Some things are just too cool not to comment on. Like this Iron Man 8GB Flash drive.
OK, so the £30 is a little steep, especially given that I recently got four 8GB sticks for half that price but for the ultimate fans among us they are a pretty neat way of expressing it. You can also complete the team with designs for the Hulk, Thor and Captain America available, should you want to carry around a flash drive Avengers team…and let’s be honest – who wouldn’t.
While watching the BBC morning news earlier this week, I witnessed a debate between a 20year old girl recently recovering from anorexia and Carole Malone, a journalist who stated that airbrushing models has no effect on whether girls become anorexic.
That in itself is OK – these arguments happen all the time but when I read this quote, from Jo Fonseca, director of Models 1 I couldn’t believe that people could be so imbecilic:
“Models have to be slim. I can think of nothing worse than being fat. The only reason that thin girls look so unusual at the moment is because there are so many fat people.”
Let me just stress a point here:
“I can think of nothing worse than being fat.”
Cancer? World Hunger? North Korea? Anorexia?
When did the world become so image obsessed? On the BBC news, Carole spoke about how girls wanted to look like these models and needed to see them looking their best…which in my opinion means they shouldn’t be airbrushed. If airbrushing was completely banned it would create a whole new base level for how girls compared themselves to models – comparing themselves to real people who worked hard to look good instead of digitally enhanced ones.
At what point do we draw the line on this sot of ridiculous behaviour. Has the world gone totally crazy?
Normally I don’t ask for comments but I am quite interested in what people think about this so if you stop by, drop a line below.
My brand new HTC One X arrived at the office last week and I thought I would share a few pictures from the unboxing and afterwards.
As for the phone itself, its a really solid platform and incredibly fast. It packs a quad-core processor along with 1GB RAM and a 32GB internal memory. The screen is 720*1280px and the camera is 8MP and capable of up 1080p video recording. Furthermore the One X sports a stereo mic to give videos that extra something.
Hope you enjoy the gallery!
I got my first apple product at the start of 2007, shortly after receiving an instalment of my student loan. My Black MacBook. It was top of the range at the time with a Core 2 Duo processor and one whole Gigabyte of RAM (which I later upgraded to two). At the time I didn’t know anything about Mac’s so I let a friend of mine (who later betrayed Apple for Linux) get it all set up. Among the various pieces of software that he installed, one of them was a very handy app called MenuMeters. The idea of MenuMeters was that it kept an eye on your system for you – your CPU load, RAM usage, Networking utilisation and a few other bits and pieces.
I took it for advantage that it was the only tool of its kind until recently discovering that iSlayer (the guys behind the very cool iStatPro dashboard widget) have a product that is quite similar – iStat Menus.
So this left me with a bit of a dilemma – do I keep using old and faithful MenuMeters, whose core functionality has remained the same for 5 years now or move to something a bit newer and bit more flashy. Time to weigh up the differences. MenuMeters is incredibly easy to install. Open the .dmg and double click the .prefpane. This installs MenuMeters into your system preferences, making it incredibly easy to activate and customise.
Within the preferences you can activate CPU, Disk, Network and Memory (RAM) monitoring – which, after choosing your preferred layout, looks a little something like this:
I have chosen the graph layout for my CPU and it shows each of my 8 cores – this takes up quite a bit of room on the Finder bar, but you can also display just percentages over even one average for all cores.
The Network tool gives you an overview of your transmit and receive speeds as well as giving you statistics from each of your networking devices in a clear manner.
The RAM tool lets you see at a glance how much RAM you have available/used, but also gives you a more in depth look at how your RAM is being utilised.
Finally the Disk tool (one I rarely use) lets you see when there is disk activity (read or write) alongside the drives currently mounted, their mount point and filesystem.
So there it is – good trusty old MenuMeters – now let’s look at iStat Menus 3.
iStat Menus runs as an application and it’s install is as easy as unzipping and placing in the Applications folder. Upon launching it for the first time we are invited to install the application before being allowed to customise it. The first thing to notice is that this is only a trial version and that fully featured version will cost $16 (£10). As a result I am expecting very good things from this application.
Straight away you can see that there are many more tools to choose from. In addition to that of MenuMeters, iStat also has Disk Usage, Temperature (and other built in sensors), Battery and Date & Time (if you feel the need to change from the Mac default clock). Looking first at CPU – iStat has the same features as MenuMeters but gives us the ability to fully customise the appearance. If we wanted we could have bars, graphs, piecharts and percentages if we wanted, although I feel that with 8 cores, I might run out of room. The same customisation applies to the rest of the monitoring tools but beyond that not much is different. We still have the used/free totals for RAM and the bandwidth utilisation for Networking.
The real difference comes when we look at the drop down menus each of the tools has to offer. The information available is much clearer and well presented. For the CPU you can see the history of all your cores, even if you only have an average displayed. It also shows us the top processes as well as the GPU memory usage and system active time as opposed to just uptime.
The RAM tool lists the top 5 processes so that you can easily clean up memory space, as well as a RAM usage history.
