Oh oh Cybiko! Presumably born of an illicit union between a walkie-talkie and a Palm Pilot, this 2000-era gadget was for kids who wanted to send messages to nearby friends. But could it also make men erect and cows flatulent?

The Cybiko, which was introduced in 2000, was an antenna'd handheld gadget could send messages via radio waves to other device-users within a 300-meter radius. Ha ha ha: Why would anyone want to send a non-verbal message to someone so darn close to them? That would be, like, IM-ing someone who sat near me in an office. Ridiculous. I almost never do that. Twice a day, tops.

In the UK and the US, the Cybiko was marketed as a kind of Baby's First PDA: In addition to using it to chat with nearby friends, it could be used to play games or as a calculator and to have what promised to be an uncontrollable amount of fun. It seems that in Asia, however, the market was slightly older. Japanese users were promised a little bit more than just fun: Namely, the ability to make cows fart out words, pop hands out of men's heart boxers, and, overall, have yourself a "happy best time." 

Anna Jane Grossman has joined us for a few weeks, documenting life in the early aughts, and how it differs from today. The author of Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By (Abrams Image) and the creator of ObsoleteTheBook.com, she has also written for dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Salon.com, the Associated Press, Elle and the Huffington Post, as well as Gizmodo. She has a complicated relationship with technology, but she does have an eponymous website: AnnaJane.net. Follow her on Twitter at @AnnaJane.

Even more impressive than the Droid's quick rooting, the Nexus One has been conquered from the inside before Google has even officially announced it.

The guy behind the rooting, a Modaco forum-goer named Paul, successfully rooted the coveted Nexus One and made a custom ROM called Superboot to ease the method for everyone else—not that all that many people can take advantage of it, seeing as how we're still a week away from the phone even being unveiled. This could be good for the Nexus One, given that some signs have been pointing to tighter Google control over the device—but we'll have to wait to try it out until its release. [RedmondPie]

TOKYO (AP) - After several decades of gruesome failures, Japanese researchers have successfully transplanted a kitten's paws to a human body. The test subject, a 29 year old model for Thanko, a gadget seller, has a new lease on life.

"For years I lived with a wretched handicap," [name withheld] explained. "My hands were human-like and only a little bit cute, which is a tough thing for a model."

After fifteen years of transplant lists, fundraisers and miracle cures, she'd almost given up. Then researchers from Tokyo University of Science called and said they'd nearly perfected a new technique of removing a non-anesthetized kitten's paws with a rusty hacksaw and gluing them to the patient's wrists.

"The news was a Godsend," she said.

Given the slightest surgical mistake, a small, defenseless kitten would bleed to death quite slowly and painfully on the operating table. The human subject, however, would be completely unharmed, resting peacefully unaware of any blood or shrieking.

"Let's just say it's good that a humane society leases the space next door," said one scientist. "A really, really big humane society just filled to the brim with unloved strays."

As for the young model, she woke from surgery with a slight hand ache requiring nothing more than a prescription for a minor anti-inflammatory. And according to her official press statement, she couldn't be more pleased:

"Now my hands are very cute!" [Thanko via CrunchGear]

How will Apple redesign the ultraslim, seminal MacBook Air that launched dozens of me-too ultraportable laptops? Only Apple knows. But here are some gratuitous musings anyway.

In a previous post, I said I wouldn't hazard any guesses on what Apple may do with the MacBook Air. And I won't. That doesn't stop me from looking at the most recent ultrathin laptop competition to see where Apple might be able to improve the design that turns two years old in January.

Enclosure

This will be a tough act to follow. The original design was good enough that Apple didn't change it for gen 2—aka Rev. B—of the Air. And the aluminum enclosure was a trendsetter, which all MacBook Pros (and other PC makers) eventually copied.

But that doesn't mean the Air is perfect. The razor-thin slab of aluminum provides little room for ports and connectors. (Apple's implementation is a flip-out set of USB, Mini DisplayPort, audio ports that retract back into the body.)

A design modification that the Dell Adamo uses (some say retrogressed to) was putting the ports on the back (behind the screen). This allows Dell to offer a fuller array of connectors.

Hewlett-Packard, for its part, went another route: it just made its Envy 13 slightly thicker (at 0.8 inches) than the Air, allowing a couple more connectors (a second USB port and an SD card slot). HP also molded the base of the Envy in magnesium, which makes it lighter, according to HP.

Then there's just-announced Dell Adamo XPS. This is even thinner than the MacBook Air and puts the CPU-complex-plus-circuit-board (aka motherboard) behind the screen, not underneath the keyboard—standard design practice for all laptops.

