In lieu of a formal review, Matt Burns and I sat down to take a look at the Samsung 700T AKA ATIV Smart PC Pro 700T, a convertible tablet that has a small button on the keyboard that pops out the Windows 8 tablet that forms the brains of the machine. The device is a bit chintzy – more pressed metal and injected plastic than I like to see on a laptop – but at about $1,000 retail it’s an acceptable compromise for Win8 users who are looking for a nicer tablet.

I gave this device a Fly simply because I like the idea – a laptop that turns into a tablet with much fuss – but Matt was unimpressed. A little treat for you: this thing was so hard to describe that I had to read the name off of my phone and I still mispronounced it.

The laptop hit about 6 hours of battery life and a Geekbench score of about 4,000, on par with the i5 tablets we tested. The lower price – especially at this late in the game for this laptop, make it an interesting choice for a fleet laptop but I think the fit, finish, and power could detract from its overall appeal. It’s an interesting laptop, to be sure, but not the best of the bunch.

A block from the Mariposa on-ramp and in the eye-line of 90,000 cars whizzing by on 280 sits an old warehouse that was home to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt weekly, and Digg. Most of the building is gutted and inside they are working on the “greatest enabler of hardware on the planet,” according to PCH International head Liam Casey. It will be the new home of Lime Labs, a hush-hush design consultancy that Casey bought in 2012 for an undisclosed amount and, most important, the U.S. gateway to Asian PCH’s manufacturing might that allows hardware startups to access stem-to-stern services in design, coding, manufacturing, packaging and shipping.

Casey, dubbed “Mr. China” in a James Fallows article that outlined the rising importance of Shenzhen as a manufacturing giant, is one of the biggest machers in Asia. A teetotaling Irishman, the inexhaustible Casey ostensibly lives in a hotel in downtown Shenzhen but is nearly always in the air. He and his cross-cultural team make nearly all the accessories you can imagine for multiple vendors. You couldn’t point a finger in a Best Buy without hitting a product PCH builds.

He envisions his new building as a gateway to China and a way to help clients – and the public – understand the vagaries of mass manufacturing. The space will contain a public foyer and cafe where visitors can learn about materials, design, and manufacturing. C-Level training will go on in a large anteroom on the first floor with a huge video screen suspended on epoxy-sealed walls.

In short, it’s the Apple Store if the focus was all the trouble that went into products before they ever reached the consumer.

“We want it to be the most photographed building in San Francisco,” said Andre Yousefi, co-founder of Lime Lab. The company, which started in the doldrums of the recession, consisted of Yousefi and his partner Kurt Dammermann until Casey bought them and expanded the team to 25. They expect to hire 15 more engineers by October and hope to fill 80 seats in their new HQ by 2014. Not bad for a tiny, two-man shop in a run-down district of San Francisco.

Yousefi is the buttoned down member of the group, clean shaven more more dedicated to design than manufacturing. Dammermann is the scruffy mechanic who has seen factory floors and is at home with drill presses and band saws.

The Lime Lab vision is born of the needs of hardware startups and companies that need a full service consultancy to help their product move from idea to packaged product in a few short months.

“What we don’t do is the high volume accessories work,” said Yousefi. “We’re doing more up-front product development, end-to-end.” Using PCH’s retail distribution platform, TNS Distribution in Dublin, Ireland, coupled with the company’s extensive contacts in China’s manufacturing centers, Lime Lab can take a sketch of a product and bring it to fruition at a speed unimaginable for most strategic design houses.

Yousefi and Dammermann were former IDEO designers and CAD jockeys who wanted to build their own consultancy.

“You come to us with either a napkin sketch or just an idea and we do the detail design and development to flesh it out,” said Dammermann. “One we have the idea fleshed out with the design team, we work with the team in Shenzhen to take it to the finish line.”

The team was reticent to mention their clients or current employees although they have hired ex-Apple, Intel, and IDEO engineers and designers who were looking for something more rewarding. They are working on everything from audio products to mini-computers and their current offices, though small, hold CNC machines, 3D printers, and a small testing facility. The new lab on Mississippi Street will contain far more gear as well as a situation room for describing the retail shipping patterns laid out by PCH and the design decisions made for each product – all in a building that is bathed in natural light thanks to a long bank of leadlights windows.

“A lot of engineers in the Bay Area have become more strategic. We’re trying to close that loop and create engineers that are really good at manufacturing,” said Dammermann.

“The physical-making aspect of engineering is slipping away,” said Yousefi. Lime Lab hopes to change that.

Like proud parents, the pair were excited to show off their new baby. The building is not nearly finished but already they talk about the epoxy-sealed floors as if they’ve been walking on them for weeks and the banquette style wooden stairs as if they’re getting ready to present to a group of schoolkids the next day. The space is huge and outside there is a definite whiff of marijuana in the air, as if the neighbors were enjoying the relative quietude of the neighborhood to run a grow house. One of the previous tenants left a Diego Rivera-style mural of mightily straining migrant workers on the stairs up to the second floor, an addition that the partners haven’t yet decided what to do with. The walls have been stripped down to studs and you can see the thick joists peeking out from between whiffs of insulation. In short, it’s a great place to start again.

Before

Brady Forrest, formerly of Khosla Ventures, will run PCH’s Incubator program from the third floor of the building where two rows of desks will house ten small- to mid-level startups. These companies will have a direct line to Asia. Most Lime Labs employees will also spend three months in Shenzhen to become accustomed to working with a bi-continental team.

“People are always talking about how manufacturing expertise has moved to China. The best thing is that we’re bringing it back,” said Dammermann.

The “after” renders the team shared with me show a building that is half factory and half Prada store. The exposed brick is mostly hidden and the space is all light and air. Gone are the remnants of industrial San Francisco, replaced with a shape as form-fitting and beautiful as an iPad box.

“We never gave up on hardware. I’ve never started a web company.”

“It took us a little while to look for buildings. When we first started, Liam was like ‘Nope.’ He wouldn’t even get out of the car,” said Dammermann. They settled on the biggest building they could find, signing a 10-year lease on the space. There is enough room to invite groups to hold meet-ups at the space and there are plans to offer engineering seminars to incubated companies as well as executives who may be interested in starting up using Lime Labs expertise. While they are looking for larger clients in the Valley – the company is also looking to help Kickstarter projects join the ranks of successful business. “Hardware makes software sticky,” said Dammermann. It’s this ethos that drives the pair to make their lab accessible to all comers.

