If the Pandora Mini Mac nettop looks familiar it’s because this is actually a Mac mini clone that comes with a Chinese porcelain painting on the top, adding a touch of color and style to it’s fakeness.

This nettop features a 1.6Ghz dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor, nVidia Geforce 9400M Graphics, 1G RAM, a 160GB hard drive and WI-FI connectivity. Some additional features include a DVD-RW optical drive, an HDMI port and a VGA port.

You can’t get a straight answer from a criminal. They are criminals after all. So cops in Brockton Massachusetts are using specially equipped iPhones to make the job easier. Cops could use the break.

The officer uses the iPhone to take a picture of the suspect, which then connects to the department’s database for a biometric comparison. If the suspect has been arrested before, the officer can get his complete file, including info on prior arrests and convictions.

We know what happens when a radioactive spider bites you. You become spiderman. But what happens when you get too much cell phone radiation? Nothing good, that’s for sure. And so the people of San Francisco will soon have a new cellphone radiation law to help.

The law requires retailers to post notices on how much radiation is emitted by the cellphones they sell. This is the first law of it’s kind in the United States. The cellphone industry claims that this law could hurt sales and make consumers believe that some phones are safer than others. No one can agree on just how harmful cell radiation is.

I wonder what Steve Jobs thinks when he reads what the CEO of Facebook has to say about the iPhone. It seems that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a fan of the iPhone as he has had some bad experiences using it. Steve probably doesn’t care since he’s too busy bathing in money.

In a recent Facebook post, he said “This week I got an iPhone. This weekend I got four chargers so I can keep it charged everywhere I go and a land line so I can actually make phone calls”. But I wonder why he had to actually get an iPhone to figure these things out.

Built with the blue-laser diode of a dismantled Casio Green Slim projector, the $200 Spyder III is the world’s most powerful portable laser. It can make you the most powerful Jedi ever. If it doesn’t permanently blind. It will set your skin, or anything else on fire almost instantly.

Yes, this is no laser toy. This thing can kill. The diodes in Casio’s new mercury-free Green Slim projectors apparently allow for unprecedentedly powerful portable lasers, and Wicked Lasers is more than happy to use them for the 1 Watt Spyder III. The blue Spyder III laser is 2000 times brighter to the human eye, compared to their $2000 Sonar and this one is only $200.

No matter what you think of Apple, you have to agree that the iPad, just like the iPhone is changing the world. Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg used his iPad for a speech instead of using index cards. Earlier that day he even showed it off in Staten Island declaring that it may replace his daily briefing book, itineraries, and other notes.

Pretty high praise indeed. It might not have been the best venue to show off his new toy though, as he was there speaking about the city’s struggling economy and facing questions from taxpayers. He loves the device. The mayor says that he even uses it to relax with a virtual Koi pond.

Hitachi is claiming the world’s first 320GB hard disk drive to spin at 7,200 RPM in a 7-mm thick package. The 2.5-inch Serial ATA 3Gbps Travelstar Z7K320 boasts a 1,334Mbps maximum transfer rate with a 16MB cache. This HDD draws 1.8 watts during read/write and 0.8 watts while idle, at 23dB when idle or 24dB when seeking.

Thanks to the slim form factor, it’s ready to boldly go some places that standard 9.5-mm thick drives can’t. Expect these to hit production lines in August and appear in next generation ultra-thin netbooks.

Folks in Bulgaria won’t have to worry about being assigned the cellphone number 0888 888 888. Every single person who’s ever had that number was killed under suspicious circumstances. Cellphone provider Mobitel has permanently banned the number.

In other Bulgaria news, the government has recently banned the numbers 666. The new number of the beast will be 667. Make a note of it.

One of the benefits of OLED displays are that they can be flexible. Now Sony has a new ultra thin flexible OLED display, just 80µm-thick, which is less than a strand of hair. The OLED display measures 4.1-inches and has a resolution of 432 x 240 pixels and a contrast ratio of under 1,000:1.

They claim that it’s the first OLED panel that can play videos while being rolled up and stretched around a cylinder (like a pencil) with a 4mm radius.

Would you like it if your car did the stopping for you at traffic lights? IBM is developing a technology that will automatically cut your engine at a red light. I’m thinking that people don’t want to give up that much control.

The patent proposes that the system would collect positioning data from cars stopped at a red light. After a given amount of wait time, a “stop-engine” notification would be sent to the vehicles, with a “start-engine” notification to follow when the light changes back to green.

A team at the University of Tokyo has found that using titanium oxide could mean that we gets discs with storage capacities more like hard drives. And guess what? The material is cheaper than the stuff used in Blu-ray discs.

Titanium oxide is ideal for disc manufacturing because of the way it reacts to light. At room temperature the material is capable of switching between metal and semiconductor states, which makes it “promising as a material for a next-generation optical storage device,” according to the eggheads.

Self-publishing has been possible through Amazon for some time now and it’s time for some healthy competition. Barnes & Noble has announced that it will open up a self-publishing portal this summer, called PubIt!. It will give unknown authors the ability to upload and sell their material through B&N’s website and eBookstore.

Details on the compensation model (or profit split) will be announced soon. And it won’t be limited to the Nook either. Almost any e-reader, tablet or PC will be able to get in and make purchases, so the potential audience for the author is large.

When it comes to booting up your netbook, how fast is fast enough? Windows users are used to waiting anywhere from a few seconds to minutes depending on your system’s configuration platform. Any recent computer has a decent start time, but if you are impatient, you might want to consider Ubuntu Light.

This version will boot up your netbook in just 7 seconds. It’s a full-fledged Linux distribution which offers all the usual tools that come with a desktop OS, like your web browser, office suite, communication and security features and compatibility with thousands of third party apps. The hardware used to achieve this 7 second boot time is a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v that runs on an 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor.

Current hard disk drives have hit their limit: a few hundred GB per inch. Or have they? A combination of two unique writing methods could lead to new HDDs that will yield ten times as much data in the same space.

The process combines TAR (thermally-assisted recording) and BPR (bit-patterned recording) to pack bits of data like sardines without the HDD’s write head accidentally messing with surrounding bits. Initially, researchers expect densities of up to 1TB per inch with the new method. Eventually they think they can get densities as high as 10TB per inch.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been trying to get a waiver for the FCC Selectable Output Control (SoC) ban since it went into effect — the ability to only allow content to flow from a HDCP protected HDMI port. There has been a lot of debate, but little or no action until now. The MPAA can now use SoC to protect high value content, but the FCC locked down exactly when it can be used.

Any movie that’s never been released on disc can be protected with SoC for 90 days. The FCC granted this because the content affected isn’t currently available to cable and satellite anyway. Consumers who own older HDTVs, without HDMI ports, don’t currently expect access to these movies. So for those with older hardware nothing changes, and for those with the latest, you’ll be able to rent newer movies from home.