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Misc Pics (30 Comments) (link)
Friday, 6-December-2013 02:19:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to mpot, Sciby and Hoff 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 (3 Comments) (link)
Friday, 6-December-2013 02:16:50 (GMT +10) - by Agg

A couple of days ago, the last five analogue TV stations in Sydney shut down for good. On 3 December 2013, Sydney and surrounding areas highlighted in purple will switch off their analog TV signals and switch to digital-only TV. Here's a YouTube video showing the last few seconds of broadcasting. Only Channel 7 made an effort, it seems!

There's been another big password theft - but this time it was client-side. The massive data breach was a result of keylogging software maliciously installed on an untold number of computers around the world, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trustwave said. The virus was capturing log-in credentials for key websites over the past month and sending those usernames and passwords to a server controlled by the hackers.

Tech Report investigated claims that retail R9 290X cards seem to be slower than press samples. Is this really a thing? Are the Radeon R9 290X cards shipping to consumers really slower than the review units sent to the press? Well, let's see what we can find. They now have an answer from AMD. Based on feedback from the enthusiast community, we’ve implemented an all new PowerTune mechanism in the AMD Radeon R9 290 series that exploits the full capability of the individual GPUs rather than clamping performance to a least-common-denominator type of capability level.

Bathurst fans will want to see this comparison video between Gran Turismo 6 and the real world. Australian racing fans had been clamouring for years for Bathurst to appear on a racing game of note. Now two have come along at once. Forza Motorsport 5 has been in the wild for a couple of weeks now, but Gran Turismo’s version is just about to hit stores. This comparison video between Bathurstreal life and its virtual equivalent is ridiculous.

Here's a video from the Internet Governance Forum back in October, where John Selby talks about throwing out preconceptions about Cybersecurity.

Friday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 5-December-2013 20:14:12 (GMT +10) - by booj

Motherboards & CPUs:
Asus A88X-PRO on Hardware Secrets.
MSI Z87 Motherboard Roundup on Hot Hardware.
Gigabyte G1.Sniper 5 Motherboard on Techgage.

Graphics Cards:
HIS R7 250 iCooler Boost Clock 1GB on Madshrimps.
VisionTek Radeon R7 260X 2GB on TweakTown.
GeForce GTX 760 SLI vs GTX 780 Ti on ocaholic.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti vs AMD Radeon R9 290X at 4K Ultra HD on Legit Reviews.

Storage:
Toshiba PX02SS 12Gbps SAS Enterprise SSD Review (400GB) on The SSD Review.
WD Black² Dual Drive on Legion Hardware.
Western Digital My Cloud 2TB on eTeknix.
Adata DashDrive HV620 External HDD on Benchmark Reviews.

Input etc:
Func KB-460 Gaming Keyboard on techPowerUp.
Func KB-460 Gaming Keyboard on Guru3D.
Ducky 2108S Zero Cherry MX Brown Mechanical Keyboard on eTeknix.

Cooling:
Thermaltake Massive 14 Notebook Cooler on Hardware Asylum.
Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler on OCC.
Titan Master USB Fan on OCC.

Audio:
Corsair Vengeance 1400 Gaming Headset on Legit Reviews.
Cooler Master Storm Ceres 300 Headset on PureOverclock.
SteelSeries H Wireless Headset on LanOC.
Sonos PLAY:1 Wireless Speakers on MegaTechNews.
Audioengine 2+ (A2+) Powered Desktop Speakers on Custom PC Review.

Misc:
IN WIN 904 Mid Tower Case on Vortez.
Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP 2x 8 GB 1600 MHz C9 Memory on techPowerUp.

Cancer Petition (5 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 5-December-2013 00:55:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg

A few people pointed out that OCAU member Supersize is doing it tough, with his wife having a rare type of cancer. The strange thing is that there is an extended delay for surgery which, although not without its own issues, can save people's lives in cases like this. This is partly due to a recent change to interstate patient transfers and a limit on number of operations. NSW Health Minister, Mrs Jillian Skinner said on 15th October 2013 that "Until recently patients were also being accepted from interstate and overseas, but that practice has now stopped." There are a limited number of doctors in Australia that can perform this surgery. Hospitals with experienced doctors, like the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, have waiting lists compounded by a limit to the number of surgeries they are able to perform, they perform only 12 a year.

So, there's an online petition to change the system and hopefully save more lives. More info on Facebook, this website and of course this OCAU thread.

Interesting Forum Threads (0 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 4-December-2013 09:55:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's a snapshot of what's going on in some of the forums. You can also find new interesting things you might have missed via the Who's Online page, the New Posts page and the Live forum view. Also try the Today's Posts link (find it on the Quick Links menu) and the handy Who Quoted Me? feature.

Anyone else feeling a bit nostalgic about overclocking? in Overclocking & Hardware.
OMFG Water Cooling gone WRONG! in Extreme and Water Cooling.
Classic G15 Keyboard Revival in Modding.
DIY Solar panel setup on a budget in Hobby Engineering.
Electrolysis - Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen in Hobby Engineering.
Best basic 3d printer (for kids) in Hobby Engineering.
Business PC naming schemes in Business & Enterprise Computing.
Creating a modern Mac environment in Business & Enterprise Computing.
Site to stop NBN turning into insulation batts debacle in Networking, Telephony & Internet.
OS X Mavericks for Free in Apple Desktop Hardware / Software.
Intel Xeon Phi co-processor (GPGPU) in Intel x86 CPUs and chipsets.
AMD 2014 Lines in AMD x86 CPUs and chipsets.
Should AMD build a NUC alternative? in AMD x86 CPUs and chipsets.
Have I committed some photographer faux pas? in Photography.
Aussie spider warning - I love my job in Photography Gallery.
Calgary Stampede Snacks in Geek Food.
Recipes to cook on a date! in Geek Food.
World's strongest beer contains 67.5% alcohol in Geek Grog & Homebrew.
Port Barrel in Geek Grog & Homebrew.
RF Safe-Stop shuts down car engines with radio pulse in Motoring.
Tesla's Worst Nightmare Sparked as Car Catches Fire in Motoring.
Hypothetical: Indonesia attempts to invade Australia in Current Events.

Wednesday Evening (5 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 4-December-2013 08:55:41 (GMT +10) - by Agg

With Amazon's drone-delivery announcement (the marketing move of the year, it seems), it's no surprise that UPS and others might have similar ideas. FedEx founder Fred Smith has spoken repeatedly about his desire to move to a fleet of unmanned aircraft, something he believes could generate major cost savings. The impediment so far has been regulators. "We have all this stuff working in the lab right now, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel," remarks Guinn.

Asher meanwhile spotted this drone-seeking drone. Serial hacker Samy Kamkar has released all the hardware and software specifications that hobbyists need to build an aerial drone that seeks out other drones in the air, hacks them, and turns them into conscripted army of unmanned vehicles under the attacker's control.