The last floor of the new space is a roof deck dedicated to the incubator participants and engineers. From here you can see the iron belt of the highway girding the edge of the Bay. It’s windy up there, a problem the pair will have to solve down the line. Until that time comes, probably sometime in mid-2014, the team can simply focus on hiring and building.

“The junior guys are awesome. Their network is immense. They’re like pigs in shit. We send them out to China and they come back with smiles on their face. One trip alone gives you two years of experience,” said Yousefi.

“We never gave up on hardware. I’ve never started a web company,” said Dammermann with obvious pride as the sun set over downtown SF.

(Soon-To-Be) After

Features:

• Convertible laptop
• 13-inch touchscreen
• Up To 128 GB SSD
• Intel Core i5 Processor
• MSRP: $999

Pros:

• Slim form factor works as a tablet and a laptop
• Nice design
• 10-finger multi-touch

Cons:

• Mushy keys
• Accelerator sensing can be frustrating
• Underpowered for the price point

Twist And Shout

Convertibles were all the rage back in the 1950s (thanks to tailfins and the Corvette) and in the early 2000s (thanks to Microsoft and Sony). In the 2000s, however, we saw convertibles in the form of laptops that could twist and turn themselves into tablets. The result, usually, was a not-very-good-laptop folded into a not-very-good tablet.

That’s what makes the Yoga special. This 13-inch laptop is as plain as can be – it has just two USB ports and an SD card slot – but becomes much more usable when you realize the various configurations you can bend it into. For example, as a laptop the screen stays straight up and there is a small central Windows button that you can either press or ignore under the screen bezel. You can also fold the laptop in half along one edge, essentially tuning off the keyboard and making the screen one big tablet. Finally, you can fold the Yoga into a tent, allowing you some modicum of control over the laptop via the keyboard or allowing you and another user to view the screen head-on.

To be fair, the “folding” features are more of a gimmick than anything else. The vast majority of the time you’ll be using this in either standard laptop mode or tablet mode. However, unlike the Microsoft Surface, you don’t have to worry about the screen flopping over at inopportune moments, which is a huge plus.
The Yoga can be rightly termed the perfect Windows 8 machine. Touchscreen access was surprisingly smooth and responsive but it wasn’t mandatory. This is a handsome, cleverly designed laptop that works as both a keyboard-based and touch device. Performance-wise, however, you’re going to take a bit of a hit on this device when compared to similar i5 devices.

They Yoga 13 hit a Geekbench score of 4,664, which is low. The i5 MacBook Air, for example, gets about 5,000 other Core i5 laptops can hover at about 8,000 depending on the machine. The laptop lasted for 5 hours of standard use. The Core i5 in this model was enough for most work thrown at it but it’s still considerably underpowered. Other users I talked to mentioned some latency issues with the trackpad although I didn’t experience them during use.

That said, I’m loath to ding the laptop on performance simply because Lenovo did something very unique with their laptop and made something that I’d actually carry. The goal of these reviews is to show some of the most unique and usable laptops available now, not the latest and greatest in terms of chipsets and processors. In terms of speeds and feeds the Yoga 13 does not shine. However, when it comes down to usability and class, the Yoga 13 is a real contender.

Who is it for?

Designers

Yes. Photographers, artists, and media types will love the big, bright screen and the unique “bendable” spine makes it easy to share the screen with multiple users or flip it over to show off a snapshot or sketch. While it’s not exactly a Wacom digitizer – you basically get a capacitive touchscreen that will respond to simpler, passive styli – this laptop is definitely something you can get a little work done on.

I would worry, however, about the limitations of the i5 processor and the on-board graphics. I wouldn’t recommend, say, rendering video or handling massive RAW files. Think of this as a showcase machine, designed to display your work after it is complete.

Founders

Yes. The Yoga is almost custom-built for salesmen and business folk. Want to get a point across? Fold this puppy up and treat it like a mini-whiteboard. Want to give a presentation? Lay it out flat like a tablet and swipe through the slides. Finally, when you have a bit of alone time and need a laptop, it’s right there and ready to go. If you’re running a Windows shop and need something that can act as both a tablet and a PC, this is probably your best bet right now. As an exploration of the Windows 8 form, this thing is great.

Programmers

No. I’m not certain that this is the right laptop for a coder. It’s definitely a cool idea but the value intrinsic in the folding hinge is lost on folks who probably need the machine to act as a primary typing device. I’d recommend looking at this thing in terms of whether or not you’d use the touch features on a daily basis and make your decision that way.

Bottom Line

The Yoga is a gimmick, to be sure. However, I think it does a good enough job at being a laptop and a tablet that the interstitial positions don’t matter as much. The Yoga 13 is everything the Surface was supposed to be and, although I do enjoy the Surface Pro, the Yoga is a superior experience.

Porn is the new Tumblr. It seems that everyone with a CS degree and a little free time is trying to cash in (or at least dabble) in the world of online sexuality, a happenstance that I’d chalk up to the ubiquity of boobies online and the potential for perceived riches. But what inspires a pair of designers and artists to create a site that essentially catalogs every NSFW GIF they can find?

I had to find out.

To be clear, the site [THIS IS A NSFW LINK. DO NOT CLICK IT AT WORK OR EVER] is very NSFW. It’s also quite basic – you simply press your mouse button to slide through one image after the other in a cavalcade of protuberances and pneumatic efforts that brings to mind Chaplin’s Modern Times crossed with Skinemax. Seriously. Don’t click the link. It’s porn. Instead, let’s talk to Raj and Katie, founders of the site. They preferred to remain somewhat anonymous.

John Biggs: Why did you guys make this?

Raj: Serendipity. In the beginning, in order to ramp up on some new technologies, I built a webapp to pull the most popular animated gifs from the web and present them one after another. I honestly expected kitties, Batman, and Kermit the frog. Instead, the gifs ended up being 99% porn. The next day, I told 6 friends about this happy accident, and by the end of the week, we were getting 200 unique visitors daily. Chris (the designer) has since transformed my clever hack into a polished user experience, Kevin (the hustler) is exploring innovative business models, and Katie (the ballerina) has helped forge our brand and identity. We use the site ourselves, and we’ve just been kindling the fire – it feels like the project has taken on a life of its own.

