Over at DroidForums they've got a tutorial on how to hack your Droid to enable GUI Wi-Fi tethering, as Moto's Android may do many things, but it stops short at hooking up with your laptop or other wireless gadget.

Modder WebAcoustics says of the hack:

"Please note that this involves rooting your phone, installing a custom recovery image, and a custom kernel. This is not for the faint of heart"

If that doesn't intimidate you, then hop on over to DroidForums for the details. [DroidForums via The Gadgets via Engadget]

ZOMG! This Christmas tree! It's just...floating! How in the love of Santa Christ did they do that?! Oh, I see, they just hung it from the top.

I will admit that the bottom is pretty badass looking, and it certainly does leave a lot of room for presents. But you need to have a home setup similar to this to pull it off, and you also need to be cool with your tree dangling from a wire hung from a crane-like apparatus.

But really, if it were my dad who did this, I would tell him to quit fiddling with the tree and to reroute that energy to my presents. That's the reason for the season, after all. [Instructables]

With all the sexting craze going on, and teens getting arrested left, right, and center on child pornography charges, I'm surprised the Safe Sexting iPhone application—which allows you to take and easily censor any photos—didn't appear months ago.

It works easily: Just take a photo, apply a censorship patch out of a total of four kinds, and save. I like the silk patch, which apparently lets you send photos with a censorship you can see through. Unfortunately, I have no use for this application. I still sext in the old school way: Using text messages.

F:)Cd==I

See? Me so horny. [Safe Sexting]

I know what you're thinking right now. "Who in the hell is Koyi Matei?" We haven't the slightest clue, but she was probably the chief protagonist in Episode 2, or something. [ThinkGeek via ChipChick]

Was that $490,000 gold Wii on the wrong side of the allegiance for you? Thankfully Goldstriker's now offering a 22ct-gold-and-diamond-studded PS3, letting you take on the terrorists in MW2 the proper way.

Only three have been made, so you better get your skates on if the 1,600 grams of solid 22ct gold and 58 0.50ct diamonds-decorated console is just the living room accessory you've been after. Only £199,995 ($319,104)—a veritable steal in comparison to the Wii. But how much will the Xbox 360 version set us back, and can we get a refund when the inevitable RROD happens? [Stuart Hughes via Goldstriker]

Sharp's made no secret of its interest in solar cell technology, but finally they've shown off the fruit of their efforts, the first solar cell capable of surviving in space.

As they're actually flexible, they'll be perfect for covering satellites and other space-bound objects, and are even able to be folded around tight corners. Measuring 20 microns in thickness, Sharp's prototype was created by combining indium gallium crystals, gallium arsenide and indium gallium arsenide, growing them on solid substrate molecules before adding them to film. Sharp's hoping to manufacture them before 2012, for space shuttles and the like to generate energy from way up above us. [Nikkei via CrunchGear]

You just know that the kid who gets pushed around in this stroller will grow up to become a boy-racer. At $2,000, it's almost karma for the parents who decided buying a Roddler was a good idea.

There's two rear wheels and one front wheel, all encased in red-painted chrome, matching brakes, wheel bullets and chrome grips. The seat is made from suede and carbon vinyl leatherette so your precious darling is swathed comfortably. It's $2,000, but I'm sure that whoever buys this thing couldn't possibly balk at coughing up an extra $500 for the kit which transforms it into a trike once the youngster grows up a bit. [Roddler via Uncrate via Geekologie]

We already saw some stunning night video of the Canon 1D Mark IV, but it's nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to this mind blowing movie of a cold winter day in Prague. You won't believe some of the shots.

Philip Bloom, the same guy who shot the Skywalker Ranch earlier this year, got his hands on a pre-production Canon 1D Mark IV and took it to Prague, alongside Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum.

McCallum helped him by eating some hot dogs, while Bloom took some of the most beautiful shots I've ever seen from a DSLR camera. So subtle, so delicate, and yet so crisp and rich. Check out the falling snow with just the street lighting. My mind is about to assplode. [Vimeo]

Did you think the giant bed condom was the biggest condom in the planet? Wrong! Those Italians have made one for the biggest salami on Earth, one that can fit 230 people at the same time: The Mob Condom.

