OLPC, Sugar on a Stick, eat your hearts out. Game developer David Braben has come up with a $25 ARM-based full-fledged computer in a USB stick form factor. The device has a USB port in one  end and an HDMI port in the other; if you plug a monitor into the HDMI and a keyboard or USB hub + keyboard and mouse into the USB, you have a full-fledged working computer that will run Linux, or it could be combined with a touchscreen to make a cheap tablet. It will probably ship with Ubuntu. Braben plans to use this...

The Art. Lebedev Studio, the same folks behind the hyper-expensive Optimus Maximus keyboard (in which every key is a miniature, reconfigurable LCD screen), have come up with a design concept for a disposable paper USB flash drive. It’s just a design concept, and I’m not sure whether it’s even technologically feasible yet (the design’s use of the future tense, “Soon the flash drive will evolve into a disposable form…”, makes me suspect not).  But it’s a very interesting idea. Essentially, the drives come in a perforated sheet of several, and when you want to use one you just tear...

Google’s Android OS has become pretty much the go-to operating system for cheap tablets and e-book readers these days. But what of Google’s other OS, ChromeOS, that is rumored to be hitting tablets by Black Friday? If you’re curious, and have a computer that is hardware-compatible and a spare USB drive, you can actually try it out and see for yourself. ReadWriteWeb notes that a developer going by “Hexxeh” has been compiling both a modified Chromium (the developer version of Chrome) build called “Flow” and an unmodified, straight-developer build called “Vanilla”. These can be downloaded and placed on...

Found via Nate’s Ebook News, Publisher’s Weekly has a piece about Barnes & Noble experimenting with bundling e-book and paper book versions together. The idea is that when customers buy a physical book at a Barnes & Noble store, they would receive a coupon to get the e-book at a discount. Exact details still need to be worked out with the publishers. Certainly a number of people have talked about wanting to get both versions of the book at once. Sometimes people who buy the print book will then go ahead and pirate the e-book, reasoning that they...