A leaked roadmap seems to suggest AMD might exit the CPU business to focus on APUs. We'd feared something like this would happen for some time now, but leaked AMD product roadmaps confirmed it that AMD FX "Vishera" is the last line of CPUs from AMD. The company will only focus on APUs from here onward, and at the very most, one could expect CPU core counts to go up from their current quad-core stale-meat since A-series "Llano," which will continue into the 2014 A-Series "Kaveri," too. Well, a grain of salt required until anything official is announced.

A new ad for the Hobbit film includes blueprints to 3D print your own props. While the ads offer standard fare like links to buy tickets and check out movie trailers, there's one particularly clever component to the campaign — viewers will be able to download 3D-printing blueprints for the Key of Erebor, a prop that should feature prominently in the second part of the Hobbit film trilogy.

John Selby contributed towards this SMH article about giving away too much on social media. An estimated 12 million Australians regularly use social media to update friends, family and followers. What many don’t realise is that tweets, posts and images are read, analysed and stored by the brands they are talking about. Social media has become big business for advertisers, helping them find ‘‘brand advocates’’ and measure opinions.

Phoronix have a 27-way NVIDIA/AMD GPU Linux roundup. Twenty-seven different AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards were tested over the past week using the latest binary Linux drivers: AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta v9.4 and NVIDIA 331.20. All testing happened from an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system running at 4.40GHz and with Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 using the mainline Linux 3.12 kernel.

More space stuff from BlueRaven: Gamma Ray burst event believed to be "birth of a black hole" captured by Los Alamos National Laboratories robotic & computer-guided RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response) system. More from Los Alamos National Laboratory here.

IntelInside sent in this story about Windows 8's lack of adoption. In the past month, Windows 8's market-share growth of 0.05 per cent was actually significantly lower than that of Windows 7 (0.22 per cent). In other words, Windows 8 is actually falling farther behind its own four-year-old predecessor even today.

Wednesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 4-December-2013 03:19:54 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Cooling:
Titan Dragonfly 4 CPU cooler on OCClub.
Titan Dragonfly 4 CPU Cooler on PureOC.
Noctua NH-D14 CPU Cooler on PCPerspective.

Video Cards:
HIS Radeon R9 270 IceQ X2 2GB on Tweaktown.
PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ 2 GB on TechPowerUp.
Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X OC on LegitReviews.

Power Supply:
Corsair CS650M on HWHeaven.
Fractal Design Tesla R2 650W on LegitReviews.

Input Etc:
CM Storm Power-RX mousepad on OCaholic.
Corsair Vengeance K95 keyboard on Guru3D.
ROCCAT Apuri Active USB-Hub with Mouse Bungee on Tweaktown.
ROCCAT Ryos MK Glow Illuminated Gaming Mechanical Keyboard on OCClub.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Acer C720 Chromebook on HotHardware.
Lenovo Erazer X700 Gaming Desktop PC on TechSpot.

Storage:
Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS on Tweaktown.
QNAP TS-470 Network Attached Storage on APHNetworks.

Misc:
Biostar Z87X 3D Motherboard on Bjorn3D.
Noontec Zoro HD Fashion Hi-Fi Headphones on NikKTech.

Tuesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Monday, 2-December-2013 21:48:18 (GMT +10) - by booj

Motherboards & CPUs:
AMD A10-5800K vs A10-6800K Gaming-Performance on ocaholic.
Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H on ThinkComputers.

Graphics Cards:
Asus R9 270X DC II TOP 2 GB on techPowerUp.
Asus R9 280X DirectCU II TOP 3GB on TweakTown.

Storage:
Lexar JumpDrive P10 32 GB USB 3.0 on techPowerUp.
Seagate Wireless Plus 1 TB External HDD on Hardware Secrets.
Transcend ESD200 Portable USB 3.0 SSD on TweakTown.
Thecus N2560 NAS Server on NikKTech.
Adata DashDrive Choice HC630 500GB External HDD on TweakTown.
Corsair Flash Voyager GS 128GB on Vortez.
VisionTek Data Fusion PCIe SSD Review (480GB) on The SSD Review.

Cases:
BitFenix Prodigy M mATX on Benchmark Reviews.
Corsair Graphite 230T Mid Tower on Legit Reviews.

Cooling:
Cooler Master Nepton 280L AIO Liquid CPU Cooler on TweakTown.
Noctua NH-U14S CPU Heatsink on Frostytech.
Corsair Hydro Series H75 on Vortez.
Zalman Reserator 3 MAX Ultimate Liquid CPU Cooler on TweakTown.

Audio:
MP4Nation Brainwavz HM9 Headphones on techPowerUp.
Razer Kraken Forged Edition Headphones on Custom PC Review.
Sennheiser G4ME Zero Gaming Headset (Video Review) on HardwareHeaven.
SteelSeries 5Hv3 Gaming Headset on NikKTech.
Diamond Xtreme Sound 7.1 XS71HD Soundcard on HCW.

Portable & Mobile:
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition Tablet on HotHardware.
Amazon Kindle Paperwhite E-reader on Benchmark Reviews.
Nvidia Shield on OCC.

Misc:
Gigabyte Aivia Uranium Wireless Gaming Mouse and Macro Station (Video Review) on HardwareHeaven.
Seasonic Platinum Series SS-660XP2 PSU on ocaholic.

Tuesday Morning (6 Comments) (link)
Monday, 2-December-2013 13:49:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Amazon have unveiled Prime Air, which would have your order arrive at your door by unmanned drone in 30 minutes. It's not April 1st, is it? No, but it's a fair way off, still. Bezos told the news program he anticipates the project could be rolled out within the next four to five years (with the timing impacted by the FAA's ever evolving approach to drone regulation). More here and a video here, thanks asher.

TheReg flash back to the Telecom Australia Computerphone. In early 1980s Australia if you wanted a home computer, chances are you were a Commodore user, a TRS-80 user or … a Commodore user. Famous British micros from the likes of Sinclair and Oric never really got a foothold down under, leaving the field to the Vic 20, C64 and the occasional local contender like Microbee.

DigitalTrends meanwhile look at some weird peripherals from the past. If you’re like most people, everything you do on your computer is controlled by a keyboard and a mouse. This setup has worked well for over three decades, but it isn’t the only way to go. Ergonomic needs and computer games that need subtle inputs have encouraged some firms to come up with some pretty bizarre peripherals over the years. Some work well. Others don’t. And one is simply disturbing.

ForeignPolicy have an article about Stuxnet's secret twin. Three years after it was discovered, Stuxnet, the first publicly disclosed cyberweapon, continues to baffle military strategists, computer security experts, political decision-makers, and the general public. A comfortable narrative has formed around the weapon: how it attacked the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz, how it was designed to be undiscoverable, how it escaped from Natanz against its creators' wishes. Major elements of that story are either incorrect or incomplete.

More worrying is the fact that nuclear passwords were simple, deliberately. Today I found out that during the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on a rapid response to an attack on American soil, that to minimize any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear missile, for nearly two decades they intentionally set the launch codes at every silo in the US to 8 zeroes.

Bing have unveiled the top global searches of 2013.. by people who use Bing. Ahem. Ladies appeared to rule 2013, since a woman was the most-searched person of the year in eight of the 12 participating countries around the world — Beyoncé reigned in the U.S., while Miley Cyrus’ highly publicized twerking made her the top-searched person in both Australia and Canada.

