Hope you didn't actually care about playing games.
Showing posts with label Hardware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hardware. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Gas Bandit's Handy Tips for the Technologically Lazy
So your wireless router is starting to flake out on the wireless part, but the computers connected by cables are still able to get their connection perfectly, and you've got a bajillion forwarded ports set up that you're really not looking forward to typing in on the new router you have to get?
Here's a handy tip from me - find the setting in your new router that says "DHCP SERVER - ENABLE/DISABLE." Flip it to "Disabled," change it's LAN address to be in the same 192.168.THIS NUMBER.whatever IP range and plug one of the LAN ports (not the WAN port) into one of the LAN ports on the old router. Voila, your new wireless router is just an access point for your existing network and you can put off doing the actual work of setting up your new router until the old one absolutely dies completely, taking its settings with it, making it 10 times as inconvenient to remember and enter in all that information to the new router!
Hrm, I'm starting to think maybe this isn't such a great idea.
Ehhhhhh whatever.
Friday, September 02, 2011
Counterfeit Chinese USB Hard Drive
Counterfeit Chinese USB Hard Drive:
The picture above looks like a Samsung USB Hard Drive case right? Looks can be deceiving, the case actually contains come large nuts to make it feel like there is actually something inside and a USB thumb drive to provide some convincing operation. The USB drive has been made to simulate the large hard drive by showing up with a 500GB capacity even though the capacity of the drive is only 128MB. I am thinking some smart people in China made a custom controller for the drive to allow it to work in a loop mode which allows all of the most recent copied data to remain and the oldest data be overwritten. The TOC also works in an interesting way since even though an old file has been overwritten it would remain in the TOC to make it seem that the drive is functioning as it should.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Razer intros ultra-slim gaming notebook
Razer intros ultra-slim gaming notebook:
Peripheral maker Razer has long catered to gamers, and its latest creation stays true to those roots while entering an entirely new market: notebooks. The company has unveiled the Blade, a gaming laptop that features a Sandy Bridge CPU, discrete GeForce graphics, and a slender aluminum chassis just 0.88" thick. The Blade looks pretty badass, too.
Read Full Article
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention
New M-Disc Technology Promises Permanent Data Retention: "
They're called M-Discs and they're being brought to market a start-up company called Millenniata, Computerworld reports. M-Discs ditch the traditional reflective layer found in standard physical media discs and instead etch the information directly into the body of the multi-layered disc itself, which is made of an undisclosed stone-like substance. Millenniata says that any device that can read a DVD can read an M-Disc – the only special equipment necessary in the whole process is an M-Disc burner.
That's cool in and of itself, but Millenniata also claims that M-Discs are darned near impervious to damage. They told Computerworld you can toss an M-Disc in liquid nitrogen, then dump boiling water all over it, and nary a byte of data will be damaged. A DoD study found no data loss after subjecting the M-Disc to grueling conditions -- a claim no other disc can make.
Although LG's supplying the initial round of M-Disc burners, Millenniata's CEO says that any DVD hardware manufacturer can make the jump to M-Disc by installing a firmware upgrade on their machines. The M-Disc's staying power comes at the cost of burn speed, however; you can only write to them at a 4x rate. At that speed, it's almost a good thing that M-Discs will only be able to match standard DVD capacities of 4.7GB when they hit the shelves in October for $3 a pop. Millenniata puts their money where their mouth is by offering a lifetime warranty for the discs.
Image credit: troveas.com
" Read Full Article
Monday, August 08, 2011
German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN
German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN: "
Last year, Chinese scientists showed off some new old-school tech, transmitting data with blue LEDs that flicker faster than the human eye can perceive. This throwback to the good ol' days of IR receivers was able to hit speeds of 2Mbps, but leave it to the fine folks at the Heinrich Hertz Institute to push the light bulb networking tech to the extremes. Earlier this year researchers hit 500Mbps with white LEDs; now, using a combination of white, green, blue, and red, the team ramped that up to 800Mbps, officially putting Ethernet on notice. The line-of-sight networking won't actually replace your standard Cat 5 line or WiFi router, but it could find a home in places like hospitals where radio-based wireless technology can cause problems for sensitive equipment. With any luck, we'll soon be bathing our homes in HD-streaming illumination.