It was part of a campaign to raise awareness of STDs, asking people to get together inside the condom at different events through Italy, using Facebook, Twitter, and other internet sites. They were able to get 230 people inside at one of the events. I like absurd things like this. I just wish everyone were naked inside, wearing condoms themselves. [Direct Daily]

Details are unclear at this time, but an American Airlines' Boeing 737-800 plane split in two, overrunning the runway at Jamaica's Norman Manley International Airport, in Kingston. One of the passengers' description is frightening.

The passenger declared that the landing seemed all normal. Everyone applauded when the Boeing touched down, after a very rough flight under heavy rain. Then they noticed the plane wasn't stopping. A big noise was heard, and the whole structure started to break down as the oxygen masks dropped and all alarms went off. Another passenger declared that the plane starting to break right in front of her. Indeed, the plane split in two when it slid during the braking phase of the landing, ending a just few meters from the sea.

Seems to me that the ABS in the landing gear may have failed. Miraculously, none of the 148 passengers and six crew on board has died. Only 40 have been reported injured. [VOA]

Remember those plastic glasses we had as kids, which changed color if liquid was inside? You'd quite often get them for 99c with a kid's meal at a fast food chain. These are the next (grown-up) step in the evolution.

While it's just a concept for now, I'm really hoping designer Damjan Stankovic can send them off on the production line. Each Cipher Drinking Glass has a multitude of colored dots in a seemingly random pattern, but once liquid is added, the dots actually spell out what sort of drink it is. You can see from the pic that it recognizes orange juice, milk and Coca Cola—but I wonder if it would detect the difference between vodka and gin? [Damjan Stankovic via New Idea Homepage via OhGizmo]

That Eee Pad we heard about earlier in the month has just been given another rinse through the gossip washing machine, with details about a multitouch, Tegra chipped 4 - 7-inch model breaking cover in March.

It seems like every man and his dog is using NVIDIA's new Tegra chip, with Notion Ink and ICD's tablets being just two we've seen recently. The German site NetbookNews has been tipped off on a March launch for the multitouch tablet, which will be either 4-inches or 7-inches in size (or potentially offered as two different models), and will have either 720p or 1080p resolution. It's presumed to be running Android 2.0, or a variant of it anyway, which ASUS should've got around to much earlier than now, as rumors of a smartbook or Android phone have been flying around since last year.

The leak isn't exactly solid, as you can see, but for anyone holding out for an affordable tablet next year, it's a sliver of hope to cling onto. [NetbookNews via Electronista]

Digitimes' patchy sources are claiming that OmniVision Technologies—the current manufacturers of the iPhone 3GS' 3.2-megapixel CMOS image sensor—has won a new contract with Apple to provide the Cupertino company with new sensors for the next-generation 2010 iPhone.

They claim that the new CMOS image sensors are 5 megapixels. OmniVision Technologies say the orders will increase too, from 20-21 million estimated this year, to 40 to 45 million CMOS for the 2010. [Digitimes]

What does it mean to be have been born in 2000? In a video that went viral earlier this month, Allison Louie-Garcia interviews 9-year-olds who can't hum a Britney Spears song and learned about 9/11 from a library book.

At a recent family function, I showed my eight-and-a-half-year-old niece, Dandara, my new book, Obsolete. Specifically, I showed her the book's James Gulliver Hancock-rendered illustrations of various objects that are becoming obsolete. I asked her what she thought each one was. She guessed that the cassette tape was some kind of film dispenser; a can of 35mm film was, in her view, clearly meant for storing small food products. She correctly guessed that Wite-Out was a kind of paint, but she couldn't figure out what one would use it for. This was a really entertaining game... for me. Unfortunately, she quickly grew tired of me laughing at her.

Allison Louie-Garcia took this idea one step further by interviewing a handful of kids born in 2000. The resulting video serves as a reminder of how much has changed in the last decade. The children discuss their first MP3 players, recall using computers at age two, and marvel over the sounds of a dial-up modem. Napster, one kid guesses, must've had something to do with naps. And Britney Spears lives in their memory as "the girl who cut her hair bald."