The fan film Star Wars Downunder has been released in full.

Misc Pics (27 Comments) (link)
Friday, 29-November-2013 03:01:43 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Friday again!

And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.

Friday Afternoon (0 Comments) (link)
Friday, 29-November-2013 03:00:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg

OCZ have been in trouble for a while, but they have finally filed for bankruptcy now. Apparently Toshiba have put in an offer for their assets. The Company has received an offer from Toshiba Corporation to acquire substantially all of the Company's assets in a bankruptcy proceeding. The parties have substantially completed negotiations on an asset purchase agreement and OCZ believes that all the material terms have been agreed to. Coverage on Slashdot and PC Authority, thanks PP and Sniper.

Ouch - a UK man has thrown out a hard drive, forgetting it had 7,500 bitcoins on it. Buried somewhere under four feet of mud and rubbish, in the Docksway landfill site near Newport, Wales, in a space about the size of a football pitch is a computer hard drive worth more than £4m. It belonged to James Howells, who threw it out when he was clearing up his desk in mid-summer and discovered the part, rescued from a defunct Dell laptop. He found it in a drawer and put it in a bin.

C|Net have listed their 2013 Tech Turkeys - it is Thanksgiving over there, after all.

Some spacey stuff from BlueRaven: Awesome photo of supernova cloud and high-emission "star factory" nebula in the same shot of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Also some cool timewasters in the form of interactive solar system and comet ISON trajectory models. Lots of options to play with. Nice music too. Links posted in the General Astronomy/Space thread.

Friday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 28-November-2013 21:28:00 (GMT +10) - by booj

Graphics Cards:
XFX R7 240 and R7 250 vs GT 640 and GT 630 on HardwareHeaven.
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270X WF OC on Madshrimps.
GeForce GTX 760 SLI vs GTX 780 on ocaholic.
Asus Radeon R9 270 DirectCU II OC on ocaholic.

Storage:
Corsair Flash Voyager Slider 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive on TweakTown.
Western Digital Red (WD40EFRX) 4 TB NAS HDD on TechARP.
OCZ Vector 150 240GB on Legion Hardware.
Western Digital WD My Cloud on Megatechnews.

Cases:
Aerocool GT-S Black Edition on techPowerUp.
NZXT Source 530 on OCC.

Cooling:
Antec KUHLER H2O 1250 on Vortez.
SilverStone Tundra TD02 AIO CPU Cooler on PureOverclock.
Thermalright AXP-100 CPU Cooler on LanOC.

Audio:
Sennheiser Presence Bluetooth HD Headset on TechnologyX.
CM Storm Pulse-R Headset on ocaholic.
Corsair Vengeance 2100 Wireless Dolby 7.1 Gaming Headset (Video Review) on HardwareHeaven.

Input etc:
Gigabyte Aivia Uranium Mouse on PureOverclock.
Max Keyboard Blackbird Tenkeyless Mechanical Gaming Keyboard on Custom PC Review.
CM Storm Reaper Mouse on Ocaholic.

Networking:
Rosewill RPLC-200PKIT Powerline Adapter Kit on Benchmark Reviews.
Netgear R6250 Dual Band Gigabit Smart WiFi Router on eTeknix.

Mobile:
Apple iPad mini Retina on Techspot.
LG G2 Smartphone on TweakTown.

Misc:
Compro TN600W IP Wifi Camera on Vortez.
ASRock Z87 Fatal1ty Killer motherboard on Guru3D.

Friday Morning (6 Comments) (link)
Thursday, 28-November-2013 14:12:31 (GMT +10) - by Grec

Something that I'm looking forward to in the new year - The return of Cicada 3301. For the past two years, a mysterious online organization has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolvable problems. But to what end?

Not sure who would wear a vibrating "Smartwig" - But Sony patented the idea just in case. The hair-raising design, released by the US Patent, is "a wearable computing device, comprising of a wig" that has sensors "GPS", "tactile feedback" and the ability to communicate wirelessly to computing devices.

And whilst we're on the topic of odd "Smart Objects", here's a tongue stud that can be used to place phone calls, play video games and drive wheelchairs. The new device, a barbell-shaped titanium ring, has a magnetic field that changes when the tongue is moved. The changes are picked up by sensors on a headset and relayed to an iPod connected to a wheelchair or computer.

Researchers at ETH Zurich, a university of science and technology, have teleported information from one end of a superconducting circuit to another. The experiment has two unusual features: 1) It is the first time quantum teleportation was conducted over a circuit without the use of a powerful laser beam; and 2) the information was relayed making use of the laws of quantum physics rather than classical physics.

The suns been awfully quiet of late, with sunspots dropping an awful lot of late. Solar storms can interrupt telecommunications and electronic networks on Earth. Sunspot activity can also have an impact on the Earth's climate.

Science has proven that gaming can actually improve your reactions, memory and social skills. An experiment at the University of California found a game called NeuroRacer resulted in "60- to 85-year-old subjects improved to the point that they outperformed 20-year-old subjects who had never played it before." This new found ability to upgrade your ability to juggle more than one task could help you become more efficient when you work, shop or are around the home. All gaming has given me is an extra few kilos and glasses.

And speaking of gaming, for anyone having issues winning the significant other over with buying a Xbox 1 - Microsoft has your back with a pre-drafted letter.

Thursday Morning (11 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 27-November-2013 15:44:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg

This Christmas won't be affected by a lower GST threshhold. The decision to lower the GST-threshold on imported goods worth less than $1000 has been pushed back until March next year. That means Christmas presents bought online this year from overseas will not be subject to the tax.

Newegg have lost their patent dispute - although there'll no doubt be an appeal. Newegg, an online retailer that has made a name for itself fighting the non-practicing patent holders sometimes called "patent trolls," sits on the losing end of a lawsuit tonight. An eight-person jury returned to court shortly after 7:00pm and found that the company infringed all four asserted claims of a patent owned by TQP Development, a company owned by patent enforcement expert Erich Spangenberg.

Futuremark have responded to the benchmark shenanigans reported on a few months ago, and have removed Samsung and HTC from their listings. Delisted devices are stripped of their rank and scores. In this instance, several Samsung and HTC devices are accused of breaking Futuremark's benchmarking rules. Futuremark didn't elaborate on which specific rule(s) these devices broke, but a look at the company's benchmarking policies reveals that hardware makers aren't allowed to make optimizations specific to 3DMark, nor are platforms allowed to detect the launch of the benchmark executable (unless it's needed to enable multi-GPU and/or there's a known conflict that would prevent it from running).

We linked some reviews earlier but here's Western Digital's page on their new dual SSD+HDD drive. Introducing WD Black², the world's first 2.5-inch dual drive storage solution. The WD Black² dual drive is a completely new approach in a compromised solid-state and hybrid storage market. Finally you can have the speed of an SSD that you want and the capacity of a hard drive that you need in your notebook or all-in-one PC.