Disk Activity gives us a read/write history of the main drive as well as current speeds, while Disk Usage gives us the free/used space per drive. Note that here we do not have the drive mount points although as the drives are always mounted in the same place (/Volumes) it isn’t really a useful tool to have.
Finally the Network tool gives a detailed graphically representation of transmit/receive, but unlike MenuMeters, hides the inactive interfaces (you can see here that as bluetooth is turned on, it is displayed).
The addition of a sensors tool gives an incredible amount of information of system temperatures. Not only can you display the value of each sensor separately if you wished, just /look/ at how many there are to choose from. You can monitor temperature, voltage, fan speed and even current and power. An incredible amount of information – especially if you are an enthusiast.
Finally, iStat has one more trick up it’s sleeve with the combination tool – this allow’s you to display icons and menus as separate entities; If you just want CPU icons you can have them, or if you want the sensors menu but no icons, you can have it. This means you can thoroughly customise all the tools you want to see, along with all the ones you want at your fingertips, but not taking up space on your Finder bar.
So what’s the tally? Well MenuMeters has great functionality for a free system – its lightweight, customisable and unobtrusive. iStat, however, has incredibly detailed information, great looks and a plethora of customisation options but it does cost £10 after the 14-day trial period.
So the choice is yours, but for me, I have the feeling iStat might be sticking around…
Check out iStat Menu and some other great Mac widgets over at http://www.islayer.com/apps
MenuMeters is available from http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters
Over the years I have built computers for everything. Servers, gaming machines, family PC’s – I’ve built them all. All, that is, except a media PC. I’ve had gaming machines that I watched movies on and I have servers that have streamed media to my iPad but I have never had a machine that was physically connected to my TV. Untill now that is. Building a media PC can be a difficult process – you need to get the right balance of power to money and have to take things such as aesthetics and acoustics into consideration – after all, no one wants an ugly noisy box sitting underneath their TV.
Enter the Acer Revo R3700. I picked up one of these systems for £200 from eBuyer.co.uk after a recommendation from my older brother, who has a couple of the older models dotted around his house (EDIT: Turns out he has actually had at least one R3700 for a while now…). I had spent a month or two debating between the Revo or a Zotac ZBOX but didn’t want to spend more than £200 which I would have upon buying the ZBOX.
Starting with looks, the Revo is designed to fit in with modern-day TV systems. Its shiny black shell has a metallic finish, the Revo logo taking up one side leaving the other one bare. The chassis has a sturdy feel despite the surprisingly low weight of the system. Included in the box is a two-pronged stand for a standing setup, and a mounting bracket which uses the VESA standard – allowing you to mount the Revo on the back of the TV.
For ease of use, Acer included a wireless keyboard and mouse with the system, which can sit on a coffee table in a very unobtrusive manner, as I have discovered over the past few days.
Looks are all well and good but a pretty box that doesn’t do much wouldn’t be worth the money. Luckily the Revo doesn’t fail to deliver. The specs of the system are pretty impressive given its small size, using a 1.8GHz Intel Atom D525 – a dual-core hyper-threaded processor, designed for great performance at low power (max 13W). Add to that 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GB hard drive and you already have a pretty decent system.
However, the true power of the Revo lies in the NVIDIA ION GPU which handle all media processing. The ION is a low power graphics chip which has the ability to handle 1080p films and even games. Not only can it happily handle bluray quality movies and TV shows but it allows for the full Windows experience which keeps the computer running smoothly.
For output, the Revo has an HDMI and a VGA port for visuals along with a standard 3.5mm jack and optical SPDIF for audio. For input the Revo has 5 USB 2.0 ports (4 rear 1 front) along with 3.5mm audio in and a SD/MMC/XD/MS card reader.
The Revo was supplied with a stock version of Linpus Linux. This saved on the cost of the device as there were no licensing fees for Windows but the quality of Linpus was awful. While wireless worked out of the box there was no 1080p support meaning that I had a maximum resolution of 1042 x 768. On top of that, there are very few repositories included, so when I tried to update the system, there were no updated packages available. I couldn’t even download a kernel.
With Linux a write off I opted to install Windows, as it offers the best support for my prefered media software – Plex. Plex runs on my server and allows for streaming over the network (or internet) of my movies, TV shows, music and pictures. This could have been an arduous task, given that the Revo has no optical drive, however I happened to have a USB stick with a copy of Windows 8 on it, ready to install.
The install process was quick and the Windows 8 setup was painless and smooth. Within an hour I had a fully function media system including Plex, XMBC and Spotify to handle all my media needs. Additionally the Metro UI allows for really easy navigation from a sofa, especially for someone like me whose eyesight isn’t quite the best to easily find all the programs I need. Apps like The Telegraph allow you to browse the headlines while the Weather app gives a summary of the day’s/week’s weather accompanied with beautiful visuals.
This little system has been a great investment. It is unobtrusive and quiet (Oh so quiet!) while being powerful enough to handle everything I throw at it. Coupled with Windows 8 it opens up a world of media possibilities.
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