Louie-Garcia also asks the children about war and terrorism. My nephew Miles was three on 9/11/01 and I recall, in the weeks after the attack, walking in Manhattan's Union Square talking to him about the American flags that were omnipresent. With his little hand reaching up to mine, we walked around and made a game of counting them. It was my little way of trying to brand the memory on him—a recollection he would one day be able to share with his own grandchildren if they ever asked if he remembered what it was like to be in New York during that fateful time.

A few months later, one of my editors at work told me to not reference 9/11 in anything I wrote. "People are already over it," she said. I was nonplussed. But, this video reminds me that, in the end, editors are always right. What do the kids of 2000 as the most important event in their lifetimes? Michael Jackson's death. [Vimeo via Diary of a Madman and pretty much everywhere else on the internet]

Anna Jane Grossman will be with us for the next 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.

It was bound to happen sooner or later: Here's an inter-dimensional spaceship, breaking through the planet Xkyrzee 3, finally caught in Google's Street View. At least, that's what I believe it is.

Seriously, what the hell is this thing? Can anybody see what it may be, because I sure can't. [Google Street View via Geekologie]

It's one of my pet peeves: Internet assclowns shouting "FAKE!" or "PHOTOSHOP!" while presented with any image that is unbelievably amazing. Like what is happening now with this stunning prize-winning photograph of a wolf jumping over a fence.

The photo was taken by Spanish photographer José Luís Rodriguez, who won the British Natural History Museum's annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year, which is awarded jointly with the BBC Wildlife magazine. He beat 43,000 photographers to get the $16,000 prize, but people in the Internet are claiming the whole thing is a fake. They say the wolf—whose name they say is Ossian—was really held in captivity, and the jump staged. Naturally, Rodriguez says those cries are false:

I have been a victim of a strong campaign of defamation on the part of a group of people - I presume photographers like myself - who have hidden behind internet nicknames. I can only say that the evidence that has been provided to support the claim that it is a captive wolf are unsubstantiated and that what should be examined is the veracity of this evidence and the way it has been gathered.

He said that it took him ages to find the right location, wait for the wolf—tempting him with meat—and take the photograph. I believe him. This is all internet bullshit. The wolf is not Ossian. It's clearly a computer-generated wolf, created in Autodesk's Maya and Pixar's Renderman. [Daily Mail]

Ah, Balloon Boy. It happened barely two months ago, yet it already seems ready to show up on an I Love the 00s nostalgia-fest. Anyway, Balloon Boy's a-hole parents just got hit with a $42,000 bill for the stunt.

The tab covers the local, state and federal agencies that were called in to deal with the hoax, and seems kind of steep (do fire engines take some sort of special $10,000 per gallon gas or something?) but maybe there's a premium for captivating the nation with idiocy. However, the Heenes aren't about to pay the fine without a fight—their lawyer insists upon seeing precise documentation before paying a cent, which is reasonable. Let's hope this is the last we hear of poor, puking Balloon Boy until he writes his tell-all memoir in ten years. [Denver Post]

Thanks to a clandestine meeting with a source, I got a chance to play with and try out the Nexus One. It's basically, from my time with it, Google's Droid killer. It's thin, it's fast, it's better in every way.

My source was very firm about no photography, and I didn't want to jeopardize anything on my source's end, so there are no photos, hence these photos are ones we've already shown you. But, based on all the leaked shots this week, plus the very pretty and very clear one last week from Boy Genius, everyone knows what the phone looks like already. Hell, there's even a complete UI walkthrough today that's on YouTube. So I'm going to focus on the experience, and how it compares to the Droid and the iPhone 3GS.

How it feels

The Nexus One is slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS, and slightly lighter. No hard specs were thrown around, unfortunately, since Google didn't even let people who they gave the phone to know that. The back is definitely not cheap and plasticky, like the iPhone's backing, and feels like some sort of rubbery material. So, not smooth like the iPhone, but not as rubbery as the Droid. It's halfway in-between.

You can call the design the antithesis of the Droid: smooth, curved, and light, instead of hard, square and pointy. It feels long and silky and natural in your hand—even more so than the iPhone 3GS. There are also three gold contacts on the bottom designed for future docking (possibly charging?) use, but there aren't any accessories available for the phone now. It plugs in via microUSB at the moment.