These are some of the responses to our site on Reddit.

@TheWorstDrug that is…..AMAZING! Is it just for this particular one or will all of em eventually be like this?—
Mirza-A (@Mirza_A88) May 11, 2013

@TheWorstDrug You're a magician with your site! Had to slap myself in the face to stop being hypnotized by it. Damn youuuu!! —
Rabbit Sweet (@brabbitsweet) May 07, 2013

@TheWorstDrug opened it up @ work and lost all my concentration… This is the worst drug… Luv it—
Texas proud (@tompaul64) May 06, 2013

JB: Who are you guys?

Raj: I’m equal parts hacker and guitarist at heart, Chris is an artist, Kevin is a hustler, and Katie is a choreographer. We’re a group of friends, and we each bring unique talents to the table. We love working together. At the moment, we’re building a porn site. Next time, we might record a rock album.

Quick story: A few months ago, we were trying to figure out where to take our product, so I issued Chris a No Fap Challenge. I asked him to not spank it to any porn site other than The Worst Drug for as long as possible. Chris lasted 3 days. He came back to me and told me that he couldn’t get off without video – so along with animated gifs, HTML5 video became our next major feature.

JB: There seems to be a trend of women working on porn startups. Why?

Katie: As porn becomes more mainstream, disrupting the current tech is fair game for anyone who isn’t afraid of it. This includes the kind of savvy and self-governing women who would abandon their kitchens and venture into the tech world in the first place. That’s my guess anyway. For me it was happenstance that the content was porn. These GIFs reveal the usually obscured popular content of the Internet. Imagine observing the planet from a distance, swiping through what we look at, laugh at, get aroused by, and share with each other. I was initially surprised, even shocked, that what we captured was basically all porn, but then I had to laugh. I love this big world of happy, normal, clever, horny people. We’re sexy.

JB: Why porn? Why now?

Raj: We’re driven by a particular philosophy. Recent studies have shown that there’s little correlation between porn use and deviant/risky sexual behavior. Researchers have also been looking into why porn is addictive. I’ve been trolling on 4chan for years, and I think that watching porn makes you a better person. It’s always my belief that knowledge is more powerful than ignorance, and porn is a particular type of knowledge.

Also, there’s nothing in our algorithms that limits our content to porn. Our site simply pulls in the most popular animated gifs as determined by web users around the world. It just happens to be the case that these gifs are all porn – we’re reflecting the world back at itself.

JB: How will you make money?

We don’t know – do you have any money?

We’ve bootstrapped ourselves so far, and we’ve been able to cover our operating expenses. For the moment, we’re focused on building the best user experience that we can.

Unrelated: Our name (The Worst Drug) reflects the addictive nature of the site. Chris chose our logo font because it looks like something that you’d see on a bottle of prescription pills – and it feels a little dirty, but still somehow clean. Our ‘u’ is a forward arrow key, as you can hit that key instead of clicking the image.

JB: Do your parents know what you’re doing?

Raj: My parents have no idea what I’m doing. My parents have never had any idea what I’ve been up to. They still don’t know that I once stole a nice pen from K-Mart in 6th grade. (I hope that my parents don’t read TechCrunch.)

Katie: Yes, and my mom loves the site! She’s offered suggestions for the UI, and she’s even Tweeted about us to her 17 followers. Her response is flattering, but I question her taste, because I also showed her Two Girls, One Cup, and she thought it was hilarious and didn’t throw up in her mouth at all.

JB: What’s your favorite kitten picture?

See above.

While we don’t have all of the details on the new Xbox Live features announced at today’s Xbox One launch, it’s clear that Microsoft is going all-in when it comes to social and multiplayer gaming. First, they are upping the number of dedicated servers for online play from 15,000 to 300,000 and nearly all of your content and game data will be store in the cloud.

The service will also allow you to take in-game video and photos and share them over social media services. This is similar to Sony’s PS4 solution and is definitely a method allow users to create valuable and viral homemade content while still maintaining control of distribution. As games become more social and more cinematic, this will be an important differentiator and is essentially free advertising for game makers.

Finally, the new service adds asynchronous matchmaking, which means you can be searching for potential teammates (or enemies) while watching TV or playing another game. This increases the stickiness of multiplayer titles by nudging you back into the game when a worth opponent appears. Microsoft has also added “bigger matches with more players” and, most important, “living and persistent worlds.” This sounds to me like a direct attack on MMORPGs like World Of Warcraft and could make the Xbox a formidable force in the popular professional gaming subculture, a niche no console maker has yet cracked.

We should see further information about the Xbox One at E3 this summer.

The Meta 1 is a pair of augmented reality goggles that performs some very unique and useful tricks. While they are still in beta stage, the glasses are coupled with a Kinect-like camera to sense objects in real space and allow users to interact with virtual worlds with the swipe of their hand.

The company founder, Meron Gribetz, says that the company is on track to create a mass produced solution shortly, but until then they have brought on Steve Mann, a real cyborg and wearable computing researcher, to act as a chief scientist. You’ll recall that Mann was assaulted in a Parisian McDonald’s for wearing a Google-Glass-like headset.

“We brought Mann on board because of his expertise in two key areas: miniaturization and mediated reality. Mann has been developing a Google Glass-like device for years but recognized now was not the right time for something of that scale, because of the limitations of such a device. Rather than a phone accessory, Mann is keen to work with us to develop a fully fledged new interface for computers,” said Gribetz.

“His scientific leadership in mediated reality will be a huge advantage for us when delivering an immersive augmented experience. Occlusion (hiding or modifying real world objects) is a key part of full augmented reality and Mann’s experience in mediated reality will allow us to bring the best solution to market in this area.”

Gribetz is a Y Combinator alum and the project, which is still on Kickstarter, is nearly funded with 26 days to go. Users can receive a Dev Kit for $550. Epson will help build Meta’s next-generation VR glasses which will look considerably less DIY than the beta developer version.

“The entrance into consumer wearables needs to be a high powered immersive device capable of fully replacing the computer and more. Heads up notification systems have their use cases, but they won’t be game changers. Mann’s commitment to a fully wearable future is why he chose to join us,” said Gribetz. Considering Mann has been wearing his computing power for most of this decade, it seems like a good fit.

Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing service is now offering one full terabyte for users, enough storage space to hold whole swathes of the world’s photos. The service is offering this benefit in addition to its full resolution photo storage service.

While the average user will probably not touch the outer limits of this storage space in a lifetime, this alone is probably enough to draw dedicated photographers to the service and, more important, bring lapsed users back to the Yahoo fold.

This move is important. Given the odd nature of most photo sharing services, you are either limited to a few dozen gigabytes or, in the case of Instagram and other mobile services, an unstated upper limit that is not part of the marketing collateral. While I don’t doubt that Google or Facebook could make the terabyte claim in the near future, being first to market with this particular feature is an important milestone.

This move is quite clearly a play by Yahoo to make its wares relevant. The long-beleaguered Flickr has at once enthralled and frustrated pro users with claims of abandonment by the web giant.

As Marissa Mayer noted in her presentation, this is about “bringing lifetimes of beauty into Flickr.” It’s also about convincing casual photographers to trust Flickr as a universal shoebox for their old snaps – a lucrative and surprisingly important thing to be.

Features:

• Runs Ubuntu out of the box
• 13.3-inch screen
• 256 GB SSD
• Intel Core i7 Processor
• MSRP: $1,549 with rebate

Pros:

• Excellent Ubuntu performance out of the box
• Thin and light
• 12 second boot time

Cons:

• No SD card slot
• Limited software choices
• Graphics card slightly underpowered

Dude, you got a Linux-powered Dell! In all the years I’ve reviewed laptops I’ve never been as pleasantly surprised by an Ultrabook as I was with the Dell XPS 13 Developers Edition. This ultrathin, ultralight SSD laptop originally came in Windows flavor but, much to my surprise, I far prefer the Ubuntu edition of this device. It is solidly built, acceptably priced given the solid state drive, and surprisingly powerful.

Rewind

I’ve been using some form of POSIX-compliant operating system for over a decade but I must admit that I have been remiss in my Ubuntu installations. Whereas I was once a KDE kid with some Gnome leanings, my distro knowledge stopped at about Mandrake and picked up again as Ubuntu began its rise to glory. That said, I was curious to see what Linux looks like these days. In short, it looks great.

The laptop itself is well-made. An aluminum top and pane of Gorilla Glass protects the 13-inch screen and it weighs a little less than 3 pounds. The entire package is self-contained, solid, and quite portable.

The laptop, codenamed Sputnik, is a concerted effort by Dell to make sure everything on the device works well. It includes a number of Dell-specific packages – you can see a list here – but it supports most updates to the OS and attendant software and seamlessly upgraded to the latest version, 13.04, on top of the stock 12.04 Dell provides.

If you haven’t used Linux on a desktop you’ll be surprised at how uneventful it is. Everything “just works,” from the camera to the disk encryption to the update downloads, and there is little of the traditional futzing around with scripts and drivers when attempting to add hardware or fix broken peripherals. As a non-power-user who once wrote a script to re-initialize my audio chip every time I woke my computer from sleep, it was a pleasure to see the XPS 13 boot up without issue and worked quite seamlessly with most devices I tried with it. Arguably, with only two USB ports (one 3.0, one 2.0) and a DisplayPort jack, you’re not going to be adding much to the mix.

The GeekBench score for this particular model hovered at around 5,500, which is solid performance. The MacBook Air, for example, gets about 6,600 on a good day and the Core i7 hits about 7,000 although it can top out at about 10,000 depending on the machine. 5,500, while not ideal, is still solid. The laptop lasted for 7 hours of standard use, about par for the course for a laptop of this size.

Using the laptop was a dream. I was able to set up my environment quite quickly and seamlessly and after a few hours I quickly picked up a workflow that allowed me to write, edit photos, and post from the field. The lack of an SD card was quite disheartening, to be sure, but an external dongle helped me make short work of that issue. I used GIMP to crop and resize photos, Vim to edit my posts and writing, and connected to web-based versions of my favorite cloud services if I needed access to files or social media.

The best part about the XPS 13 Developers Edition, however, is Dell’s own support offerings. It’s clear that releasing an Ubuntu into the wild without good support would be suicide for the product. To that end, the company is offering one year of “ProSupport” that includes round-the-clock North American tech support and next-day on-site servicing. While Dell Hell is still a fresh memory in my mind, at least, this offering is more in line with corporate support than end-user Windows management.

Who is it for?

Designers

No. Unless you’re a GIMP master, this probably isn’t the laptop for you. To be fair it’s surprisingly thin and light but it has no SD card slot, making it a hard sell for the designers among you. Working solely on the web? Sure, you could feasibly get away with doing a little CSS or HTML on this thing, but you’re probably better served with a laptop running more photo-editing applications.

Writers will also be a little put off by the lack of native support for some of their tools. However, if you’re a markdown/plain text editor kind of person, this laptop connected with a revision control system could be a winner. It obviously depends on your workflow and, although I was able to pick it up fairly quickly, Ubuntu might not be the place to look for absolute ease-of-use.

Founders

Yes. To paraphrase Justin Timberlake, a laptop isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? An Ubuntu laptop. While you may annoy most of your co-workers with your insistence on running LibreOffice, this laptop is more than enough to run a few spreadsheets on and, in addition, build a business with. Seamless connectivity to most cloud services is a large benefit and thanks to Dell’s CloudLauncher app you can quickly and easily spin up nodes with a few keystrokes. Best of all, you’re not going to be another me-too entrepreneur with a MacBook Air and a dream (and you don’t have to use Windows 8), which is a great feeling

Programmers

Yes. This is a more-than-capable programmer’s machine and all of the care Dell put into this laptop really helps it shine as a developer’s device. For example, Dell has added Profile Tool, a method for “cloning” a workspace between laptops. This allows you to manage dependencies, preferred system tools, and tool chains. An Ars reviewer notes that these Profiles could become a way to “share” setups between programmers as well as a method to see how programming “superstars” have set up their machines. In short, Dell wants to make it clear that they care about developers with this device.

Bottom Line

It doesn’t get much cooler than the XPS 13 – and that’s high praise coming from an unreformed Apple addict. While I’m not sure this would become my everyday carry laptop, I could definitely see it replacing a similarly outfitted Windows machine and, if I ever felt the need to go full Doctorow when it comes to encryption, open software, and paranoia, this is the device I’d choose.