Here's an incredbile bitcoin mining setup in Hong Kong. HK’s new bitcoin farm involves one meter high transparent glass tanks, copper piping, cooling machines and computer boards soaked in bubbling 3M cooling liquid. LED lights flash constantly, though the facility is cool, safe and quiet.

Wednesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 27-November-2013 01:19:29 (GMT +10) - by booj

Motherboards & CPUs:
ECS GANK Drone Z87H3-A3X L337 on Legit Reviews.
ASRock Fatal1ty Z87 Killer on Hardware Secrets.
Gigabyte Z87X-UD5 TH on Hardware Asylum.

Graphics Cards:
HIS R9 270X IceQ X² Turbo Boost 2 GB on techPowerUp.
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti SC SuperClocked ACX on Guru3D.

Storage:
Adata DashDrive Elite UE700 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive on APH Networks.
Corsair Flash Voyager LS 128GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive on TweakTown.
Western Digital Black^2 120GB SSD + 1TB HD Dual-Drive on Anandtech.
Western Digital Black^2 120GB SSD + 1TB HD Dual-Drive on LanOC.
Western Digital Black^2 120GB SSD + 1TB HD Dual-Drive on Techware Labs.
Western Digital Black^2 120GB SSD + 1TB HD Dual-Drive on PC Perspective.
Buffalo TeraStation 5400 NAS on Computing on Demand.

Cases:
NZXT Source 530 Full Tower on Neoseeker.
Rosewill Galaxy-03 Mid-Tower on Legit Reviews.
Logic Supply LGX ML300 Fanless NUC on Silent PC Review.

Power Supplies:
Antec High Current Gamer 750W on eTeknix.
Corsair RM Series 650 W on techPowerUp.
Fractal Design Integra R2 750W on ocaholic.

Audio:
Tesoro Kuven Devil 7.1 Virtual Gaming Headset (Video Review) on HardwareHeaven.
Attitude One Tunguska 7.1 Virtual Surround USB Gaming Headset on NikKTech.
Arctic S113BT Portable Bluetooth Speaker on Funky Kit.
Noisehush i7 Noise Canceling Headphones on PureOverclock.

Networking:
Amped Wireless RTA15 High Power Dual Band 802.11AC Router on TweakTown.
D-Link DIR-868L Dual Band AC1750 Wireless Router on TweakTown.

Tablets:
Apple iPad Air on HotHardware.
Lenovo Yoga Android Tablet on Benchmark Reviews.

Misc:
Scythe Kaze Chrono Fan controller on Funky Kit.
Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex TV HD Media Player on PC Stats.
ADATA XPG v1.0 Black DDR3-1600 CL9 Memory Kit on OCIA.

Wednesday Morning (2 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 26-November-2013 22:12:54 (GMT +10) - by Grec

A drone hit the Sydney Harbor bridge yesterday that was launched by British man Edward Prescott. An edited version of the video uploaded to YouTube by Mr Prescott shows that the drone's camera was rolling the entire time it flew through and then into the Harbor Bridge, landed on a railway line, was picked up by Sydney Trains crew, placed in the train and taken back to their office.

Researchers over at the New York University have developed a small flying machine that flies through the air like a Jellyfish, intended for monitoring traffic. The device has four wings arranged like flower petals, which pulsate up and down. Though it resembles the motion of the jellyfish in water, it is aerodynamically more similar to the flight of a moth. Its tiny motor is tethered to a power cord. The machine can fly and hover.

For all of the PlayStation fans out there, here's a rather clever stop motion video on the original PlayStation, comparing it to some new and old technologies.

A little while ago, a video about a homemade grenade with components you could buy AFTER having passed security in a Airport came to light - This time Evan Booth has made a blunderbuss.US computer technician Evan Booth has cobbled together an amateur arsenal in his spare time - and it is a deadly demonstration of the danger of a creative mind when applied to everyday objects. "If we're trying stop a terrorist threat at the airport," says Booth. "It's already too late."

An interesting discussion is underway in the US over whether or not to implement "Kill Switches" into mobile phones in the US. Led by a district attorney in San Francisco and attorney general in New York, law enforcement would like all smartphones to contain firmware that allows a consumer to "brick" a mobile that's lost or stolen. The largest mobile phone maker in the world, Samsung, is on board with the program, and a developer of kill-switch software has offered its program to Samsung for free.

CSIRO, the patent owners of WiFi, have some more bad news - The patents (As of the 26th of November) have expired meaning they no longer receive income from them. In 1992 a team of CSIRO scientists used radio-astronomy to solve the problem of radio waves bouncing off surfaces indoors, causing an echo that distorts the signal. The scientists built a fast chip that could transmit a signal while reducing the echo, a technology now used all over the world in WiFI.

If you've ever thought that your friends Instagram photos look good enough to eat, well now you can. Some Instagrams look good enough to eat, especially when they're glorious food photos. You could just pop them in your mouth. With a little assist from Boomf's marshmallow printing abilities, your Instagram-eating dreams could come true.

Tuesday Morning (9 Comments) (link)
Monday, 25-November-2013 13:13:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Virgin Galactic are accepting accepting bitcoins as payment for space flights. In a blog post, Branson explained that one passenger, a female flight attendant from Hawaii, has already purchased a Virgin Galactic ticket using bitcoins and he expects "many more to follow in her footsteps."

Mazzanet sent in this article about a patent battle which is worth it for this quote alone: "We've heard a good bit in this courtroom about public key encryption," said Albright. "Are you familiar with that? "Yes, I am," said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the biggest understatement of the trial. "And how is it that you're familiar with public key encryption?" "I invented it."

g@z is having a flashback to the Compucolor II, which I have to admit completely passed me by back in the day - I went VIC20, Amiga, PC. Anyway: An enthusiast in the US has set out to preserve what he can of the Compucolor II. He’s uploaded hundreds of programs and disk images that can be run on a java emulator of the Compucolor OS (FCS – File Control System) at and with the disk images. Some of the programs my dad wrote are up there I believe and I’m going to dig out the old collection and see what I can contribute to the project as I ended up with the entire Compucolor Users group of Victoria disk and newsletter library. Sounds like a job for the Retro Forum!

JC sent in this wooden table mod. The desk is made out of solid old-growth red wood. Not a knot anywhere. It came from a demolished hundred-year-old water tower.

PCPerspective tried improving the storage of the new PlayStation 4. The most dramatic change was seen in the AC IV testing, where the drop from HDD to SSHD was 19% while the drop from HDD to SSD was an impressive 32%. Clearly the SSD is the best option but we saw some interesting results in the SSHD benchmarks.

PCPerspective also consider how to build a PC from console-equivalent hardware. Education and hard work will reward those who build their own PCs, but not every bit of open source software will achieve the results that the tight integration of the Xbox One will offer casual users who are not interested in getting their hands dirty. The PC might not match the price/performance of the PS4 and the expectation is that Sony will improve the platform over the years with updates to more adequately match the Xbox in terms of media serving capabilities.

This cool road-zipper machine caught my eye recently. Commuters on Interstate 15 will have some company in between rush hour commutes. Caltrans is studying the durability and performance of its Barrier-Transfer Machines, also known as "zippers."

