TOP TECHNOLOGY NEWS

The Sixpack is a minimal wire rack with a singular purpose: carrying bottles. It is also worryingly close in form to the terrible, home-made twisted-coat-hanger candle-holders you get every year for Christmas from your cheapskate, hippy cousin.

The blurb:”It’s perfect for those BYO dinner outings where a normal 6 pack gets destroyed after you rip out one beer.”

That might be so, although I’d suggest that once you have brought the beer to the party, you won’t be going anywhere else until the beer is finished.

Home theater is about compromise. You probably can’t afford tens of thousands of dollars to make a real home cinema. Neither can you convince your significant other that you need to jam a speaker into every corner of the room and, worse, run cables to them. And even if you’re happy with just a big TV hooked up to your PS3, the wall-mounted flat-panel is likely firing its rear-mounted speakers straight through the plaster into the (unimpressed) neighbor’s bedroom.

LAS VEGAS — Dell has managed to pack an entire Alienware gaming rig into a tiny, 11-inch notebook body, and it kicks ass. It will also cost less than $1,000.

Regular readers will know I’m a Mac user. Normally, no matter how good a PC might be, if it doesn’t run the Mac OS I’m not interested. The Alienware M11X is the first machine to tempt me to the other side.

Dell decided not to bother with a heavy, power-thirsty CPU. Instead, the M11X is tricked out with a Core 2 Duo and hardware to push graphics.

LAS VEGAS — Walk into a  Costco and $20 LED flashlights line the aisles. To turn it into a product that’s at least ten times more expensive requires some engineering. The result is the mPower Illuminator– a sleek, expensive emergency flashlight that’s packs 180 lumens into a palm-sized product.

With its brushed titanium and chrome finish, the Illuminator is a good-looking enough device.

Like to check e-mail or surf the internet while traveling? You may want to take the Megabus rather than JetBlue, says a study.

The availability of free Wi-Fi and power outlets in inter-city buses and trains, coupled with increased security around air travel, is spurring more people to take the longer road home.

“Technology is changing how people approach travel,” says Joe Schwieterman, a professor at DePaul University who worked on the study. “For many travelers, the ability to seamlessly use portable technology offsets the disadvantages of longer travel times.”

Schwieterman and his colleagues collected information from 7,000 passengers on intercity bus, train and airline trips in 14 states.

Florida startup Psystar has switched its business model from selling ugly Mac clones to selling ugly t-shirts.

Psystar, which recently lost its year-and-a-half-long legal battle with Apple, is selling t-shirts on its website instead of generic PCs hacked to run the Mac operating system. The company is accepting donations, too.

In a blog post, Psystar said it plans to ask the court to clarify legality surrounding Rebel EFI, a downloadable piece of software that enables users to create their own Hackintoshes.

The Nook hacking frenzy seems to be as active as the first wild days of iPhone cracking, with new news arriving all the time. Now owners of the Barnes & Noble e-reader can “jailbreak” the device without having to open it up.

Previously, to gain full root access to the internals of the Nook’s Android operating system meant grabbing a screwdriver and physically popping out the internal microSD card on which the OS resides.

Exploring a new city is always fun. But if you can’t get there, a gorgeous, zoomable 360-degree view photo can be an acceptable substitute.

360 Cities, a Dutch company, has created a stunning panoramic photo of Prague in the Czech Republic.

“The creation of this image represents my previous five years’ obsession with all things panoramic,” says Jeffrey Martin, founder and CEO of 360 Cities.

What do you do if you are an aging (but still awesome) psychedelic rocker and you’re having trouble reading the small type on your iPhone’s address book? If you are Lou Reed, you design and release your very own text-zooming app on the iTunes App Store.

The app is called “Lou Zoom” and the tagline is “Lou Reed brings style and clarity to your contacts”. It costs $2, and of course I bought it immediately.

Lou Zoom doesn’t just make things easier to read, although it does do that — each name is blown-up to use the full width of the screen.

At last, the Googlephone has appeared. Forget the Droid, the G1 and all those other Android wannabees: Google is testing its own handset, the search giant confirmed over the weekend.

Although Google did not specify details on the phone or its plans to sell it, numerous sources have fleshed out the picture. The handset is designed by Google, made by hardware partner HTC, is running Android 2.1, and is called the Nexus One, according to multiple sources including the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Daring Fireball, and leaked photos. The phone will be sold online by Google itself, the AllThingsD reports.

The Nexus One will, crucially, be sold unlocked, according to TechCrunch, giving Google complete control over the hardware and software with no pesky carrier interference. Even the iPhone, which has had almost unprecedented autonomy in its functionality is still constrained by carriers: AT&T’s anti-tethering paranoia is a good example.