Laptops are the new desktops. While you can buy a solid tower PC for about $500, this price represents how little manufacturers care about the desktop world. Barring a few huge gaming rigs, laptops are where it’s at.

We have been arguably remiss in avoiding formal laptop reviews and so we’re trying to remedy that with a series we’re calling Laptop Week. This week we will focus on some of the best laptops available today alongside a few gems that popped up over the past year or so. We will run the gamut from Chromebooks to Windows 8 and take a few detours on the way.

You can read all of our Laptop Week coverage here and feel free to contact me if you’d like to see us look at anything in particular on the market or in the laptops we’re testing. Look for a few Laptop Week posts per day, starting with an amazing Ubuntu laptop that I think could easily replace a MacBook Air for those in the right frame of mind.

We’ve created a quick and easy rating method for each laptop we address and take into consideration the needs of designers, entrepreneurs, and programmers. Because you mostly don’t care about speeds and feeds, these will be high-level assessments of each laptop from a practical perspective.

Welcome to Laptop Week. We hope you enjoy your stay.

Joshua Pearce, PhD, is a researcher at Michigan Tech who rearches open source and low-impact solutions to engineering problems. He is also the founder of the Printers For Peace contest, an effort to bring together clever 3D-printed ideas that have loftier aims. You can win one of two 3D printers if you submit a winning project.

We asked Pearce a few questions about his goals for the project and about the future of 3D printing.

John Biggs: Why Printers For Peace?

Joshua Pearce: I think it is clear that low-cost open-source 3D printing has enormous potential to do real good for the world – particularly for the poor as it radically reduces the cost of high-value products like scientific tools and consumer goods. This threatens a lot of entrenched interests because the average Joe can fabricate extremely complex products at home for pennies, which is disruptive to say the least. I have noticed a clear bias in 3D printing news coverage – any advances on the low-end of the spectrum are generally ignored or vilified. The media frenzy about 3D printed guns is actually having terrifying consequences – and I don’t mean the guns. A California senator has already proposed registration, background checks, and licensing for 3D printers!

Michigan Tech and Type A Machines sponsored the contest to get the more positive truth about 3D printers into the conversation. There are over 90,000 open-source 3D printable designs available and only one low-quality gun. We do not want to lose the baby with the bathwater. Our aim is to raise awareness of the power of 3D printing to change the world for the better.

JB: What do you think will happen now that the 3D printed gun is out of the bag? It was inevitable, obviously, but what does it mean?
JP: The 3D printed gun is a red herring. Anyone who wants a gun can make a much better one using more traditional tools found in any machine shop and many garages — or just buy one. I am, however, very concerned that the debate about 3D printed guns will be used to squash the incredible technological development we are seeing in the open-source 3D printing community.

JB: What’s the coolest Printers for Peace project you’ve seen so far?

JP: The contest just opened, but there are some really cool designs already developed that I think would make good starting points for derivatives. I really like some of the small-scale 3D printed windmill designs – and there is a graduate student working on what looks to be a printable recyclebot. I would love to see a reliable 3D printed treadle pump as this is one of the most successful appropriate technologies for lifting rural farmers out of poverty in the developing world.

JB: What’s next? 3D printed bazookas? 3D printed heart stents? Where do you see this headed, in either direction?

JP: I think it is clear that existing manufacturers will continue to move from using high-end 3D printing for rapid prototyping into actual manufacturing creating entirely new classes of jobs (e.g. automobile parts, human body parts, etc.). This is exciting, but not nearly as exciting as what is happening on the low-end of the spectrum. As open-source 3D printable designs continue to grow exponentially the value of owning a 3D printer is climbing as their quality improves and actual costs continue to decline. Thus, low-cost open-source 3D printers will become ubiquitous household items, which people use to make a wide array of consumer goods, replacement parts, and highly customized products. Following shortly after I hope to see recyclebots become similarly widespread – with people recycling their waste plastic inhome to make their own products. The implications for improving human well-being are staggering.

Now that Defense Distributed is on the defensive, it’s time to think a bit harder about what 3D printing really means. To that end, Michigan Tech is sponsoring a Printers For Peace contest that is encouraging designers and engineers to make amazing stuff using a 3D printer that can change the world for the better. “Unfortunately, the only thing many people know about 3D printing is that it can be used to make guns,” writes Dr. Joshua Pearce, founder of the project.

“This is an open-ended contest, but if you’d like some ideas, ask yourself what Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, or Gandhi would make if they’d had access to 3D printing.”

The deadline for the contest is September 1st and they’ll announce winners on the 4th. They are looking for designers to build things that will help, not harm, people.

The winner of best project will win a Type A Machines Series 1 3D Printer and the runner-up gets a simpler RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printing kit.

With all the press attention on 3D printing is the gateway to firearms anarchy, it’s refreshing to see someone take a different path. By backing 3D printing engineers into a corner, DefDist and the government are simply using fear to achieve competing goals. The results will be both needlessly draconian legislation and a variant of the Streisand Effect that will spread these arguably faulty plans far and wide. When the government outlawed DVD decryption code you could buy a T-shirt with the code printed on it. The same will happen in this case, although this code, when run, could take off fingers and give legislators more ammunition for a full crackdown on home 3D printing.

Let us know if you enter and good luck. We need more weapons against poverty and fewer weapons against each other.

[Image via Thingiverse]

Vevo, popularny serwis muzycznych teledysków, ogłosił oficjalną dostępność w Polsce. Usługa, wcześniej niedostępna w tym regionie geograficznym, będzie zawierać video-clipy najpopularniejszych polskich gwiazd jak Brodka, Pezet, a może i nawet David Hasselhoff.

Usługa jest dostępna na Vevo.com i pojawi się również na urządzeniach mobilnych oraz konsoli Xbox Live.

Vevo jest spółką joint venture pomiędzy Sony Music i Universal Music Group, powołaną do istnienia w 2009 roku. Obecnie zawiera tysiące teledysków, występów koncertowych i wywiadów.

Aby przygotować się do tego nawału treści wideo muzyki, proponujemy zjeść solidny posiłek z marynowanych śledzi, pogonić go wódeczką i umieścić na swojej szyji przystojny szalik Wisły-Kraków.