Monday Afternoon (12 Comments) (link)
Monday, 25-November-2013 04:01:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg

It's curtains for Winamp, with the venerable media player being shut down next month. Much-loved media player Winamp will shutter on December 20, 2013, the company has announced, with the AOL-owned software planning to cease all of the related web services and yank the official download. The news, quietly announced alongside version 5.66 of the software, ends fifteen years of the app being offered, with the Winamp team warning that anybody wanting a copy before it’s pulled should download soon.

Also making an exit is John Carmack, leaving id Software. This latest move comes after Carmack took on the role of head of technology at Oculus VR, which makes the buzzed-about Rift virtual reality headset. Though Willits essentially says that Id's always-strong technology development is on a steady course, Carmack's departure certainly marks the end of an era.

Der8auer has taken an AMD CPU to over 8GHz. Today, Der8auer from Team Germany is the first to go below the 9min 30sec mark on AMD. He accomplishes this with a CPU clocked at - and we advise you to sit down for this - 8026MHz. Yes! That's right! Over 8GHz SuperPI 32M stable! That is pretty darn impressive.

LG Australia are apparently investigating the smart TV spying claims from last week. But Phillip Anderson, head of public relations at LG Australia, told Fairfax in a statement on Wednesday: "LG Australia acknowledges the issues that have been identified in the UK. We take the claims very seriously and are currently investigating the situation at a local level."

Owen sent in this Google BBS. Ahh, it takes me back.

Monday Midday Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Monday, 25-November-2013 01:14:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Video Cards:
ASUS R9 270 Direct CU II OC 2 GB on TechPowerUp.
2560×1600: GeForce GTX 780 Ti vs Radeon R9 290X on BenchmarkReviews.
GeForce GTX 760 SLI vs GTX Titan on OCaholic.

Cooling:
Zalman Reserator 3 Max AIO Liquid CPU Cooler on eTeknix.
Antec Kühler H2O 920 CPU cooler on OCaholic.
Enermax Aeolus Vegas Notebook Cooler on PureOC.
Corsair H80i CPU cooler on LanOC.

Input Etc:
CM Storm Aluminium Keyboard, Mouse & Headset Round-up on eTeknix.
SteelSeries Sensei Fnatic Mouse on LanOC.
Mad Catz S.T.R.I.K.E. 3 Gaming Keyboard on NikKTech.

Audio Visual:
Avermedia Game Capture HD 2 on RBMods.
Creative Sound Blaster ZxR Sound Card on MadShrimps.
Creative Sound Blaster EVO ZxR on Vortez.
CM Storm Pitch In-ear Gaming Headset on TechPowerUp.
Acoustic Research ARS60 Speakers on PureOC.

Motherboard & CPU:
Intel Core i7-4770K vs 3770K vs 2600K Gaming-Performance on OCaholic.

Storage:
Thecus N2560 NAS on Vortez.
Thecus N4560 Four-Bay Consumer NAS on Tweaktown.
WD My Cloud Personal Cloud Server on HotHardware.
OCZ Deneva 2 R 200 GB eMLC SSD on OCaholic.
Corsair Flash Voyager GS 256GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive on Tweaktown.
Lexar JumpDrive M10 Secure 64GB Flash Drive on eTeknix.
OCZ Vertex 450 128GB SSD on NeoSeeker.
SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB RAID 0 SSD on Tweaktown.

Cases:
Enermax Fulmo ST Midi Tower on NikKTech.
BitFenix Phenom Micro-ATX on eTeknix.
Tranquil PC D33217GKE NUC Case on TechPowerUp.
Cooler Master Cosmos SE on TechPowerUp.
Fractal Design Arc XL High Airflow Full Tower on LegitReviews.

Power Supply:
NZXT Hale82 V2 550W White PSU on LegitReviews.
OCZ Fatal1ty 750W on Guru3D.
Be Quiet! Power Supply Cable Accessories on Tweaktown.

Portable & Prebuilt:
MSI All-in-One Gaming PC (AG2712) on HWHeaven.
EUROCOM Panther 5D High Performance Laptop on HWHeaven.
Sony Smartwatch 2 SW2 for Android Smartphones on MegaTechNews.

Misc Pics (23 Comments) (link)
Friday, 22-November-2013 03:14:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Thanks to Axeman and Matthew today!

And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.

Thursday Morning (5 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 20-November-2013 14:34:50 (GMT +10) - by Agg

If you're tired of negative Bitcoin headlines, here's some good news - the US Government has declared it a legal means of exchange. While not an official seal of approval, the hearing has given some legitimacy to a payment mechanism that has been associated with illegal activities even as it gains acceptance by the general public and investment community.

Oxford's word of 2013 is selfie, beating twerk - and as Australians we've only ourselves to blame. Oxford Dictionaries has named "selfie" - which had its humble beginnings in a post on ABC Online more than a decade ago - as its word of the year.

However, our copyright laws could use some work. DO you know that sharing a meme in this country makes you a criminal? That's right. Condescending Wonka, Li'll Bub and Ryan Gosling's hey girl are all crimes under Australian copyright law. In fact by sharing a YouTube video you could face five years in jail and a fine of $93,500.

AMD has a new supercomputer graphics card. With full support for PCI Express® 3.0 and optimized for use with the OpenCL™ compute programming language, the AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Edition GPU features ECC memory plus DirectGMA support allowing developers working with large models and assemblies to take advantage of the massively parallel processing capabilities of AMD GPUs based on the latest AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Edition GPU is slated for availability in Spring 2014.

Bill Gates has written a lengthy piece on Wired about how you can help improve the world. But if you take the long view, by almost any measure of progress we are living in history’s greatest era. Wars are becoming less frequent. Life expectancy has more than doubled in the past century. More children than ever are going to primary school. The world is better than it has ever been. But it is still not as good as we wish.

DDsD sent in this interesting development after the recent Adobe breach Facebook and other companies are using the leaked data to compare against their own password hashes and warn their own customers if their password was leaked by the other services. As I proffered in a follow-up comment on this story, Facebook and any other company can take any of the Adobe passwords that have already been guessed or figured out and simply hash those passwords with whatever one-way hashing mechanism(s) they use internally. After that, it’s just a matter of finding any overlapping email addresses that use the same password.

The surviving members of Monty Python are set to reunite in a new stage show. The group, whose work has been living on in the musical Spamalot (penned by Idle), was set to announce their comeback Thursday. But news was already circulating, with Idle tweeting Monday that fans should look out for a "big forthcoming news event." And The Sun newspaper splashed the news Tuesday with a front-page headline proclaiming "Monty Python Flies Again."

Callan noticed this LG TV which reports back to home base even when you ask it not to. How very 1984! It was at this point, I made an even more disturbing find within the packet data dumps. I noticed filenames were being posted to LG's servers and that these filenames were ones stored on my external USB hard drive. To demonstrate this, I created a mock avi file and copied it to a USB stick.

Wednesday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 20-November-2013 11:40:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Cases:
Phanteks Enthoo Primo on BenchmarkReviews.
Lian Li PC-A79 Aluminum Chassis on eTeknix.

