Hardware – Page 11

ASRock ION 330 as Media Center

August 13, 2009July 8, 2010 Doug Groves ASRock, Atom, Boxee, Hauppauge, HTPC, ION, Media Center, Microsoft, Nvidia, Windows35 Comments

Intel’s low-powered & low cost Atom processor has been all the rage in the computer industry for quite some time now, and nobody has embraced it more than just about every Taiwanese hardware manufacturer whose name starts with an ‘A’. ASUS thrust the netbook form factor into the minds of the masses, but it was Acer who (so far) has won the small form factor war, as the number one netbook maker (the Aspire One grabbing 50% of the market). But it hasn’t stopped there. The Atom is appearing in…

Rogers HP Netbook (non) Deal

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009 Doug Groves netbook, Rogers10 Comments

After annoucing the 50Mbps hi speed internet option in the Toronto area for the low low price of $150 a month, Rogers is now making on the go internet convenient and similarly expensive. For $300 you can get an HP Mini 110 netbook with embedded 3.5G service, with data plans starting at $25/m for 500MB of data, on a 2 year contract. These deals can be found at certain retailers such as Best Buy. Pointing out the lack of major savings compared to buying an unsubsidized netbook, there’s more suitable…

Life Sized Gundam Statue Finished in Tokyo – Geeks Worldwide Get Simultaneous Hard-On

July 3, 2009July 25, 2009 kingpinlei Gundam4 Comments

Life-sized… Gundam… Statue. What more could be said? That is a whole lot of awesome! On June 10th, construction of a life-size Gundam RX-78 was completed on Tokyo’s Odaiba Island Shiokaze Park for the upcoming 30th Anniversary of Japan’s most famous anime, Mobile Suit Gundam. This 18-metre statue was built with a moving head, hydraulics, and boasts 50 – count ’em 50! – points of working lights.

Acer Aspire Easystore H340 Review

June 15, 2009July 30, 2009 Doug Groves Acer, Easystore, Microsoft, NAS, review, WHS, Windows19 Comments

Overview: I’m sure we’ve all been faced with the dilemma of running out of hard drive space, and wondering whether it would make more sense to upgrade an internal drive, or plunk down the money for an external solution. When contemplating getting yet another hard drive to add to my system (as dictated by the paltry 24 GB I had left free on my last drive), I realized it was time to look into some sort of network addressed storage (NAS) instead of dogpiling another drive in the computer, or…

Cheapest way to get a Blu-Ray Player? Part 1 (And no, stealing one doesn’t count)

June 15, 2009June 15, 2009 kingpinlei blu ray, PS37 Comments

Okay, it’s been a long while since I lasted posted an article, so here goes… This article is based on something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. With more and more movies coming out on Blu-Ray, it is getting really tempting to pick up a Blu-Ray player (it’s a battle that’s still raging with me, but that’s another story). But since most of my hard-earned cash is going towards bills and such, that got me thinking… Let’s say you’ve spent your hard-earned cash on a beautiful big screen…

Microsoft wants to rename netbooks with absurd 5-word phrase

June 3, 2009June 4, 2009 Danny X Microsoft, netbook12 Comments

While cruising around the Internets today I came across an article on Boing Boing that was just so right on, I just had to repost it here. As we’ve been gushing about around the rgb offices lately, Microsoft is getting a lot more right than it is wrong these days…but t seems that mantra has yet to trickle down to the marketing department. Enjoy. Steven Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s General Manager of Application Platform and Development Marketing, thinks that the term “netbook” should be abandoned. Instead, he says, such devices should be…

Artificial Walking Gel Created

April 28, 2009July 25, 2009 Doug Groves Science, terminator8 Comments

The above video demonstrates a chemical gel created in a lab at Waseda University in Tokyo. It’s a purely chemical reation that allows it to move in a fashion similar to an inch worm. The 600 um scale is just over half a millimetre, so there’s no fear of it killing loved ones and taking their forms yet… From The New Scientist, a great place to keep tabs on all the latest advances of SkyNet.

Philips 21:9 Cinema TV Demo Cool

April 27, 2009April 10, 2010 Doug Groves 21:9, phillips3 Comments

Earlier this year Philips announced it’s 21:9 Cinema TV, which officially makes it 5 better than 16:9. Although one could argue whether the world needs 21:9, Philips has put together a really cool demo of the TV, using a bullet time type short called Carousel which can be watched here. As the film plays, watch for the the three tags in the progress bar, which work as inline commentary.

Sony Vaio AW Tankbook

April 9, 2009April 9, 2009 Johnathan Leger Apple, Laptop, Sony6 Comments

Well, there comes a time every 3 years or so that I look at my current rig and decide that I need a change and with me, usually that means, drastic change. The last time this happened I opted to switch from an Apple to a Dell… Which was, to those who know me and my thoughts on Microsoft, shocking…

Samsung’s new line of BluRay players make the PS3 look like more and more of a bargain

March 31, 2009July 25, 2009 Danny X BluRay, Samsung10 Comments

Ask anyone who hasn’t bought a BluRay player yet why not and you’ll likely get the same response: They’re too expensive. And they’re right. With the cheapest player at Best Buy, the Samsung BDP1500, currently weighing in at $262.98, it seems the industry still has a while to go before they hit the $199 mark (the price point that many believe is the turning point for the global infiltration of a new media format). They’ve been popping up here and there, but they’re usually by brands like Vizio or Insignia…

MIT sees dead people. Well, not really.

March 18, 2009March 18, 2009 Danny X 0 comment

At last month’s annual TED conference, MIT’s Pattie Maes demoed what she called the new 6th Sense, which took the form of a wearable piece of tech that was able to translate your gestures and behaviour into functional and useable data. The uses for such a device are enormous, as you’ll see in the video, but the most fascinating part is that this is not simply theory but practical fact. At a cost of $350 “cobbled together” with “off the shelf parts” at an MIT lab, the device is not…

Nvidia ION Platform Windows Certified – See It On Video

February 11, 2009April 17, 2009 Doug Groves HTPC, netbook, Nvidia, SSF9 Comments

Reference design image from trustedreviews.com Nvidia’s small form factor (SFF) computing platform has received Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) certification for its drivers. What makes this noteworthy is the new platform is both tiny, as illustrated above, and dirt cheap (starting at about $300 US when shipping) and a not insignificant amount of horsepower under the hood. This looks like a break out platform for the growing netbook/nettop device segment, as it provides significantly more graphics power than the current crop of Intel graphic chips ubiquitous to the low-end market….