A tak przy okazji, będę w Krakowie na Bitspiration w czerwcu tego roku, jeśli chcesz porozmawiać o Żubrówce, disco polo lub weselnych hulankach.

[Thanks, Victor, for translation help. Check out Victor's startup, SlashDB.]

I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled Karateka inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start – six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened rooms. The Shogun aimed a finger at a door and the princess was forced into bondage. You were the Karateka, the hero, your pixelated motion was as fluid as any humans. I marveled at the realism. The whiffed punches sounded like a fist smacking a ham hock. The fight music, the little fanfare of victory, was all I needed for those few hours before school. Karateka was a marvel in an era of cheap gaming. In a world populated by Pac Men, Karateka foretold the future.

Karateka begat Prince of Persia and the creator of both, Jordan Mechner, went on to become one of the greats in the gaming industry. Luckily, he and his clan of programmers haven’t been resting on their laurels. They have just re-released Karateka in its original glory on iOS or Android, allowing us oldsters a brief moment of nostalgia and ensuring the younger generation understands the magic of a game that sparks the imagination.

They’ve also created an updated version of the game but I suspect most of us will want to experience the pixelated splendor of Mechner’s virtual world instead of the modern, cartoony style so popular with mobile gaming recently. Pro tip: watch out for the freaking eagle.

It’s rare to see a company that is so established yet as cutting-edge as Shapeways. The company, founded in 2007 as a spin-off of Royal Philips Electronics, began as a one-off 3D printing service that offered basic plastic items for sale online. Over the years, however, the company has branched off into some amazing materials – steel, ceramic, and even sandstone – and they’ve already been able to support full color printing in 3D.

Now the company is opening a series of facilities in the US and they invited us to their first print shop in Long Island City, New York. In this massive, warehouse-like space, the company has set up a number of acrylic printers as well as a small customer service team. They plan on expanding further, adding more machines to an already impressive array. The goal is to offer 3D print shops close to major US metropolitan areas to reduce wait-times and to spread out the manufacturing process among different factories. The company will have 30 to 50 printers in the LIC location once it is complete.

I spoke with co-founder Peter Weijmarshausen about the Shapeways process, the printers, and what it takes to become a 3D-printing powerhouse in a nascent market. It’s great to see such a cool company expand and it’s even more fun to get to tour the facilities even before the machines, printers, and staff becomes fully operational. Enjoy the tour and tune in next time for another TechCrunch Makers!

TechCrunch Makers is a video series featuring people who make cool stuff. If you’d like to be featured, email us!.

When we first met the team from Zivix their wild MIDI guitar, the Jamstik, promised a unique music-making experience thanks to a tether that connected it to a computer or iOS device. In the few short months since CES, however, they’re now preparing to announce that Jamstik works nearly flawlessly over Wi-Fi with iPhones and iPads, thereby reducing the need for a physically tethered device.

The Jamstik, which has surpassed its Indigogo goal with 13 days to go, is the first product by Zivix that aims to make music education and composition far easier than on a normal guitar. Not unlike the GTar, the Jamstik outputs MIDI signals as you play. However, instead of electrical connections with the strings the Jamstik uses IR sensors to “see” where your fingers are on the fretboard, allowing for tricks like string bending and hammer-ons and -offs.

The new prototypes have full MIDI over WiFi support, allowing you to connect to an iOS device completely wirelessly. The Jamstik actually creates its own ad hoc network with your device, allowing you to maintain a connection to your favorite audio program without having to connect cables. In the demo I saw today the Jamstik maintained a solid connection for most of an hour and, using Audiobus, you could transmit audio from one program to another, allowing for some amazing mixed MIDI and audio recordings.

The company plans to go into production in 30 days and they have 17 days left on their Indiegogo campaign. The device itself is $299 and the company is in talks to get it into retail stores in Q4 for general consumers. It’s an exciting time to be a musician, that’s for sure.

Jackthreads is a Thrillist company that features clothes and accessories for men. The style is all over the place – goofy t-shirts sit next to nice blazers and jackets – but it’s decidedly urbo-hipster in the design and sizing. Full disclosure: I try my damnedest not to buy their stuff but I still find my self idly clicking through and buying age-inappropriate streetwear. It’s pretty addicting.

That said, they’re going gangbusters.

The company will see $75-100 million in revenue this year and their iPhone app just passed 2 million downloads. The app has been a consistent top free lifestyle app and it pushes millions of pageviews and sales sessions. “It’s a huge driver for the business in every single way,” said CEO of Thrillist Media Group, Ben Lerer.

“The native app experience killed for us,” he said. “It drove tens of millions of dollars of revenue.”

They have just launched a new iPad app that acts as a catalog for their daily deals and pushes notifications when new sales are added. Lerer is excited about the new platform and has seen mobile usage explode.

“We anticipate the highest conversion rate on any channel,” he said. “I know I’m buying more frequently on the iPad. Mobile is a huge driver for the business in every single way.”

Given that Jackthreads is one of Thrillist’s most profitable properties and thanks to solid growth over the past few years, it’s clear that Lerer and team have found the goose that lays the lightweight golden track jacket with scorpion detail on the back.

I’ve been enamored with the Das Keyboard since it launched in 2005. These supremely clicky, IBM-style keyboards are some of the most rugged mechanical input devices you can buy. Their Pro model — an all-black monolith with black keys and no key markings — is the gold standard for Gibson-esque console jockeys who believe that the best keyboard can be used as a weapon and shouldn’t be touched by mere mortals.

The company just launched a new “quiet” version of its Das Keyboard, Model S Professional Quiet, and I thought it would be fun to talk with Daniel Guermeur, founder of the company who went from being an open-source software maven at the turn of the century to making one of the most sought-after and coolest keyboards on the market. While Guermeur still works in software, his clicky Das Keyboard is probably his most lasting legacy in the gaming and programming world, a unique tool suited to unique professionals.

John Biggs: We’ve been talking about Das Keyboard for years, but I don’t think anybody’s really talked about how you started the company, what the inspiration was?

Daniel Guermeur: The company started in the year 2000 as a software company. At that point, we started with open source software. We actually commercialized or distributed one of the first point and click content management systems.

Within 30 days of that software being released, it was No. 1. It was the most downloaded server software on SourceForge. We had been selling there, so our model was to provide tech support for that open source software.