That screen is damn good

Even though the screen is the same size and same resolution as the Droid, it's noticeably better. The colors are much more vibrant and the blacks are blacker, as evidenced by putting both side by side and hitting up various websites and loading various games. The pinks on Perez Hilton and the blues on Gizmodo just popped a lot more on the N1, and made the Droid (which was actually considered to have a great screen) seem washed out. The same feeling carries over when you compare the Nexus with the iPhone 3GS. And it's pretty damn bright, compared to the other two phones.

This is probably the best screen we've seen on a smartphone so far. Probably.

Why is it so fast?

Google just gave Motorola (and Verizon) a swift shot to the TSTS, because the Nexus One is astonishingly faster than the Droid. The speed dominance was most evident when we compared the loading of webpages, but even when you're just scrolling around, launching apps and moving about the OS, you could tell that there's a beefier brain inside the N1. I don't know the specs for sure, but there's talk of a 1GHz processor being inside, which would push it quite a ways above the 550MHz Arm A8 in Motorola's newest toy.

When comparing the three phones in loading a webpage over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many webpage loads, so it's indicative of something going on inside with the hardware.

I ran all three through a Javascript benchmark engine for some quantifiable numbers, and while the results were similar between the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS, the Droid still came up at about 60% of the other two. Surprisingly enough, Mobile Safari on the iPhone scored better on the Javscript benches than the Nexus did, even though the Nexus was able to pull down and render actual web pages faster. Note that I didn't list actual numbers here, for privacy reasons.

That crazy video background

You've no doubt heard about the animated video backgrounds, but they're actually more than just animations: you can interact with them.

The default background is the square/8-bit like one shown above, where lines of colored squares come in from different sides of the screen. What's neat (even if it is superfluous and battery draining) is that you can tap anywhere on the desktop in a blank space and trigger dots to spread out from your tap. Basically, press anywhere to cause blocks to fly outwards. The same thing happens in the "water" background, except instead of blocks, you cause ripples in the water.

What's also neat are the two virtual sound meters, which act as a visualizer for whatever music you're currently playing on your phone. There's one analog one that looks like one of the old ones with a red needle, and a "digital" one that looks similar to ones you see elsewhere. Sorta neat in itself, but it shows that the interactive backgrounds can actually interact with apps, as long as one knows the other's APIs.

Other bits

The 5-megapixel camera is nice, and the flash works well enough for a flash on a phone, but it's not spectacular, as seen by early photos taken and uploaded online by Googlers. There is autofocus, and you activate it with the trackball on the face of the phone. There is no tap-to-focus as see on the iPhone 3GS.

There's no multitouch in the browser or in the map, but I think at this point that's more of a legal consideration than a technical one, since many phones that run Android have the capability of supporting multitouch on a hardware level.

Playing back music over the speakers sounded decent, but not great. It's definitely in need of a dock—like all smartphones—if you want to listen to music for a sustained period.

I didn't get a chance to call on it, because I wanted to keep this as anonymous as possible, and didn't want any sort of way to trace when I used the phone. From what other people say in their time with it, it functions fine as a phone, and should work as normally as other Android phones in the SMS/MMS department.

So what's this all mean?

If Google's planning on releasing this phone as their official Google phone, it'll certify them as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn't have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it. And face it, some people didn't like the Droid's keyboard because it was too flush and the keys were too unseparated with each other. N1's onscreen keyboard felt fine, and the speedy processor made sure that each key was interpreted well.

But in the end, it's still an Android phone. If you want Android phones, this is the one to get, provided Google goes ahead with the rumored plans of either selling it themselves or partnering with T-Mobile in a more traditional role. Droid, shmoid; Nexus is the one you're looking for.

Image courtesy anonymous tipster

So like the Droid before it, the Cliq has been rooted. It's not ready for wholesale fun-making mods yet, however—it's not capable of handling new ROMs quite yet. But it will be, my friends. Mods like Cyanogen, Sense, and more should be coming soon, in case you're sick of Blur's Twitter interface being all up in YOUR face, nah mean? [Redmond Pie]

Holy friggin' hell! I don't know why I haven't seen this before, but apparently Norwegians eliminate hazardous rocks by having helicopters slam huge swinging balls against cliffs. I really hope I don't ever piss off a Norwegian. Geez!

Is this really the most effective way to do this? [via Ace of Spades HQ]