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This week saw the Flash battle rage on, a new iPhone firmware released, and Facebook received a redesign. But what went down in the world of geek? Let’s take a look, in our weekly geek round-up. DIY: Two Funnels + Earbuds + Old Tech = Rock On We liked the new book, 62 Projects to Make With a Dead Computer , so much that we decided to actually make one of the projects. In this case, we made a set of speakers out of disused iPod earbuds, a couple funnels, and some dead MP3 players. Read on… Want an iPad Now? Build Your Own With Lego One intrepid adult Lego enthusiast wanted to get a idea of how the iPad would feel in your hand, so he built one out of Lego bricks. The Lego iPad doesn’t do anything, but it sure looks cool. See what the maker had to say about it. Read on… Will Your Next Smartphone Shape-shift? One Researcher Presents His Ideas PhD student Fabian Read the rest of this entry ?

According to our cousins at Computerworld , the developers of Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser are deep in discussions about the future of the program on Mac OS X Tiger. While the final nail has yet to be driven into the purest Carpathian wood of 10.4’s coffin, the writing for the striped cat appears to be on the wall. Support for Tiger was dropped from the development version of Mozilla’s Gecko framework last September, but the required code for supporting 10.4 was left intact, in case that decision was changed. On Thursday, Mozilla developer Josh Aas laid out the case for dropping support for Tiger altogether , in order to take advantage of more modern features introduced in Leopard and Snow Leopard. Mozilla’s stats from January 25 of this year show that users on 10.4 account for about 24 percent of Mac users running Firefox 3.5 and about 12 percent running the Read the rest of this entry ?

A fledgling Shanghai company aims to tap rising demand for back-end IT services in China, where red tape and other woes can make it complex to operate in the country’s booming Internet industry. China claims more Internet users than the U.S. has people, but its Internet companies face a host of challenges unique to the country. Parts of China’s Web infrastructure remain poorly connected, and regulators can punish companies if users upload pornography or other sensitive content to their Web sites. But another key challenge is that the Internet’s fast growth has boosted the need for workers with experience managing back-end servers, while those skills remain scarce, said Steve Mushero, cofounder of ChinaNetCloud. Mushero used to work as CTO for Tudou, a Chinese YouTube rival. “There are a lot of complications that you just don’t see in the rest of the Read the rest of this entry ?

Microsoft defended itself against an opinion piece written by a former vice president, who argued the software company has lost its edge and is “failing” as a result. In response, the software company said it remains competitive and innovative. Dick Brass, who was a vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, didn’t pull any punches in the opinion piece he authored “Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason,” Brass wrote in The New York Times. He hit Microsoft for its “inept” marketing, and compared the company to ailing car maker General Motors, saying its current profits are too dependent on Windows and Office, products that were developed many years ago. “Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever,” he Read the rest of this entry ?