Over the years, I have laid eyes on some strange casemods and have seen more than one machine that was submerged in oil. A new casemod has surfaced that has a Bioshock theme. The builder uses an aquarium to put his new HTPC under four gallons of mineral oil.

The mineral oil is normally used as a laxative for horses apparently. The mainboard and PSU are mounted to a clear plastic sheet and placed into the aquarium. The only hardware part not under the oil is the HDD. The maker rounded the design out with a bubble filter, gravel and a few other things.

Back in September the ExoPC slate went up for pre-order. The machine was pegged to ship on October 15. If you pre-ordered and have been counting the days until yours showed up at home, you have a bit more time to wait.

The company has announced that a problem on the Pegatron assembly line with a piece of automated equipment that was using too much force to install the touchscreen and causing cracks. There are a small number of 32GB machines that didn’t get cracked screens. The machines that were ok will ship during the week of October 18.

I have wished on more than one occasion that my iPad had more volume and better sound for its onboard speaker. That’s not possible though and if you want better sound from your iPad too; we will need to look to the aftermarket for speakers that work with the iPad.

iLuv has announced a new line of speakers that with the iPad and Mac or PC computers. The new speakers include the iSP130 Mini Clip speaker, the iSP150 Portable Speaker Bar, and the iSP170 Cube Speakers. The 130 speaker is designed to clip onto the screen of any laptop and get power from the USB port.

Say supercomputer to most people and they think of the massive machines that take up entire rooms at colleges and laboratories around the country. The sort of computers that have massive power and consumer as much electricity as a mall.

SGI has announced a new computer that is the first in what it calls its line of personal supercomputers. The machine is a high-performance desk side cluster. Despite the machines high-performance it takes up the same amount of space as your average workstation.

Corsair has been in the PC hardware business for a long time. The company offers and produces some of the most popular enthusiast memory products around and has a full line of flash drives and SSDs that are available.

Corsair has announced two new modular power supplies that are both 80 Plus Silver certified for energy efficiency. The new models include the HX850W and HX750W and the modular design of the PSUs means that there are no extra cables left inside your PC chassis that you don’t need.

It’s not hard to understand why netbooks are doing so well in the current global economy. People still want and need new computers, they simply don’t want or can’t spend what they would have on a new computer last year.

Netbooks are cheap, light, and portable leading many mobile users to jump on the netbook train. Strategy Analytics offers a few details about the netbook market in its latest report. According to the firm 2/3 of all netbooks sell for under $500 and more than half of all netbooks sold use Windows XP Home.