Everyone have fun while I was away? If so, good. If not, maybe you should re-think your routine for the holiday season. Season isn’t over yet though, you still have one opportunity to send the year out with a bang on New Years. So go get tanked (if you’re legal age of course) and hang out with some friends, fire up the gaming console and see who plays better after they have had a bit of alcohol in their system. Until then, you can always sit back and skim through Tech Tuesday as your way of taking a break from any cool gadgets you procured over the last week.

In the wake of all this holiday cheer, Google has been hard at work as always. While it is all still speculation, but they are currently looking to netbook makers to design various lines of netbooks fitted for Chrome OS. The tentative specs for the netbook are listed in the article, but what should make some people quirk an eyebrow is the fact they will support multi-touch and are completely HD ready. This new OS, if you haven’t looked into it already, will rely on Cloud based storage. Meaning a bunch of servers out there is where most of the apps and your data will be securely stored. The netbook as of now looks like it will include a 64GB solid state drive, so you don’t have to store everything on the Cloud servers. Looks like we will have to wait a year before this netbook hits store shelves, and the price tag is estimated at around $300 USD.

What would you spend $2.1 million on? If your answer was a robot modeled after a hummingbird then…well, wow. Good guess. A team of researchers in Japan have developed such a robot, and the price tag of development is climbing as they try to work out a few new design additions. One, they want the robot to be able to hover stationary in the air like a real humming bird is capable of. Two, they want to put a camera on it so it can be remotely operated. Current prospects for use of this little robot could be anywhere from a flying spy cam to searching through areas a human can’t go through.

Now, back in August I remember hearing about this computer engineer from Germany trying to get phone companies to adopt a better security other than the GSM encryption that is applied to around 80% of cellphone calls made across the globe. The GSM algorithm was developed back in 1988. Not kidding, here is the Wikipedia link for you if you want some more info: G.S.M. So back to the computer engineer, needless to say his pleas to the companies were brushed aside so what does he do? He decides to give them a reason to rethink their positions a bit. He challenged around 24 computer hackers to help him build a code book of all the possible encryption algorithms that GSM uses to encrypt cellphone calls. Don’t go panicking just yet, this doesn’t really pose a threat to us as end users of cellphones yet. There is already another encryption standard that has been developed, but most phone companies haven’t decided to take up the costs of upgrading their security. The code book has been published to the internet, so if you want to take a peek I would recommend hitting a bit torrent tracker. The method this particular computer engineer employed to get his point across isn’t anything new to the world of computing, hackers are the reason we have the security we have now…now whether the hackers are up to no good or just helping out by finding and reporting vulnerabilities is what is left up to debate.

Nope, no New Years video for you today. I nearly went and found one for you, but I discovered another really awesome video that I absolutely must share with everyone. A Youtube user has taken the theme that appears in nearly every Final Fantasy game, and he’s put lyrics to it. Yes, it is as awesome as it sounds. Enjoy everyone.

“Glassing” by Inqui117 on 10.11.2009

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” by Oo eMJay oO on 01.01.2008

“Awww” by Jamasia on 06.28.2008

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Ryo back with another seemingly random title. Today’s has nothing to do with a video, so I’ll just eliminate that outright for you. Came really close to trying to figure out a way to make this TT a bit…holiday cheery sort of thing, but none of my ideas seemed quite right. So instead I will keep it simple, happy holidays everyone. Enjoy them while they last and flaunt any techie gifts you receive. Seriously, post them online and leave a link in the comments. I get enough pictures and I will do a round-up article after the holidays consisting of pictures of cool stuff geeks received.

iMac owners, at least owners of one with a 27 inch display with built in ATI Radeon card, you will be happy to hear Apple has fixed the flickering issue that seemed to plague your devices. The update is listed for download and only applies to the Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 models. It seems this update has resolved all the issues for everyone feeling its affects, but if you happen to notice any other glitches or the like: file a bug report ASAP. The sooner the word gets out about bugs, the sooner the dev teams can try to reproduce and subsequently repair the glitchy code.

Keeping with the Apple scene for a moment, some third party developers have figured out how to use a bluetooth keyboard with their Apple iPhone. One catch though, you have to jailbreak the device in order to get all this working right. For those that have, go onto Cydia and poke around where you should find the driver for bluetooth keyboards. You can install the demo of it or pay $5 to get the full driver, not bad if you really want to use that bluetooth keyboard.

Seems Ford and Microsoft are liking the idea of turning your car into a wifi hotspot. Without inserting too much of a backstory or the typed up plans I’ve made for a set up with the same idea, let’s take a peek at what they are doing. Skimming over the article tells me that this system is only going to be available to select Ford made models next year. Security seems to be pretty good too, the wifi defaults to a WPA2 setting and requires the driver to authorize new devices that connect for the first time. So not bad it seems. Still doesn’t make me want to buy a Ford though, I’ll stick to my plans on getting a radio based system set up. If this jumps to other car manufacturers (it will), it will likely be a major deciding point in which car I buy in the future.

And now, just for some fun since I couldn’t decide on a holiday themed video. I present to you Link: The Later Years. A video I’ve had in my favorites since I discovered it months ago. Enjoy the video and your holiday season everyone, I’ll see you next week.