German geniuses hit 800Mbps with light bulb WLAN originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Slashgear | Email this | Comments"
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Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Z-Drive R4 SSD combines blazing speed, PCIe 2.0 interface
Z-Drive R4 SSD combines blazing speed, PCIe 2.0 interface: "
PCI Express may be the future for solid-state drives, and the interface has already taken root in OCZ's Z-Drive SSDs. The company has just announced a new one: the Z-Drive R4. Available in full- and half-height models, the Z4 has a PCI Express 2.0 x8 interface with 4GB/s of peak bandwidth to and from the system. You're gonna need the bandwidth, too, because the fastest Z4 is said to be capable of pushing data at nearly 3GB/s.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption
Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption: "
256-bit AES not doing it for ya? Now you can replace that dedicated-processor encryption with actual mechanical hardware, thanks to the Cryptex flash drive and its five-wheel combination lock sleeve. Modeled in AutoCAD and constructed using various glistening metals, the Cryptex's five-digit combination will keep prying eyes far from you sensitive files -- and, well, it just looks insanely awesome. Like many shiny objects that seem too good to be true, it's barely more than a concept at this point, so you'll have to settle for the digital version for now.
Cryptex flash drive uses combination lock sleeve, brings a whole new meaning to hardware encryption originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 12 Jul 2011 01:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Technabob | Steampunker (Russian) | Email this | Comments"
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The fanless spinning heatsink: more efficient and immune to dust
The fanless spinning heatsink: more efficient and immune to dust: "
There’s a fundamental flaw with fan-and-heatsink cooling systems: no matter how hard the fan blows, a boundary layer of motionless, highly-insulating air remains on the heatsink. You can increase the size of the heatsink and you can blow more air, but ultimately the boundary layer prevents the system from being efficient; it’s simply a physical limitation of fan-and-heatsink cooling systems in specific, and every kind of air-cooled heat exchanger in general, including air conditioning and refrigeration units.
But what if you did away with the fan? What if the heatsink itself rotated? Well, believe it or not, rotating the heat exchanger obliterates the boundary layer, removes the need for a fan, and it’s so efficient that it can operate at low and very quiet speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Air Bearing Heat Exchanger [PDF]. Developed by Jeff Koplow, a researcher at the US government’s Sandia National Laboratories, the new heatsink (which has also been dubbed the “Sandia Cooler”) basically resembles a big, metal fan. The cooler consists of a static metal baseplate, which is connected to the CPU, GPU, or other hot object, and a finned, rotating heat exchanger that are cushioned by a thin (0.001-inch) layer of air. As the metal blades spin, centrifugal force kicks up the air and throws it up and outwards, much like an impeller, creating a cooling effect.
So when can you get your hands on one? Koplow is now working on a design that can be mass-produced — and hopefully he’ll soon be able to bring this awesome piece of technology to market.
Read more at New Scientist or read the research paper
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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
TR's Summer 2011 system guide
TR's Summer 2011 system guide: "AMD's next wave of processors may be on the horizon, but some of us need to upgrade sooner rather than later. So, here's a new edition of our system guide replete with some of the fastest gear and best deals money can buy right now."
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Tuesday, June 07, 2011
Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless
Cheap GPUs Rendering Strong Passwords Useless: "StrongGlad writes with a story at ZDNet describing how it's getting easier to use GPU processing against passwords once considered quite strong.
