World’s 1st 24k Gold and Sapphire-inlaid MacBook Air. Sheesh.

Here.

You are what you make.

Some guy rendered Steve Jobs‘ face using Apple products. For the big picture, click here.

I’ve always wondered about the people endlessly tinkering around with the demo units at Apple stores. What the heck are they doing? Playing games? Surfing? Emailing?

Well, we know what one person was doing - writing a book.

Isobella Jade, an aspiring commercial model, has actually written her memoirs without owning her own computer. She’d write bits and pieces on demo units inside an Apple Store in Soho, New York, saving the files to her Yahoo account in email form, day after day. Isobella says she’s too poor to buy her own iMac, so she mooched off the Apple Store until her book, Almost 5′ 4″ was finished.

I remember one of my favorite writers, Harlan Ellison, who as a publicity stunt wrote one entirely while inside a store display window where you could watch him work from the street. Isobella’s stunt is more sneaky, though.

Her book has been self-published, but she has signed over the world rights to The Friday Project in the UK, and a commercial version of Almost 5′4″ will be available next year.

How she did it, and an interview with the author, is over at the Mental Floss blog.

(And man, here I am with 5 computers, and I can’t even finish one. Sheesh.)

I’ve written a couple of times how in Japan seeing a wayward iPhone is rarer than it normally is elsewhere. That’s because hack-and-kracks don’t work there (their system has different requirements that the iPhone hardware does not have yet). So seeing one in Apple-crazy Japan is not too common, and the craving seems to have given rise to odd things - like this Sony Ericsson slider that someone there modified to look like an iPhone:

Gizmodo calls it the “saddest iPhone” they’ve ever seen. I agree.

(I’ve known this trick for some time and have actually been teaching it to friends ever since, but it never occurred to me to post the darn thing. Taught it to Game Magazine editor Howard Paw the other day and realized I haven’t even mentioned it here. Well, better late than never.)

Apple has left out cartloads of basic features, apps and utilities that should be no-brainers to add. Even worse, they even forget to mention things that are actually already there for you to use right out of the box.

One of the things they forgot is how to find out currency rates in real-time over the net, quickly and easily without going to websites when all you want to do find out what the rate today is. Don’t worry, there’s no specific icon for it; you didn’t miss anything. It’s built into the Stocks widget that comes with the iPhone.

Updating the rates of currency worldwide is done through Yahoo online. All you need do is run the widget and add the “stock” of your selected currency manually, and every time you update it’ll check the current conversation rate for your preferred coin. Finally, a use for Stocks that those of use who don’t dabble in the market will find way useful. (Remember, it’s not a currency conversion calculator, mind you - someone else can invent one; this just gives you the current conversion rate. You can use the built-in Calculator to find out how much you’ve made or lost, which is now a snap because you know the current rate.)

Run the widget, then tap on the “i” icon on the lower right corner.

Then tap on the “+” or add button on the upper left corner, which is supposed to let you add stocks you wish to monitor.

In the text window, type the currency equation in this format: yyyzzz=x, where yyy is currency you’re asking about and zzz is your home currency.

Thus, to use an example, to find out how many Philippine Pesos (PHP) one US dollar (USD) can buy, you type USDPHP=X.

The proper abbreviations for currencies that the widget understands can be found on the Yahoo!Finance Currency Converter page (where you can actually do this and calculate specific amounts - which is better, really - but that’s not the point of this tip.)

Once you type in the argument, the iPhone will locate the proper “stock” and show it in the window below. Tap on it and it will add the “stock” to your list of monitored stocks.

Tap on “Done” and you’re all set. Every time you run the widget, it’ll consult Yahoo!Finance and give you the real-time exchange rate of the currencies you’ve selected.

You can add as many as you want (and while you’re at it, you can remove the pre-installed stocks Apple put in to save on screen real estate - me, I left Apple on to see how Steve and the gang are doing, just out of curiosity.)

So there.