We did pretty well until the end of the dot-com boom, and at that point, every, most software companies had trouble finding customers, so we had to downscale a little bit. But we still kept going with that. We were pure software at that point.

Me being a software person, I spend my time on the computer, like 8 or 10 hours a day every day and the weekends and so on. Even more than 10 hours, I guess. One day I realized that I’m a pretty slow typist and if I typed faster, I would actually achieve more. I kind of tried to understand why I was slow and it was because I was looking at the keys.

So I thought, hey, if I could not look at the keys, my mind will know where the keys are. It will memorize where the keys are. So I asked my assistant to find me a keyboard with nothing on it, no key inscriptions and she came back, saying, “Hey, it doesn’t exist. I could not find one.”

So I told her, “Hey, could you contact somebody, could you find a factory in China and have them make one just for me?” And she did. And so three months later, I received a blank keyboard, totally black and totally blank and I typed on it.

And amazingly enough, I doubled my speed within 30 days.

JB: Wow.

DG: So I was pretty happy because I was very slow. I was around 30 words a minute, now I’m at 65, something like that. And I kept it on my desk and the amazing part is that people who came to my office, friends and colleagues say, “Hey, wow, you have a blank keyboard. You must be really good.” I said, “Yes, that’s me, I’m really good.”

So there was this cool factor I didn’t know about before people told me, that it really looked bad ass. And so I kept going, using my keyboard and after about a year, I had so many requests from people asking me, “Hey, where did you buy that keyboard? We want to buy one because it’s so cool.”

I said, “Hey, let me do a little study and you’ll be able to buy it from my website within one month.”

I went to see my friend, Maurice Miller, who’s one of the founders of Rackspace and I told him, “Hey, I want to ask your sysadmins to test my keyboard to see if they would buy it because a blank keyboard is something that nobody wants to buy except crazy people like me.”

My assumption was that people who are in the tech world, like sysadmins and programmers, they would like that because they were more or less like me. They said that they really liked the keyboard. About 60 percent said they would buy it, so I thought, “Hey, it’s a marketing result.” It was an informal marketing survey, nothing scientific. I thought, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive — 60 percent — it’s incredible. I’ve got to try that, to set it up online.”

What I did is I created a one-page website over the weekend. I took a picture of my keyboard. I think it was on Monday we made the website public. It was linked to a stock Yahoo store, totally ugly. The whole website, the concept was that the blank keyboard is only for the geeks — for the ubergeeks. That was the angle.

We sent one email to Gizmodo — a five-line email — saying, “Hey, Gizmodo. We’ve got a kick-ass, a bad-ass blank keyboard called Das Keyboard,” and we sent them the link. That’s all the marketing we did. I thought, they probably won’t publish that, ever, but my idea was that if I sell 15 keyboards, then maybe there was a market. Then if I have totally misjudged the opportunity I’ll sell probably five, so between five and 15.

Actually, Gizmodo published a little blog post, and within five days we had millions of visitors. The keyboard was featured in the New York Times. In the print edition we had a picture of the keyboard. It was on Slashdot, CBS News, we got MTV, World News Report, we got a ton of people talking about the keyboard.

We got millions of visitors. The web server was so busy we had to upgrade the machine. It kept crashing. We got thousands of orders within a few days.

JB: I just realized that was my post on Gizmodo. I’m looking at it now.

DG: Hey!

JB: I wrote that. I just checked. I wrote that in 2005.

DG: Thank you so much. Wow. That’s awesome.

JB: Yeah.

DG: Yeah, so I’m talking to you.

JB: Yeah, I’m the guy who made your company work.

DG: I think you are, yes. Yeah, that’s really awesome. Hopefully at some point we can meet in person so I can shake your hand.

JB: That would be nice. Anyway, keep going.

DG: We had a huge demand, and we didn’t plan for that so we didn’t have any inventory. We identified a few possible suppliers, but we didn’t talk to them. We said, “Hey, what do we do? We are a software company. We know nothing about hardware, and we have customers.”

We said, “We should try to deliver within three months.”

We contacted the customers and said, “Hey, we are out of stock. Are you willing to wait three months, and then we’ll ship?”

The vast majority said, “Yes, we are totally wanting to wait three months because that keyboard is so bad-ass. The blank keyboard, we want it.”

We said, “OK.” Then we worked really hard to procure all the keyboards and deliver them. That’s how it started.

At that point we decided, “Let’s upgrade the quality of the keyboard,” so we have been starting to improve the design, improve the technology, always focusing on the highest possible quality of every component we use.

Then we actually were able to carve a niche with positioning, which is Das Keyboard is the ultimate typing machine, where everything we design, the spirit of it, is to have the best, highest quality possible. The best typing experience possible.

That was our idea.

We think people spend at least eight hours a day typing on a keyboard, which makes a keyboard very important. That’s the object many people touch the most in their entire life. It’s a keyboard. That’s why we think, if you have a very responsive keyboard, very comfortable, your whole life gets upgraded. I don’t know what kind of keyboard you use, but I can tell you our customers really love it. When we have a new opening here on Metadot, they come and they start typing on it. They just love it.

We started with the blank keyboard. That is the one I have on my desk. Then we said, “Hey, there is a lot of demand for a high-quality, very tactile keyboard, but with inscriptions,” so then we decided to do it as well. We call it the Professional. The blank one is the Ultimate. The other one is called the Professional.

We went through several generations of products. The latest one is generation No. 3. It’s the latest, and we have several flavors.

Two models — which is Ultimate, blank one, and the Professional — and within those we have options, like the typing experience. One is the blue key switch, which is the most clicky. We have the brown key switch, which we call Soft Tactile, so it’s less clicky but still very tactile. Less clicky means also it’s not as audible as the blue key switch.

Today, we launched what we call the Quiet Keyboard. It’s a quiet key design. It’s a red key switch with a quiet key design, which makes it very quiet. The tactile feel is absolutely unbelievable. Maybe we should send you one like this so you can…

That’s the demand we have now. It’s a little bit like the tomato sauce. You have tomato sauce with the gigantic piece of meat, and some people like that, and some people prefer when the meatballs are smaller, or a lot smaller. There is like a flavor of experience that people want to have. What’s amazing is that, on paper, the specifications are very similar, but the user experience is so different.

JB: Where did you get the name? What’s the inspiration of the name? Is it just because it sounds cool?

