Google changes name to Topeka and other April 1st jokes

It's the first of April and as usual the Internet is full of April Fool's Day pranks. Lets take a look at some of the more popular ones.

First up, Google temporarily changed its name to Topeka.

Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.

The search giant also introduced Translate for Animals, a new service that will help bridge the gap between animals and humans.



Nokia developed software that enables you to control a real helicopter with the N900 phone:



Toshiba presents TubeTop, world's first inflatable laptop:



ThinkGeek turns your iPad into an arcade cabinet with the iCade.



TweakTown received the exclusive on NVIDIA's new TWIMTBB (The Way it’s Meant to be Baked) program. Seems like they're planning to make some extra bucks by turning defective Fermi GPUs into efficient cooking machines.

Easy Bake Ovens with Fermi inside will hit the stores sometime in June. There was no word on pricing, but some sources are saying they expect the new Fermi based “nuclear” Easy Bakes to be over $200. An ASUS engineer was also quoted as saying “we can overclock it, too” while a source at GIGABYTE referred to needing more copper in the design.

Is fatigue hurting your gaming performance? Suffer no longer as Razer's Venom promises to keep you going for over 100 hours of gaming time in one sitting! Just plug the 300ml intravenous bag with some kind of green Kryptonite-like solution into your vein and you're ready to go on a 120 hour marathon of l33tness. The Venom Starter Pack features five goldplated various needle sizes to suit your vein sizes, or if you don't like needles you can also get the Venom Nebulizer Starter Pack which diffuses the Venom solution into a green mist to be inhaled. We've already requested a review sample, but Razer said they're still working out the legal details..



Yanko Design has created a new concept called Google Envelopes:

Designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with this concept called Google Envelopes. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to map the course of mail and how it can tell a story? They came up with Google Envelopes, which can be sent through G-Mail itself. It’s only a concept, but totally viable and something people can immediately understand.

Another new product comes from IWOOT, they've created a dock that turns your iPhone into an iPad!

Fancy an iPad but can't stretch the budget quite that far? Well why not get yourself a Pad-Dock? It's a portable dock for your iPhone that magically turns it into an iPad! Well, maybe not magically, but it certainly is clever. Using a touch-screen magnifier, your iPhone screen is enlarged to the exact dimensions of an iPad. Most of the features that the iPad boasts about are on the iPhone anyway, so it only makes good sense to simply enlarge it. And, unlike the iPad, you can actually answer and make calls. Technology, eh? That means you can check your emails, watch a movie, surf the net or whatever it is that you do with your iPhone, but with the attractive size and heft of the iPad.

TechPowerUp found an application that enables you to run NVIDIA CUDA software on everey PC.