Personal Dork Assistant

Untethered

Wow, this thing is shit-hot. Take a Sony tablet, and throw in a Bluetooth dongle for the wireless mouse and foldable keyboard. Sure, the computer's got built-in wi-fi, but what if you're not within range of a 802.11 hotspot? Well, that's where the cell phone comes in. Bluetooth link to the cellphone with GPRS Internet access for the win. Whole setup is 1.2 pounds and smaller than the coffee mug. Is that mug Bluetooth enabled, too? Because that would rock.

— Cool stuff courtesy of Engadget

That's the sort thing I'd do if I had unlimited free-time and unlimited disposable income, and if I were conscience-free enough to spend all that disposable cash. As it is, I've had to be content with slowly piecing together my SFF HTPC. Mom brought back another 250GB hard disk and the hardware-MPEG2-capable USB2 TV-capture box courtesy of Fry's/Outpost, along with other doodads. Unfortunately, the DVI-HDMI cable looks to be a bit of a bust as the Pioneer plasmas may not be capable of native-resolution display through HDMI. Damn. The USB-UIRT and Girder programming will have to wait until I get back from China, too. Hopefully the cheap-o USB-serial converter I picked up in Taiwan will be compatible with the MX700 so I can reprogram the remote. Of course, now that I have a Real Job™ I hardly have time to watch TV. Not that there's much worth watching on Taiwanese TV anyway, so it's off SuprNova for the latest and greatest BitTorrents hot off the American airwaves. With the combo of the ZoneEdit dynamic-DNS service and PHP4ABC, I can use Another BitTorrent Client's webservice to initiate the download on the PC at home from a webpage I can access in China. And by the time I've set all that up I'd rather sleep than watch crazy-ass reality TV anyway. Maybe I should just stick to porn downloads (no pun intended).