Video Cards:
Powercolor Radeon R9-270X Devil on Bjorn3D.
AMD Radeon R9 290 Review On Linux on Phoronix.
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 4GB on LegitReviews.
Gigabyte Radeon R9 280X OC Edition on ThinkComputers.
PowerColor Devil R9 270X 2GB on CustomPCReview.
ASUS GeForce GTX 760 MARS on Guru3D.
HIS Radeon R9-290X on Guru3D.
ASUS ROG MARS 760 on OCaholic.

Input Etc:
ROCCAT Raivo Gaming Mousepad on NeoSeeker.
Mionix Avior 8200 Gaming Mouse on PureOC.
Logitech G510s Gaming Keyboard on OCClub.

Cooling:
Cooler Master V8 GTS CPU cooler on Vortez.
Cooler Master Nepton 280L CPU cooler on OCClub.

Motherboard & CPU:
BIOSTAR NM70I-1037U on MadShrimps.
Cooler Master Nepton 140XL cooler on Modders-Inc.
ASRock Z87 Extreme6 on eTeknix.

Storage:
Icy Dock FatCage MB155SP-B Drive Cage on Tweaktown.
LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i 6Gb/s 8-Port SATA+SAS ROC RAID Controller on NikKTech.
The Western Digital My Cloud EX4 on TechARP.
Seagate 600 Series 240GB RAID 0 SSD on Tweaktown.

Portable & Prebuilt:
Google Nexus 5 smartphone on TechSpot.
Apple iPad Air on TechSpot.
Google Nexus 5 on HotHardware.
Gigabyte Brix i5-4200 Haswell mini-PC on SOTechDesign.

Misc:
Microsoft Xbox One game console on HotHardware.
Hands-on with the BeagleBone Black, a 32-bit Micro Computer on Tweaktown.

Tuesday Night (11 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 19-November-2013 12:03:59 (GMT +10) - by Grec

Want free talk, text and data on your mobile phone? Sprints now offering just that, for a year - Catch is, you need to be a student... and in the USA. Once you're verified, your account will be credited for one year of unlimited talk and text, plus 1GB per month of data if you buy a smartphone, which Sprint says is a $70 per month value. If 1GB of data isn't enough for your studying -- or let's be real, social media -- needs, you can pay $10 per month for unlimited data.

So, there's an ad in the form of Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits with his legs resting on two trucks driving backwards. And another ad of cute kid in a Darth Vader outfit using "special powers" to unlock car doors. Don't forget that group of adorable babies dancing with adult versions of themselves - And somehow, these are some of the most effective advertisements. In the case of the new Van Damme ad, which has nearly 7.7 million YouTube views, the publicity will not only aid the overarching Volvo brand, but it could also sell more trucks, says Mediapost.com advertising columnist Barbara Lippert.

Bad news for Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones lovers - Or, at least, those who download it off the internet. Hundreds of thousands of Australians who illegally download the latest seasons of their favourite TV show would be engaging in a criminal act under the US proposal, critics said. The proposal was for an international trade deal called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Stargazers and doomsayers alike, rejoice! Comet ISON was discovered by amateur astronomers in Russia and Belarus in September last year. It will pass just 1.2 million km from the sun on November 29, and will pass even closer to earth on the 26th of the month. That's next Tuesday. 3. In the third scenario, which scientists really don't want because it would spoil all their fun, the comet is pulled into the sun. This is called a sun grazer, and pretty much means a harmless death for the comet. But the news is not all dull, because that would result in one seriously large explosion. Indeed, this could be the largest explosion ever observed by mankind, Astro Dave says.

Photographer Romain Veillon recently travelled to the deserts of Namibia, where he photographed the abandoned village of Kolmanskop - especially the parts that are slowly being consumed by waves of sand. Check out the photos here.

Looks like Apple may be dabbling in the 3D market, after having paid US$345 million for PrimeSense's 3D sensing technology. PrimeSense is perhaps best known as the company behind the technology that enabled Microsoft's Xbox Kinect. The sensing technology allows the game console to view a scene in three dimensions, so players can control a game using their body and physical movements.

Tuesday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 19-November-2013 05:22:01 (GMT +10) - by booj

Motherboards & CPUs:
Gigabyte G1.Killer Sniper 5 (Z87) on Legit Reviews.
X79 Charts: 18 Boards - ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition on ocaholic.
Intel Core i5-4670K vs 3570K vs 2500K Gaming-Performance on ocaholic.
Supermicro X10SAT Workstation Haswell Xeon Motherboard on TweakTown.

Graphics Cards:
HIS R9 270X IceQ x2 Turbo on Vortez.
MSI R9 270X Gaming on LanOC.

Storage:
SuperTalent Pico 32GB USB 3.0 Thumbdrive on Madshrimps.
Adata DashDrive Elite SE720 128GB External SSD on The SSD Review.
QNAP TS-470 4-Bay SMB NAS on TweakTown.
QNAP TS-670 6-bay SMB NAS on Madshrimps.
Western Digital Black 4TB 3.5" Consumer HDD (WD4003FZEX) on TweakTown.

Cooling:
Cooler Master Nepton 140XL Liquid CPU Cooler on TechnologyX.
Scythe Mugen 4 on techPowerUp.

Cases:
NZXT Source 530 Full Tower on Legit Reviews.
NZXT Source 530 Full Tower on TweakTown.
NZXT Source 530 Full Tower on Pure Overclock.
Silverstone ML05 mini-ITX HTPC case on Silent PC Review.
SilverStone Raven RV04 Computer Case on APH Networks.
Xigmatek Aquila Micro ATX on TechnologyX.

Power Supplies:
Be Quiet! Pure Power L8 500-Watt 80 PLUS Bronze on TweakTown.
be quiet! Pure Power L8 730W CM on ocaholic.
Fractal Design NEWTON R3 800w on techPowerUp.
Lepa MaxBron B800-MB on Hardware Asylum.

Networking:
Asus RT-AC56U Gigabit Router on LanOC.
Netgear R6250 Wireless AC Router on HardwareHeaven.
Buffalo AirStation Wireless AC866 USB Adapter (WI-U2-866D) on HardwareHeaven.

Audio:
TDK TREK A26 Ultra-Portable Wireless Speaker on NikKTech.
Tt eSPORTS CRONOS Gaming Headset on Neoseeker.

Monday Night (6 Comments) (link)
Monday, 18-November-2013 11:33:59 (GMT +10) - by Grec

The Playstation 4 launched yesterday, with some users ( .4% of shipped consoles according to Sony) complaining of broken HDMI cords, units in unusable condition, and various versions of the Red Light of Death. "Be assured we are investigating reported PS4 issues," the President of Worldwide Studios tweeted this morning. "The number is very small compared to shipped, we believe they are isolated incidents."

As the meme goes, no longer want to live on this planet anymore? Turns out, there could be a truckload of habitable planets out there. According to engadget's "Alt Week" as many as one in five sun-like stars have planets in the Goldilocks zone. About one in five sunlike stars observed by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has an Earth-size planet in the so-called habitable zone, where liquid water — and, potentially life — could exist, according to the new study. If these results apply elsewhere in the galaxy, the nearest such planet could be just 12 light-years away.