Of course, there's the recurring rumor that Apple is looking at different materials to make it even lighter while maintaining its famous sturdiness. This could potentially be a combination of aluminum and something like carbon fiber. (Though, as stated above, HP claims that magnesium is the way to go.)

Other possibilities: make one model bigger (wider), a la the Dell Latitude Z, which offers a 16-inch 1600x900 WLED Display and at its thickest point is only 0.79 inches.

Or make it smaller. The Sony Vaio X is a great example of how light (1.6 pounds) and thin (0.55 inches) a premium laptop (technically it's a Netbook) can be.

Tablet? There is the remote possibility that a version of the Air becomes a tablet. And that would mean potentially a new enclosure and new silicon.

Graphics

The second feature I'll touch on is graphics. A good graphics chip is tough to squeeze into ultrathin designs and this a major feature that set the Air apart from other slim designs, which use the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD.

Apple, with the Rev. B of the Air, introduced Nvidia 9400M (aka, Ion) graphics silicon. This delivered decent performance and actually made the Air run cooler (I know, I've used both the original Air and Rev. B extensively.)

Let's be clear—the graphics on the original Air was poor. And the source of many gripes about the original design (which proves how important the graphics chip is now). Apple chose to go with Intel's X3100 graphics (they didn't have much a choice in 2007, when design decisions were made), which superheated the bottom of the unit when watching video. My Air would get so hot that I would have to place a large, flat picture book (in effect, a crude heat sink), between my lap and the MacBook Air.

So, what's next after the Nvidia graphics in Rev. B of the Air? There's Nvidia's upcoming Ion 2 graphics, which is still a mystery. I even queried an Nvidia executive about this recently in an interview, but mum's the word. I have confidence that Nvidia will deliver a solid solution that offers an optimal balance between power efficiency and performance.

Nvidia also offers the GeForce G 105M, which is used, for example, in the HP dm3t consumer ultrathin laptop.

Then there's the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics chip, which Advanced Micro Devices describes as a "thin and light mobile graphics processor...delivering unprecedented performance-per-watt...while watching Blu-ray movies." (The Blu-ray aspect may be overkill for an ultrathin, especially in the case of the Apple, which does not offer Blu-ray drives in its MacBook line.)

This ATI chip has already found its way into an HP ultrathin laptop.

I won't dive into processors here. Suffice to say that Intel continues to expand its variety of low-voltage (e.g., SL9600) and ultra-low-voltage processors (SU9600). Maybe more enticingly, Intel will bring out low-power versions of the Core i series of mobile processors next year. Probably sooner rather than later. This is likely what Apple is targeting for any major revamp of the Air.

This story originally appeared on CNET

The App Store is oozing with sleaze; sex-themed apps are everywhere. But here's the thing: these "porn" apps are always terrible. Here are some of the worst, and how to fix this, the most important problem in the world.

First, here are a few of the worst, collected by Intern Kyle and myself. It's a list of disappointment, of broken promises, and most importantly, of no nudity.

Of course, you can pick up your iPhone right now and go to a porn site. It's a smartphone. It has the internet. Some sites even have iPhone-optimized video streaming and navigation, because apparently, just like on every other device that's been connected to the internet, people use their smartphone for porn. This is an inevitability.

And Apple has a ratings system in the App Store. It has a 17+ rating, for apps with violent, crude or sexual content—or app that have a browser function, which could be used to access objectionable content. Most of the apps above are 17+, which means that if parents so choose, they can block their iPhone-having children from even being able to download them. It follows that they could do the same for 18+ apps, so why haven't they?

I can understand Apple not wanting to get into the porn business, which, by taking 30% of developers' revenue, I guess they would sort of be doing. But the current setup just doesn't make any sense. You can buy an app with a built-in browser, which can access the most horrible smut on the web, and get a 17+ rating. But if you link said app to one of those sites, and disable general browsing, suddenly it's verboten. Again, I can understand how we ended up here, but the results, as you've seen, are depressing.

It's fair to say that most people just assume there are porn apps, when there really aren't. But there are hundreds of apps that look like porn apps, cost money, and that are, effectively, bait-and-switch scams. Apple can fix this in two ways: they can open the floodgates and just let people have their real porn apps, which would effectively kill these in-between semi-porn apps, or they can revise how the App Store works: by instituting a 24-hour open return policy for paid apps, like the Android Market has, people would simply return these worthless apps, and developers, now unable to trick people into giving them boner money, would stop making them. They would tumble down the rankings and into oblivion.

Anyway, no matter what Apple does, people will continue to look at photos of naked humans on their iPhones. It may make the company squirm, but there's no reason to pretend it's not happening, and to let scammers screw up the App Store more than they already have. So do something, Apple! The fate of the world depends on it, a little!

