Gizmodo’s got proof!

Someone actually got an actual living, breathing Psystar Open Computing unit, that third-party hardware pseudo-Macintosh desktop and made a video of it booting up. Software Update can’t seem to figure out what it is, but it thinks it’s a Macbook Pro. Whatever it is, it’s damned fast!

See the exclusive video!

UPDATE: Psystar itself seems to want to validate itself. It just put up a video of its own on their site, although they can’t seem to shake off that cloud of seediness and smarm that’s been clinging to it from Day One, up to now. Especially now. Watch it here.

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

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.

No, it’s not exactly a phoned-in thing.

Engadget reader Claude M. proposed to his girlfriend Doris by painstakingly producing a faux-Apple iPhone iProposal ad and then showing it to her. She said yes. Don’t you just love geeks?

Watch the iProposal here.