Crave

This week in Crave: The geek chic edition

Too busy planning for Geek Pride Day to keep up with Crave this week? Well, take your eyes off the circuit boards and computer code on your Geek Sneaks for a moment and catch up on what you missed.

• Can't make it to Dubai to snag a Galaxy S III? Get the S III experience on your S II right now.

• Put all the big iPhone 5 rumors together and here's what you get.

• New Android home screen is a real Chameleon.

• Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 together at last.

Video made with Google's glasses bounces online

How does Google and its high-tech-specs effort top company VP Sebastian Thrun's viral photo of a dad's-eye view of Thrun swinging his boy round in circles?

Easy. It puts the Project Glass spectacles on someone, puts that someone on a trampoline, then puts the setting on "video" and lets that someone start jumping and filming.

The 404 1,061: Where we're in too deep (podcast)

Stupid Andy helps us round out the week before the three-day holiday, and our favorite way to pay tribute to the soldiers is by getting choked up at YouTube videos of soldiers reuniting with their dogs. The ones with their families are pretty good, too.

Top 5 internal drives: The state of solid-state drives

No matter how big or small your computer is, there are at least one internal drive on the inside to host its operating system and programs. This drive, be it a regular hard drive or a solid-state drive (SSD), generally comes in one of the two standards, 2.5-inch (for laptops) or 3.5-inch ford desktops.

Most, if not all standard SSDs, however, come in the 2.5-inch design. This is because a 2.5-inch drive can fit in both laptop and desktop computers, while the 3.5-inch drives can only fit in desktops. Also, due to the fact more

Top five routers: 802.11ac ushered in

It was clear from CES that 2012 is going to be a year of many changes in home networking. To help you keep up with these changes, here's our list of the top five networking products currently available. This time around, the list includes the very first 802.11ac router on the market.

This top-five list will be updated on a regular basis. This means if you don't see your favorite router or brand on the list, don't be discouraged, you might see it next time. This also means that the products mentioned here won't necessarily be the top five of 2012, which we'll determine at the end of the year.

Without further ado, these are our current top picks for networking devices as of the end of May. This list is sorted by the review date, starting with the most recently reviewed.

Buffalo AirStation WZR-D1800H revew: 802.11ac performance inconclusive

The Buffalo AirStation WZR-D1800H is the first 802.11ac (aka 5G Wi-Fi) router on the market, and Buffalo's WLI-H4-D1300 wireless media bridge is the first 802.11ac client. Since those are currently the only two 5G Wi-Fi devices, it was impossible to get a complete picture of the 802.11ac standard itself by testing them.

However, I was able to quite easily pair them together and experience the 802.11ac connection. Unfortunately, while the connection was very fast, it wasn't close to what the 802.11ac standard has to offer.

Kanex Thunderbolt cable is long and expensive

If you've been following my reviews of Thunderbolt devices, which you should, you can't help but notice how I've been lamenting about the cable.

There are a couple of things about the Thunderbolt cable from Apple that thins my hair: none of the devices comes with one; it's expensive at $50; it has a ridiculous single-size length (video); and you can only get one from Apple.

Now things have changed a bit, but the future doesn't seem much brighter.

Kanex, the maker of the first MHL-HDMI cable for Android phones, announced today that it's more

The 404 1,060: Where we break through the clusterzuck (podcast)

Now that the Internet isn't flooded with Facebook IPO news, we can move on to more breaking news, like Hollywood finally answering our prayers for a Hook prequel that tells the Rufio origin story.

That's right, the original actor who played Rufio, Dante Basco, recently announced in an interview that a Rufio prequel film is in the works under the directing eye of Rpin Suwannath. Maybe we'll finally get to the bottom of how he got those fabulous red tights.

Intel's latest desktop board: Finally Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 coexist

More than a year after it was first launched exclusively for Macs, the Thunderbolt standard is now officially available for PCs, too. And by "officially," I mean you can literally buy a motherboard and build a system on your own that supports Thunderbolt.

There's been a lot of talk about Thunderbolt getting to PCs since the standard was first launched. Rumor had it Intel would show off PC motherboards that supported Thunderbolt at CES 2012 (which it didn't). On Monday, however, Intel quietly launched the standard for the PC platform, and today I have in my hand the Intel Desktop Board DZ77RE-75K, the first Thunderbolt-certified motherboard that comes with a built-in Thunderbolt port. The wait is finally over.

After more than 30 years, Grid Beam modular construction system comes to market

This year at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, trying to juggle my own interests (talk to cool people) and my 5-year-old son's (build or break stuff), we both hit paydirt at the same time when we stumbled across the Grid Beam exhibit.

My kid spent 45 minutes in the hot sun inventing and screwing together a life-size car-like contraption, and I got to dive into the minutiae of the product with its creators, Phil and Richard Jergenson.

Grid Beam is Erector Set meets IKEA. The hardware is standard 2x2 wood beams with holes drilled through every 1 1/2 inches (which is the actual width of a 2x2 beam), and standard furniture bolts that will be familiar to anyone who's ever assembled a futon frame. more