As many of you that read one of the other blogs will know, I have owned my 3 Skypephone for a good few months now. I loved the idea of being able to use Skype on a mobile phone without resorting to some cobbled together solution involving extra equipment nor a computer. I blathered about it being a smart and useable handset that turned out to be suprisingly cheap over at Blatantly Random, but now that I have lived with it for a few months, the honeymoon period is over.

In a nutshell, it’s a normal candybar mobile phone. It’s cheap, it’s functional for calls, texts and mms, and it has hefty Skype integration, allowing you to call people from your phonebook on either their mobile, housephone or their Skype client if it’s accepting calls. The important part is that 3 UK offer this Skype functionality for no extra charge, so long as you are either on a contract or on a prepay solution. It does the jobs as described, but it does have it’s faults….

The most obvious problem is cosmetic. Rubbery latex covers most of the handset which, despite being a bit odd in terms of coating, is lovely to touch. Sadly, the coating for the removable back cover has mostly peeled off. Weirdly it is just this back cover that has the problem, since the rest of the phone seems to look ok.

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Nvidia’s Nvision 08 has now ended, and obviously there were many technical and graphical things on display at the event that many people in the computing world would care about. Graphics card and CUDA related stuff mostly. [Here endeth the "technical" part of the post...]

Among the other events were a live Diggnation, a lanparty and Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters. As in those guys that throws a dummy into a burning vehicle full of explosives to see if the moon landings really happened (Or at least I would guess, I haven’t seen that episode yet so I can only speculate on what experiments they would end up doing to prove or disprove that).

The Myth-Duo had decided to show the difference between a CPU and a GPU using a medium known for expertly demonstrating such technical changes: paintballs.

Video after the jump…

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As a member of “society” (you can loosely call it that), sometimes you feel the need to help others. Sadly, that usually comes at the price of doing something vaguely boring, disgusting or degrading in order to help (for example sponge baths, as in you washing someone with a sponge and water, not you getting bathed).

Folding@Home is one way of “helping”, but really it isn’t if you only run it on your home machine and maybe your PS3. You need to use multiple machines, or if you are adventurous, a server farm. That is one large step in the right direction, but you can always go one further…

Overclock.net forumgoer “nitteo” has decided to go down the road of graphical prowess. Using a large number of graphics cards, a few motherboards and one control station, nitteo is capable of over 260,000 points of work in 24 hours. That is a lot, when many people have trouble getting into just 4 figures.

Although it’s great for the fight against things like Cancer, the real question is: Will it run Rage?

[Via Bit-Tech]

Apologies to you all, but sadly E3 is on, and that means that all hands are on deck at Gametactics.com and E3coverage.com until the flood of news ends. Normal service should return next week.

Have you won the lottery recently, hit your mid-life crisis or generally have a ton of cash doing nothing? Well, why not blow a chunk of change at Alienware. Yes, I got bored and looked at the UK site to see what kind of potential damage I could do.

Well, how about £10,323.15? (That’s $20,591.48) On a single PC….

Of course, how could a sane person spend so much money on one PC!? Well, by adding lots of stuff that you don’t need or really want for the expense value alone. Like a watch, mug, all possible game controllers, and MS Office Professional 2007. In German. It could have been potentially worse, but I decided not to include things that wouldn’t fit in, such as if there are too many drives or cards in the back.

To see what I could have “Bought” had I the finances and the nature to blow so much cash, come on through to the other side… Continue Reading »

The Blizzard Authenticator is designed as a supplemental authentication method for your World of Warcraft account, giving you the security of Two-Factor authentication. Each time you log in using the Blizzard Authenticator you are provided with a unique, one-time use password to use in addition to your regular password. Log in with both and you can rest easy knowing that your account is now even more secure from malicious attacks such as keyloggers and trojans.

[From Blizzard Store]

I’d get one. Except that I don’t want the guys I game with to see that I think they’re thieving goons with no other objective than to steal my (non-existent in real life) gold. I don’t want to lose my friends that quickly…

Take the great voice of GLaDOS. Add in a Garmin GPS unit. Mix in some trickery, and you have a sudden need for a portal gun in your Volvo.
Yes, someone at Vanmiddlesworth has created the Portal Glados Voice File, allowing everyone’s favourite demented computer voice to tell you where to buy cake from…

Just… don’t go anywhere that buys incinerators. That test is impossible…