So, there's an interesting new motorcycle helmet with Google Glass-style heads-up display, rear-view camera, and Bluetooth implemented into the actual helmet for increasing rider safety on the road - Arguably both a good thing, and a bad thing. How can you pay attention to cars zipping about you, sometimes within inches of killing you, while flipping your eyes around to focus on a clear plastic box at the bottom of your field of vision? That's what I was considering on Thursday in the bright noontime sun as I slid on the Skully P1 and gently wiggled my glasses back into the helmet, one of three prototypes in existence.

Whilst we're on the subject of cameras in headgear, check out the new Google Glass 3D Printed Sunshade - Something you can make using your own 3d printer.One aspect of the Sunshade is that it obscures the light that tells you Google Glass is in use. You are now free as a bird to shoot whatever you like, whenever you like, and from whatever angle you can get your head around. Accused of encouraging sneakiness, Barrett repeated that his only motivation had been poor visibility during sunny days.

Something I've daydreamed about before but now seems to have become reality, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a device that can render digital 3D content physically using a projector, an Xbox Kinect sensor, 900 pins, linkages and actuators, and a computer. Dubbed a "dynamic shape display", the device, unlike a hologram, can render 3D content physically, so that users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. It can also interact with the physical world around it by, for example, moving objects, such as a ball, on its table’s surface. Remote participants in a video conference can also be displayed physically, allowing for what the MIT researchers call "a strong sense of presence" and the ability to interact physically at a distance.

The worlds fastest spy plane has been planned out to hopefully hit the sky by 2030. And by the worlds fastest, I mean six times the speed of sound – about 6760 km/h, or 113 kilometers a minute - That's Sydney to Melbourne in less than ten minutes. To reach such speeds, Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne, the companies said to be actively developing the plane, will have to create a new type of engine. Engines found in big commercial airliners can hit speeds up to two-and-a-half times the speed of sound before they're no longer efficient. Other engines keep their efficiency up to four times that speed, but getting to mach six will require a hybrid engine, one that uses a turbine when it's not going too fast, and a supersonic combustion ramjet when it's ready to move

You've probably all heard of Batkid by now - the alter-ego of five-year-old Miles, a super kid fighting leukemia. Make-A-Wish foundation pulled out all the stops for him when he said he wanted to be Batman for the day. A donated Lamborghini, one Riddler, Penguin, Police Commissioner, Batman and what looked like most of San Francisco all turned up to help him out.

Photography Gallery (1 Comments) (link)
Monday, 18-November-2013 10:04:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's a quick snapshot of what people are up to in our Photography Gallery forum.

Sunday Night Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Sunday, 17-November-2013 12:43:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Audio Visual:
NuForce S3-BT High-Fidelity Bluetooth Speakers on NikKTech.
CM Storm Pulse R Headset on RBMods.
Grace Digital GDI-BTSP201 Bluetooth Bookshelf Speakers on MissingRemote.

Power Supply:
be quiet! Dark Power Pro 10 850W on OCaholic.
OCZ Fatal1ty 750W Gaming on FunkyKit.
Enermax Revolution X't 630W on TechPowerUp.
Anker Astro2 9000mAh Portable USB External Battery Charger on Tweaktown.
SilverStone ST65SF-G 650-Watt 80 PLUS Gold on Tweaktown.

Video Cards:
EVGA GTX 780 Ti SuperClocked w/ ACX Cooler 3GB on TechPowerUp.
HIS R7 260X iPower IceQ X2 and R9 270X iCooler IceQ X2 Turbo on PureOC.
Sapphire Dual-X R9 270 on HWHeaven.
AMD's Radeon R9 270 on TechReport.
ASUS Radeon R9 270 Direct CU II on HotHardware.
AMD Radeon R9 270 on Guru3D.
MSI Radeon R9 270 Gaming OC and Sapphire Dual-X R9 270 OC on LegitReviews.
MSI R9 270 Gaming 2GB on CustomPCReview.
ASUS AMD Radeon R9 270 Direct CU II OC 2GB on eTeknix.
PowerColor Devil R9 270X on OCClub.

Input Etc:
Gigabyte Force M7 Thor Laser Gaming Mouse on BenchmarkReviews.
SteelSeries Apex Gaming Keyboard on OCaholic.
SteelSeries Apex Keyboard on APHNetworks.
ROCCAT Kone Pure Optical mouse on Vortez.
Tt eSPORTS Theron Infrared Gaming Mouse on ThinkComputers.
Corsair Raptor K30 Gaming Keyboard on HWHeaven.
Tt eSPORTS VOLOS MMORPG Gaming Mouse on NikKTech.
FAVI Entertainment Smart Stick/Keyboard on PureOC.
Logitech G602 Wireless Gaming Mouse on LanOC.

Memory:
Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba 8GB PV38G240C0K on PureOC.
Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba PC3-19200 16GB on NeoSeeker.

Misc Pics (45 Comments) (link)
Friday, 15-November-2013 03:26:00 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Friday again!

And if you're after more, check out this Wiki page which lists ALL "misc pics" news posts from the archive.

Sponsor Specials (0 Comments) (link)
Friday, 15-November-2013 03:19:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Remember to keep an eye on our Sponsor Specials forum. In there our various sponsors have info and deals on headphones, media players, office chairs, video cards, arcade game parts, technical training, fitness supplements, hard drives and more. Check 'em out!

Friday Afternoon (0 Comments) (link)
Friday, 15-November-2013 03:14:25 (GMT +10) - by Agg

There's growing concern about the "Trans-Pacific Partnership" or TPP and how the negotiations are being conducted in secrecy - although parts of it have been leaked. Choice have stated their position. But because the text of the agreement won’t be public until the treaty is signed, consumer groups and the public are being shut out of the process. Sign our petition calling on the government to bring consumers to the table and release the text before the meeting in December. Don’t let Australia trade consumer rights away. Discussion here.

AMD have a new API called Mantle, with coverage on Tech Report and HotHardware. One of the major planks of AMD's APU13 developer conference has been an in-depth discussion of its next-generation API, Mantle. Mantle, which first debuted at the company's Hawaii unveil in late September, has been billed as a high-performance alternative to DirectX 11. Prior to today, AMD has mostly discussed Mantle in broad terms, without giving much detail on the nuts and bolts of what it offers.

AMD also released their mobile APU roadmap, with coverage on Tech Report and PC Perspective. AMD’s APU13 is all about APUs and their programming, but the hardware we have seen so far has been dominated by the upcoming Kaveri products for FM2+. It seems that AMD has more up their sleeves for release this next year, and it has somewhat caught me off guard. The Beema and Mullins based products are being announced today, but we do not have exact details on these products.

Microsoft have a new cybercrime centre. “We wanted to protect our customers,” says Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU). “As a result, we’re hopefully identifying or producing evidence that we can provide to national and international law enforcement so they can not only identify these criminals but apprehend them.”

