Hacking an Alarmo, Google's $20 million fine and more

Well, that’s it – Halloween 2024 is in the books. I hope you had a great time and spent the day doing spooky things with your friends and family. Now that November is here, it's time to start thinking about family gatherings as Thanksgiving and Christmas are now on the horizon. If you've been busy preparing for the holiday season and haven't caught up on what's happening in the tech world, here are our top five news items from the past week.

Seriously, how did no one think of this idea sooner?

We really like DIY handhelds here at XDA. We've reported on people converting all sorts of devices into a portable format, from console motherboards to gaming laptop hardware. However, someone created the Beth Deck that uses a framework motherboard specifically designed for DIY projects, which makes me a little silly because I didn't think of doing this myself. It's called Beth Deck and if you want to create your own handheld it seems like the perfect place to start.

No more 8GB models

Would you pay a premium price for a laptop with 8GB of RAM? Some Apple fans had to put up with this, as the technology giant from Cupertino was pretty stubborn about keeping a relatively small amount of memory in its laptops. Fortunately, the company has seen the light of day with the new generation of M4 devices and scrapped all 8GB models. Now you get at least 16GB of RAM when you buy a MacBook.

Out with the new and in with the old

So how about the new Outlook app? It sounded good when Microsoft first announced it, but once people got their hands on it, it turned out to be not so great anymore. Luckily, one Redditor has found a way to keep the old Outlook interface for now. The fix may not be permanent, but it's a good way to continue using the older design until Microsoft figures out how to close this loophole.

2 Someone hacked an Alarmo, and you can too

You don't even have to open the case

When some people get their hands on a shiny new device, all they think about is how they can crack it open and make it run whatever they want. This week we saw a colleague named Gary who got his Alarmo to display a cat image and uploaded the code so others could do the same. And after a little more tinkering, they got Doom running too. The most impressive thing about this hack is that it does not require any external changes to the Alarmo. Just plug in a USB cable, run some code, and you're done.

By the way, that's 20 decillion dollars

Here's a fun fact that I didn't know before the week started; The total value of all the world's money is $110 trillion. The reason I know this is because Russia fined Google $20 billion in 2022 for removing a YouTube channel. Google didn't seem too bothered by this, and it doesn't look like it's even trying to pay it back, but wow – what an amazing thing to come out of the world of tech.