We've made it this far through soul-sucking winter, so it's time to celebrate. This week's Shooting Challenge is simple: "Happy New Year" is the theme. And I need your participation!

Last week, we had to can the results because only 3 photos were entered into the contest. 3! (The week before, we had almost 60.) So once again, please help me keep this section going strong—nothing makes me happier than seeing Gizmodo transition to cover not just press releases for gadgets, but the artistic products that said gadgets actually help produce.

The rules:

1. Submissions need to be your own.
2. Photos need to be taken the week of the contest. (No portfolio linking or it spoils the "challenge" part.)
3. Explain, briefly, the equipment, settings and technique used to snag the shot.
4. Email submissions to contests@gizmodo.com.
5. Include 800px image AND something wallpaper sized in email.

Send your best entries by Sunday at 6PM Eastern to contests@gizmodo.com with "Happy New Year" in the subject line. Save your files as JPGs or GIFs at 800 pixels wide and larger, and use a FirstnameLastname.jpg naming convention using whatever name you want to be credited with. Include your shooting summary (camera, lens, ISO, etc) in the body of the email. [Photo by Bubba Trout]

We asked Maximum PC's Will Smith to describe the cheapest PC you can build, and he said he'd do it, if only to talk you out of spending so little. Here's what you gain, and lose, by going ultra cheap.

Over at Maximum PC, we just posted a guide that show's you everything you need to know to build the cheapest PC I'd recommend to anyone for use as his or her main PC. It's a surprisingly beefy machine, capable of playing games, ripping DVDs, editing video and photos, and playing 1080p video with nary a dropped frame. For a mere $647, we managed to pack a quad-core CPU, a great video card, 4GB of memory, and Windows 7 Home Premium into a surprisingly fashionable mid-tower. However, if you don't need as well-rounded a general purpose PC, you can go cheaper, especially if you're willing to make some sacrifices. Let's take a look at the parts we used, and then we'll start making cuts.

Let's look at the price chart. If you're not a gamer and aren't using one of the handful of applications that's accelerated by general-purpose GPU-based computing, then there's no good reason to spend 25% of your budget on a videocard that will lie fallow for most everything you do. The Gigabyte motherboard sports integrated graphics that will do everything you need to do, including hardware accelerated decode for video playback. Pulling the videocard brings our total cost down below $500, to $481. Not too shabby, but we can save even more.

If you're not going to be running tons of apps, editing photos, or encoding videos, that quad-core is massive overkill. To save a few bucks, we're going to replace that quad-core Athlon II with a single-core Sempron LE-1250. It costs less than a Blu-ray disc at Best Buy, a mere $32. Unfortunately, that still doesn't get us below $400, so we need to dig deeper.

Since you ditched the quad core CPU, your PC won't be up to running many applications at once, so we can cut back on memory. You can buy a generic 1GB stick for $22 at Newegg, which is the minimum requirement for Windows 7.

Since you won't be creating content, there's absolutely no reason to spend big bucks on a massive 500GB hard drive. In fact, you could probably even get by installing Windows on a decent-sized flash drive, but that's more expensive than what we have in mind. It's tough to beat a more-than-adequate 80GB drive for a mere $35. Oh, and while we're at it, you should ditch the optical drive. Odds are, you won't need it for anything after you set up your machine, and it's easier and faster to install Windows from thumbdrive (which you probably already have anyway).

After more than halving the price of our PC, Windows is looking mighty expensive. At $105, the OEM edition of Windows Home Premium is more than a third of the total cost of this machine. It's time to start thinking about Ubuntu, which will get our total price down to a cool $200. But wait, we can go even cheaper.

If you're just going to browse the web on this machine, why spend money on a real CPU? A Foxconn Atom motherboard that comes with the CPU costs a few bucks less than our AMD motherboard alone, so it's time to trim the fat, yet again. Sure, we could spend a few bucks more and get the same CPU in a motherboard equipped with Nvidia's Ion chipset, but EVERYTHING MUST GO!

For a machine with power requirements this meager, there's absolutely no reason to spend 20% of our budget on a quality power supply. Instead, let's get a case that includes an integrated power supply. It may not be reliable, but it sure is cheap!

Now, I'm reasonably certain that there's no way to build a cheaper machine. The only bad news? You just built a nettop.

Don't forget to check out Will's complete guide to the cheapest PC he'd actually recommend you to build.

Will Smith is the Editor-in-Chief of Maximum PC and has been building PCs longer than he cares to admit. He enjoys long walks, Rock Band, and is anxiously awaiting the first great Android Phone and the Apple Tablet.

Top image by Tim Rogers/Flickr, used under CC License