There's a LAN in Canberra tomorrow. The only BYOC LAN Based in Canberra, ACT. Australia's Capital Territory – Capital LAN (CLAN) is targeted at all the awesome gamers who live in Australia's Capital City! This event is targeted more towards the traditionalist, hardcore gaming crowd – although there's a lot of gaming experimentation so aside from the usual popular games like Call of Duty, Team Fortress, Trackmania and more, you'll find the gamers at CLAN also trying out things like indie games, the latest releases and upcoming games.

Friday Afternoon Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Friday, 15-November-2013 02:58:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Portable & Prebuilt:
NVIDIA Shield gaming handheld on NeoSeeker.
Microsoft Surface 2 Windows RT 8.1 Tablet on HotHardware.
CyberPower Zeus EVO Lightning 3000 SE AMD-powered Gaming PC on Tweaktown.
iPad Air on Bjorn3D.
iconBIT NetTAB MERCURY Q7 (NT-3602M) Smartphone on MadShrimps.
Sony Xperia Z1 smartphone on TechSpot.

Cases:
SilverStone Raven RV04 on OCIA.
Phanteks Enthoo Primo giant tower on SilentPCReview.
SilverStone Kublai KL04 Mid-Tower on BenchmarkReviews.
Enermax iVektor on HWAsylum.
Antec GX700 on ComputingOnDemand.
NZXT H230 on TechPowerUp.
Cooler Master Cosmos SE on Tweaktown.
BitFenix Prodigy M Micro-ATX on eTeknix.
In Win H-Frame Mini mITX on eTeknix.

Cooling:
Antec Kuhler H2O 650 AIO CPU Water Cooler on eTeknix.
Raijintek AIDOS CPU cooler on OCaholic.
Cooler Master CM Storm SF-17 Gaming Notebook Cooler on MadShrimps.
Noctua NH-U12S Cooler & NF-F12 Fan on FunkyKit.

Storage:
Serial Cables 8-Port 12Gbps SAS Direct Attached JBOD on TheSSDReview.
WD My Cloud EX4 8TB Personal Cloud Storage NAS on LegitReviews.
Western Digital My Cloud EX4 on PCPerspective.
ASUSTOR AS-304T NAS Server on NikKTech.
OCZ Vector 150 240 Gigabyte on OCAholic.
Western Digital My Cloud EX4 Personal Cloud Storage System on TechWareLabs.

Geek Food (2 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 13-November-2013 09:37:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Here's some yummy threads from our Geek Recipes forum:

Chipotle Popcorn Chicken
by scrantic

Smoked Beef Shortribs
by scon

Lamb Shoulder
by hsvguy

Angus Burger
by gcflora

Roast Pork Belly
by sbm888

Corn Seafood Chowder
by Amfibius

Wednesday Afternoon (5 Comments) (link)
Wednesday, 13-November-2013 05:41:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Internode founder Simon Hackett has been appointed to the NBN board. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull today announced that he had appointed three senior executives, including Simon Hackett, Internode founder and doyen of Australia’s broadband industry, to be non-executive directors sitting on the board of the National Broadband Network Company. NBN discussion continues in this thread.

An Australian bitcoin website has been robbed of $1.1M by hackers, apparently. A bitcoin user who calls himself TradeFortress says more than 4,100 bitcoins worth about $1.1 million have been robbed from his website. The stolen bitcoins are owned by the users of his website, who had trusted their bitcoins to him. More here, and in the meantime, a Chinese bitcoin site has vanished, taking $4.1M with it.

Owen spotted this article by Backblaze about how long HDDs last. For the past four years, we’ve had enough drives to provide good statistics, but 74% of the drives we buy are living longer than four years. So while 26% of drives fail in their first four years, and we have detailed information about the failure rates of drives in their first four years, we don’t yet know what will happen beyond that. So how long do drives last?

Phoronix have a Linux AMD GPU comparison. For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve's Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?

Renegade notes that Chrome extensions will be more locked down in future. According to Google, the leading cause of complaints from Chrome users on Windows is a malicious extension the user installed. To make things harder for the authors of these malicious programs, Google will, starting in January, require that all extensions installed in the stable or beta channel products come from the Chrome Web Store.

ACMA report that almost half of Australians use false identities online. Australians have admitted to providing false personal details online in order to protect themselves, according to the results of an Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) survey. The report, Digital Footprints and Identities, was conducted by Taverner Research on behalf of ACMA with 2509 Australians in March 2013. The research was carried out to find how willing Australians were to disclose personal information about themselves online. Yes, and that's not the only risk!

Wednesday Morning Reviews (0 Comments) (link)
Tuesday, 12-November-2013 14:47:56 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Caps Exchange Tutorial (2 Comments) (link)
Monday, 11-November-2013 04:41:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Check out this detailed guide from trodas, showing how to replace broken or poor-quality capacitors and other components:

click for the guide!

Monday Afternoon (2 Comments) (link)
Monday, 11-November-2013 03:30:22 (GMT +10) - by Agg

Today is Rememberance Day. Remembrance Day (also known as Poppy Day or Armistice Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth countries since the end of World War I to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty.

Perth now has free blanket WiFi. City of Perth Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi officially launched the free internet service this afternoon, which covers St Georges Terrace, the Murray and Hay Street malls, Forrest Place, Barrack Square, Stirling Gardens, and adjoining streets.

Cloud computing is all well and good, but not when there's an actual cloud. "I got a call, 'Jay, there's a cloud in the data center'," Parikh says. "'What do you mean, outside?'. 'No, inside'." There was panic. "It was raining in the datacenter," he explains.

If you're annoyed by bundled third-party offers when you download and install software (and those dodgy "DOWNLOAD" banner ads), GIMP agree with you. SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites - the green "Download here" buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well. The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.

Techdirt report on a strange meeting about TPP. In other words, the Australian government refuses to release information about TPP freely, because it says that too few articles have been written about it. And then it bans journalists from attending public meetings, thus making it harder for them to write articles on the subject.

Microsoft Australia have expressed concern about the NBN. "Ultimately, if you don't get fibre to the home, the biggest impact really is the upload speeds," she told AAP at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia event. She also said Microsoft is lobbying Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other government members.

Renegade sent in this article with more info about the helium-filled HDDs from WD/HGST. At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures. The helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.

HotHardware have been doing some Ivy Bridge-E overclocking. EVGA recently took the wraps off a new high-end X79 motherboard dubbed the X79 Dark and its black PCB with red accents, as it turned out, matched quite nicely with Corsair's Vengeance Pro series memory and H90 water cooler. But we needed stable clean power too, so we enlisted an EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G2 power supply to offer up the juice. All told, with an OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPs SSD for storage, we ended up with quite a test platform to explore the out limits of clock speed with Intel's Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E six-core processor.

Here's a cool F1 car made from HDD bits. The race card drivers head is a four disk motor populated with disk spacers. The V-12 engine hood scoops above the drivers head are the full anti-disks from four disk drives and were trimmed to fit. Rob Ryan used 12 matching WD Scorpio notebook drive actuators to make the motor. The brass tube that holds the motor together with torx screws was cut, tapped and flattened for it to work.

Monday Afternoon Reviews #2 (0 Comments) (link)
Monday, 11-November-2013 02:30:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg