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Misc Pics (25 Comments) (link)  Friday, 27-January-2012  13:48:39 (GMT +10) - by Agg Thanks to Andrew, Dan, Null Object, Skymaster and |AgB|deano this week! And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive. Friday Afternoon (11 Comments) (link)  Friday, 27-January-2012  13:23:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg Denis points out that the Macquarie Dictionary's voting for their Word of the Year 2011 closes at midnight tonight. Some good news from eBay: Australian casual sellers now pay no listing fees. As announced in September 2011, eBay has been trialling free insertion fees on single quantity items in any listing format for casual sellers, up to 30 listings per month. Following positive feedback, eBay is delighted to make this trial permanent, effective immediately. ArsTechnica checked out some big-time storage. The storage system backing Google's search engine has to be able to serve millions of data reads and writes daily from thousands of individual processes running on thousands of servers, can almost never be down for a backup or maintenance, and has to perpetually grow to accommodate the ever-expanding number of pages added by Google's Web-crawling robots. In total, Google processes over 20 petabytes of data per day. That's not something that Google could pull off with an off-the-shelf storage architecture. Toyota will be racing petrol-electric hybrid cars in the Le Mans 24h race this year, and they sound pretty good. The TS030s use a snazzy THS-R (Toyota Hybrid System - Racing) powertrain, featuring an all-new 3.4-litre normally aspirated V8 petrol engine and hybrid system with capacitor storage (whatever that means) and the oily stuff's hidden under a brand-spankers carbon fibre LMP1 chassis, which was developed and produced at Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne, Germany, where the complete car was assembled for the first time in preparation for testing. DVice report on plugging the internet into your brain. But fear not, future human batteries in training! Researchers from around the world are hard at work developing ways to mainline the virtual world directly into your brain. No middle man required. Here we present some of the coolest upcoming technology that will collapse the divide between meat and machine. If you've been irritated by your Corsair Vengeance 1500 headphones, SiliconAngel has some good news. I contacted Corsair, and without so much as another question, they sent me a set of leatherette earcup pads for the HS1 (model number: CA-HS1-EARPADS, lot No: 111904472) which, being exactly the same dimensions, fit perfectly. I've been using them for a couple of days now (the longest session without a break was around six hours) with no discomfort whatsoever :-) Forum Projects (1 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 26-January-2012  20:59:42 (GMT +10) - by Agg Catching up on more reviews and projects from people in the forums: windwithme checked out Corsair's 128GB SATA3 SSD Syvirus has a neat LANbox Lite project vcoleiro1 made a tiny arcade table VeritronX has an impressive tiny PC too while demon1300 has a monster WC tower and n3m3515 has an impressive PC and desk setup Statica made a DIY flash diffuser windwithme compared Phenom II X6 and FX-8120 and checked out the Intel Core i7-3960X Thursday Morning (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 26-January-2012  03:02:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg I hope you're having a great Australia Day! iXBTLabs have a 71-CPU roundup. The year 2011 has ended, so it's high time to sum up the results and see the general picture. If you're looking to upgrade, we hope this will make choosing a processor easier Schnappy spotted this video on the new Ubuntu HUD. Join us for a review of HUD - Ubuntu's intent driven interface. Neerav has a blog post about the intangibility of digital goods. When I "buy" an eBook from Amazon.com or you "buy" a song from iTunes we aren't actually buying anything at all. What we're doing is paying for the legal licensing right to read/listen to some bits of digital information on a limited number of compatible devices. Phoronix have some info on next-gen VIA hardware. The S3 Chrome 600 series / VIA VT3456 (VX11) still hasn't been officially announced, but here are some benchmarks of the forthcoming chipset from a VIA Nano quad-core system. AMD meanwhile announced their Q4 2011 results, about which PC Perspective have some thoughts. The company had gross revenue of $1.69 billion and had a net income loss of $177 million. That net income is not necessarily a bad result, but more on that later. Margins rose to 46%, which is still a far cry from Intel’s 65% for the past quarter. Gross revenue was up 2% from last year, which considering the marketplace and Intel’s dominance, is a solid win for AMD. OC3D checked out some fans from Prolima Tech. It's no coincidence that ProlimaTech, well known for their range of performance CPU and VGA cooling solutions, should also produce a range of fans. Here we take a look at the entire Vortex range, including the rather sexy looking Aluminium bladed 140mm model. APCMag have an editorial on the state of Net Neutrality. The fur has rarely flown as thick and fast as in the debate around net neutrality, a concept that has been batted around for years but gained significant traction last year when the US Federal Communications Commission introduced formal and binding net neutrality regulations on telecommunications providers in that country. Photography Gallery (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 25-January-2012  13:55:09 (GMT +10) - by Agg Here's a