'Take a cheap GPU (like the Radeon HD 5770) and the free GPU-powered password busting tool called 'ighashgpu' and you have yourself a lean, mean password busting machine. How lean and mean? Working against NTLM login passwords, a password of 'fjR8n' can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds, at a rate of 9.8 million password guesses per second. On the GPU, it takes less than a second at a rate of 3.3 billion passwords per second. Increase the password to 6 characters (pYDbL6), and the CPU takes 1 hour 30 minutes versus only four seconds on the GPU. Go further to 7 characters (fh0GH5h), and the CPU would grind along for 4 days, versus a frankly worrying 17 minutes 30 seconds for the GPU.'
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Thursday, May 05, 2011
Review: D-Link EBR-2310 wired router
The D-Link EBR-2310 has a nice black and silver rounded rectangular form factor that fits well on shelves or wall mountings. The RJ45 jacks hold ethernet cables in a secure and yet convenient to unplug manner.
That's all I have nice to say about it.
20 minutes after setting up the router, it walked down the hall, going from office to office kicking every user in the nuts and then shooting them in the head with a .45 ACP one after another.
Ok, that's not true, but it would have been less of a pain in the ass than what it DID do. Namely, go autistic every time more than 2 users attempted to transfer anything more complicated than an ICMP ping at the same time. Namely, increase latency by at least 300ms on all traffic. Namely, bring our internet connection and all critical systems to their knees, crippling our email, audio streams, and other must-have activities. It literally took me a week huddled in a dark, hot server closet over an eerily glowing sniffer to figure out there was absolutely nothing on our network that should be causing our problems.
We just got an absolutely crap router is all. Kind of sad. D-Link was never exactly top shelf, but its latest generation of products (20 minutes research online revealed many other people with the same experience on the entire suite of d-link wired and wireless routers currently on the shelves) seem to simply not be up to the task of actually... routing traffic. Which is... you know... kind of what you buy a router FOR.
So, unless you're the kind of net admin who likes the feeling of a weed whacker shoved up their backside and cranked to full speed, I would recommend you avoid the EBR-2310. If you ARE that kind of admin, dear god for the love of all that is good and holy get some counseling.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Accurate Math in Processors may not be important
At least not for certain tasks, such as rendering video, even of 3D environments.
An interesting bit over at Kotaku.
"The difference between the low-precision and the standard arithmetic was trivial," Shaw says. "It was about 14 pixels out of a million, averaged over many, many frames of video." "No human could see any of that," Bates adds.
Why is this a big thing? Because apparently, you can fit 1000 low precision cores in the space where 12 normal cores would go.
Nice. Read Full Article
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Another for the "maybe if I win the lotto" wishlist
From Kotaku
Man, I'd love to give this a shot... but it's 200 bucks just for the glasses, and on top of that you need a monitor that can run at 120hz... which then means you need enough video card power to run at 120fps I am guessing. According to their system requirements, my 8800 comes in right at the very bottom of their "cards badass enough to do this" list... but something tells me it wouldn't work quite right.
Ah well. C'est la vie de la technologie.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Best Monitor Deal Ever.
Until the end of the month, Dell is selling 22 inch widescreen monitor E2210H for $169. If you need a bigger/wider monitor or have been looking to upgrade from a CRT to an LCD, THE TIME IS NOW! This is the best deal I've yet seen for a monitor of this size.
Read Full Article
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Don't Buy Cyber Acoustics
My headset died the other night. I really liked it, it was a big HP headset with boom mic and bass boost vibration. Not only did stuff sound really good through it, the microphone was top notch. Anyway, a few too many yanks of the cord and now it's got a short in it, so I went to Office Depot to get a new headset.
Unfortunately my HP headset was discontinued (I got it on clearance), and looking at the choices I could get something that looked similar for $50, or I could get the cyber-acoustics standard model for 20 bucks. The miser in me did the math and I grabbed the 20 dollar headphones.
Ugh, these things are awful. They're uncomfortable, they feel flimsy, and they even make my voice sound tinny (and I'm annoyed by tinny voices on Ventrilo, so I am sure not going to become one).
I've gone through this song and dance twice before I think... you would think I would remember, but somehow it's never until I get the thing home and plug it in, and experience the RAGE that I remember, oh yeah, Cyber Acoustics is shit, why did I buy this?!
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
NVIDIA Drivers & UT3 PhysX Pack
From Bluesnews.com -
NVIDIA's Force Within Downloads Page now offers the promised release of their PhysX GeForce "power pack" for Unreal Tournament 3 along with the nver version 177.83 GeForce graphics drivers that enable PhysX physics processing on 8-series and later GPUs. The bundle includes the new graphiucs derivers, the UT3 PhysX mod, a 30-day trial of a Badaboom video transcoding beta, the full version of Warmonger, The Great Kulu tech demo, a fluids tech demo, sneak peak demos for the Nurien social networking program and a first-person shooter called Metal Knight Zero, and a folding@home client. Here's word on the PhysX pack for UT3:
Read Full ArticleOwners of a NVIDIA® GeForce® 8 series or later graphics card with a full version of Unreal Tournament 3 have the unique opportunity to tear up additional levels of Unreal Tournament 3 through some exclusive NVIDIA® PhysX™ technology features. The PhysX Mod offers three new levels of environmental destruction including destructible walls, floors, walkways, rooftops and new weapons. New levels include: Heat Ray, Lighthouse & Tornado The UT3 PhysX Mod Pack requires a full version of Unreal Tournament 3 - It is not a stand-alone title. Make sure to enable "Hardware Physics" under Video Settings in the UT3 settings.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Wireless Wii Keyboard from Logitech
As the Wii passes the XB360 in ownership, a new peripheral comes to draw even more gamers away from PCs and into console exclusivity...
source
Imagine the possibilities once the software starts to take advantage of the versatility of the keyboard with the organic control nature of the wiimote. Heck, can a wireless mouse be too far off?
Friday, June 20, 2008
DRAM on the Processor - interesting read
Check this out... the future coming?
Intel said that it was able to fine tune its DRAM design and hit a physical clock of 2 GHz using a 65 nm manufacturing process. The resulting 2T-DRAM offers a stunning bandwidth of 128 GB/s. If Intel is successful to take the clock speed up to the level of its QX9770/9775 processors, the bandwidth would climb to 204.8 GB/s. In other words: Intel would gain more than a 10x improvement over its current L2 cache technology. More importantly: This approach would completely change the programming model since there are no longer any concerns over cache misses.Read Full Article
Friday, May 16, 2008
Bad Day at Bandit Camp
So night before last, we had a bad thunderstorm. I wasn't worried, though, because all my computer equipment, even the speakers, the router, the modems (yes, plural) are all on surge protected battery backups... specifically, APC UPSes.
But there was a way in. I guess there's always a way in. My DSL modem was plugged directly into the phone jack. I guess I did this because I was worried about latency or signal degradation from going through the little "phone cord" surge protector sockets in the UPS... besides, how often does that happen?
Well, I've learned my lesson. 2 nights ago I had a surge come in through the phone line and cause me over $100 dollars of damage with probably more to follow later. Allow me to explain.
Regard the image below -
This is a quick scribble of the affected portion of my home network. The power spike came in through the phone jack, frying the DSL modem, frying both on-board gigabit ethernet adapters on the motherboard of my new gaming rig, continuing on to fry my wireless router, and through that frying the NIC in my fileserver and frying the cable modem feeding the wireless router. All dead. Thank goodness Verizon and the Cable company provided me with replacements in short order (next day, basically). I also had to go to the store and buy replacement network cards and a new router. I'm thinking I'm going to want to buy a new motherboard for my gaming rig as well, because even aside from the ethernet adapters who knows what else got fried on the motherboard that I don't know about yet and is just waiting to asplode? Sigh. Well, my DSL data cord is going through a surge protector now, I'll tell ya! Learned my lesson, I did.
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