manufacturers usually unveiled their products wholly before CES, but this time around, they all prefer to tease instead. Today we see yet another tease from Asus. What we see above is a USB 3.0 port embedded within a very slinky keyboard panel, which itself seems attached to a touchscreen display (with Android buttons!) up top. It’s looking more like a tablet PC (presumably with a pivoting screen) than a tablet, which is corroborated by other images at the source link. Two devices are included in this teaser picture set, with the other looking like it has a slider keyboard. We’re not sure what this thing really is though. Well, we’ll just have to wait for CES 2011.

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Kinect Hacked To Play World of Warcraft

Since many had hacked Kinect to do all sorts of stupid stuff, why not mod it to do some real actions? That’s what this new hack is all about. The Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California demonstrates its Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST) technology in this World of Warcraft for Kinect demo. Yes, using Kinect to wave your hands around and control your World of Warcraft hero.

Using open source software and smarts, the eggheads at USC can control some of WoW’s simpler actions—movement, spellcasting, targeting—with the Xbox 360 add-on. FAAST is designed to be used with off-the-shelf game software and can be configured to work with different titles. So the future of the mouse is your hand and your body?

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