quick snapshot of what people are up to in our Photography Gallery forum. Wednesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 25-January-2012  02:38:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg Audio Visual: Lenovo ThinkVision LT1421 Portable USB Monitor on LegitReviews. GE Chic 13 inch On-Lap Monitor on TechWareLabs. Bayan Audio Bayan 7 Speaker Dock on Tech-Reviews. Sennheiser PC 320 G4ME Headset on HWHeaven. Fujifilm FinePix F600EXR on TechReviewSource. ASUS O!Play Mini Plus on Guru3D. TekNmotion Yapster Universal Headset on OCClub. Power Supply: Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 800W on eTeknix. First Look: Corsair Individual Sleeved Modular PSU Cables on LegitReviews. Portable & Prebuilt: HP Envy 15 (Early 2012) notebook on TechReviewSource. HP Touchsmart 520 All-in-One PC on HotHardware. Kupa X11 Windows Tablet With 128GB SSD on TheSSDReview. Video Cards: ASUS HD 7970 on TBreak. Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB Super Overclock on PCPerspective. HIS Radeon HD 6570 IceQ (1GB GDDR3) on FunkyKit. Galaxy GeForce GT 440 2GB on NeoSeeker. First Look: ASUS Radeon HD 7970 DirectCU II Top on LegitReviews. Input Etc: QPAD MK-Series Mechanical Keyboards (85, 80 and 50) on Metku. Epic Gear Hybrid Pad Mouse mat on TechPowerUp. Corsair Vengeance K90 Keyboard on OC3D. Enermax Briskie Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo on HWHeaven. Misc: NewerTech iSesamo Repair Tool on TestFreaks. Belkin SURF N150 Wireless Adapter on TBreak. Kingston HyperX Genesis 8GB DDR3 1600 Memory Kit on LegitReviews. Tuesday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 24-January-2012  23:54:19 (GMT +10) - by Agg Thanks for the birthday wishes! :) Motherboard & CPU: Gigabyte X79 UD3 on NinjaLane. Gigabyte GA-X79-UD7: Mainboard for LGA 2011 CPUs Overclocking on XbitLabs. Cooling: Arctic Accelero XTREME Plus II VGA cooler on XtremeComputing. Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler on XbitLabs. Maingear Phase Changing Thermal Material - Epic T1000 on LegitReviews. Storage: Samsung 830 Series 128GB Solid State Drive on Tweaktown. Silicon Power Diamond D10 USB 3.0 750GB 2.5-inch Portable Hard Drive on ThinkComputers. Asus DRW-24B3LT SATA DVD-RW Drive on Tweaknews. Silicon Power Velox V30 SATA 3 240GB SSD on TheSSDReview. OWC DIY Solid State Drive Upgrade Kit on CircuitRemix. Zalman F1 120 GB Solid State Drive on XbitLabs. Cases: SilverStone SST-GD06B HTPC Enclosure on BenchmarkReviews. Xigmatek Asgard Pro on RBMods. Enermax Fulmo GT Big Tower on Tweaktown. Happy birthday, Agg! (63 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 24-January-2012  12:28:20 (GMT +10) - by Sciby That's right, another year has rolled around and it's Agg's birthday again! He's a little older, a little wiser, but he's still free of wrinkles and grey hairs (which makes me wonder about all his hair salon visits)... so join in us in wishing him a great day! Happy birthday, Aggster! Hope you have a good one. :) (And of course, happy birthday to our other forum members who were also born today: AdeptaCheese, Alfeh, Amfibius, flu!d, pigo1973, Cloxter, GTR27, Meowrrr, Pyro, Aaron_85 and YungWun) Elroc's Gaming Chair (3 Comments) (link)  Monday, 23-January-2012  21:21:22 (GMT +10) - by Agg We saw an impressive Man Cave earlier today - is this project from Elroc the ultimate chair? Click for the thread! Monday Night (5 Comments) (link)  Monday, 23-January-2012  21:13:09 (GMT +10) - by Agg If you're in Sydney, keep an eye out for Food Trucks doing the rounds. The 10 trucks taking the streets are mixing it up with the likes of burgers, tacos, burritos, spelt pizze, steamed pork buns, things on sticks, healthy breakfast foods and fresh juices as well as grilled meats and pulled pork sandwiches. The trucks will be making their way around Sydney and will be confirming their locations closer to feeding time via Facebook and Twitter. A few people sent in this Twitter photo which is apparently of 4KB of ancient IBM memory. 4K of IBM memory found in my grandpa's pole barn, captured in a 692K photo. Kudos to anyone who finds the model/etc of it. TorrentFreak have an interesting opinion piece on Australia's copyright colonialism. The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which would make ISPs responsible for the unauthorised file-sharing of their customers. In the wake of the Megaupload shutdown, people are considering what it means for legitimate users and if it shakes people's faith in cloud services. Does US territory now extend to cyberspace? According to the US Department of Justice, the New Zealand Police arrested MegaUpload staff in Auckland that were citizens of Finland, Germany and The Netherlands using warrants “requested by the United States.” A few people also sent in this video of a ringtone interrupting a classical soloist. Instead of stopping the music altogether (like what happened at a New York Philharmonic concert earlier this month when an iPhone’s “marimba” ringtone so blatantly interrupted the music that the conductor stopped the entire orchestra), Lukáš picked up on the Nokia noise, playing it more beautifully than we’ve ever heard. Royal Pingdom have some big numbers about the Internet in 2011. So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube? Games.on.net checked out a new Karting sim from an Australian developer. The game will eschew arcade antics and instead deliver in-depth, serious karting action for fans of the sport. Griffin has been working away on the game for over five years now, but with KartSim approaching its beta release, we figured it was time to have a look at this promising independent project.

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