DG: It’s a combination of things. First of all, the switch technology is German. I’m French, and my partner is German, so we looked at a good name; we looked at a blank keyboard, and so on.

A good name that actually meant something for many people was the word “das,” which is German for “the,” and “Keyboard” is really honest, so it will be “The Keyboard,” but with some German elements to it, which is about high quality, high performance, and good reliability, like the German concept of technology. That’s the idea behind it.

JB: What’s the future of the keyboard? Do you think you guys are going to be making keyboards in five years? Do you think keyboards are going to stick around?

DG: The answer is yes. In the ’80s, already I heard that the keyboard is dead — people are going to use voice recognition within a few years. I thought, “Wow, that sounds cool. I want to use that.” But the reality is that when people do serious typing they use a workstation, and they have a big screen. They have an awesome mouse, and they need to have an awesome keyboard.

If you check on Google Trends, the search trends of “mechanical keyboards” — just those two words — you will see that the demand has been exponentially increasing in the last years. There is a huge demand, and I think the demand is going to increase, even though people buy less desktops.

I think people who are still doing that are buying better-quality components that they use for a longer time. Hence, I think Das Keyboard is the key to doing that.

We have lots of things in the making. A lot. If you look at the competition, typically they do, “Hey, we have a keyboard. Now we are going to do a mouse, and maybe some different keyboards, more keyboards, so 20 keyboards or 50 keyboards.”

We are not going to do that. We have a different strategy. It’s a strategy that nobody has done yet. I cannot tell you all of it now, but the idea is that we’re going to focus on a very limited number of keyboards and we are going to increase the kind of products we sell, different kinds of products.

The concept that we are trying to address is that people want to be more productive when they work and we are going to give them tools so they are more productive in general.

JB: I saw the reusable earplugs on the site. That’s funny because it’s so true. This is the loudest keyboard ever. Who is the strangest or most interesting person that you’ve met who has been using Das Keyboard? Anybody famous or amazing that you know?

DG: I know that Noam Chomsky has one.

JB: I’m not sure that’s a good thing for some people.

TechCrunch favorite MC Frontalot and filmmaker Caly Monardo have created a video for “I’ll Form The Head,” a rap song about a Voltron-esque group of heroes fighting a worm monster in their rhino robotic vehicles. Each one wants to form the head, and they explain their reasoning in surprisingly eloquent terms.

Why are they rhinos and not, say, giant robotic cats? Mr. Frontalot explains why in the first part of the song:

The song comes from Senor Frontalot’s album Solved and is hilarious. He is backed up Dr. Awkward and ZeaLouS1 and while it’s clear that the gold rhino deserves to be the head, the other rhinos to seem to be solid pilots who deserve a little screen time. Hopefully M. Frontalot visits us again at Disrupt in SF, ensuring me another opportunity to state my case in re: me being the head.

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer has been placed in “administrative segregation,” prison shorthand for solitary confinement for “investigative purposes.” Supporters believe he was locked down and given no Internet access because of his ability to send Tweets to a third party who relayed them on his private account. Auernheimer has not sent electronic messages since April 8.

In a letter acquired by the Daily Dot, Auernheimer writes:

His pro bono attorney, Tor Ekeland, has not been able to contact Auernheimer since his lockdown.

Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for programmatically scraping user information from a public AT&T website and sharing it with Gawker.com. He entered prison with much fanfare and attempted to blog from behind bars until his lock down.

Gun control is control of all guns. This tautology, in a developed society, is non-negotiable. If guns can exist in our country, then gun plans can exist, and, although I’m firmly on the side of draconian control over most weapons, I find the move to ban Defense Distributed’s plans for their Liberator pistol unconscionable. Guns exist, so these plans, too, should exist.

To be clear, I think Cody Wilson’s ideas are libertarian claptrap. His jingoistic adoption of the Liberator name – the name of the simple guns airdropped on German-occupied territories to strike fear in the hearts of the Nazis – insults the memories of war dead. Even a pacifist would see the value in a last armed struggle against an enemy of unknowable power. Yet no pro-gun pundits see the supreme disconnection between the struggle of an unfree people and the rights of a gunshow weapons purveyor to a frictionless transaction. But even though we don’t need a Liberator, now have it.

And that is where I will defend these ridiculous plans to the end. Like the Anarchist Cookbook before it, the Liberator is the product of a fevered mind full of conspiracy theories and unrighteous anger coupled with a severe lack of self-awareness. The Cookbook’s author, 19-year-old William Powell, wrote his “treatise” as a reaction to the Vietnam War. He felt strongly enough that he would risk his life and limb – and the lives and limbs of countless other impressionable teens – by releasing a compendium of arguably risible improvised weaponry. But his right to publish, to produce, should never be in jeopardy. His aim was true but his target was wrong. The same goes for Wilson.

3D printing is an important new industry. It makes it as easy to play with plastic as BASIC made it easy to play with bits. I can foresee a situation where a child would design and print a plastic shiv or a fake grenade or any number of potentially dangerous items. This is how exploration works: you go to the extremes to understand the center.

I remember one summer – I was probably 11 or 12 – when my friends and I found some old glass doors in the back yard. My friends and I spent an afternoon cracking the glass and making “knives” – essentially finding pieces of glass we could hold on to without cutting ourselves. We named knives – Hawkeye, Samurai – and put them in a cloth-lined briefcase I used on my “spy missions.” My parents found us later in the the back yard playing with shattered glass. I was grounded. We never got the clubhouse. The same goes for the Liberator. The foolish mind will see a pane of glass and sees a knife. The wise mind sees the same door and will use it as the entrance to a greenhouse. That we didn’t see the useful application of these doors made us idiots.

We can fear 3D printing. Even if we ban every digital file, someone out there will make something dangerous and slap the sash of liberty on it. In the end we live in a world of chaos tempered solely by intelligence and compassion. It is my undying hope that those latter facets of our nature will win out and so I understand the value of tinkering. The speed with which Wilson ignored his own “No Takedown” rule shows us how stern and staunch a freedom fighter this boy really is. But I’d much rather see a vibrant – if sometimes misguided – marketplace of ideas than a culture of fear-mongering and bloviating. Only a fool would download and print Wilson’s gun. But, if guns can remain in our lockboxes and closets, it is the fool’s right to do so, no matter what.