Tokyo’s own Nanamica boutique has just released a set of new backpacks and a messenger bag from their exclusive The North Face “Purple Label” collection. Not only does the store exclusively carry the line, but they also design and produce it as well. The backpacks will come in three colors and is made up of premium materials with a suede bottom for extra durability. The orange and black backpack is a must have for me. Available now at Nanamica and DeepInsideinc.com.
Nike has some nice new additions for the women’s Dunk Premium line. Focusing on sharp, spring-toned colors, the focus is in the use of light-green on both the low and hi dunks. Both dunks also feature fiber-optical illumination and Nike’s Zoom Air cushioning. No word yet on availability but expect these to drop this spring.
Source: dunk.com.cn
From the looks of it Terry Kennedy is taking this rap thing very serious. In the Fly Society video for “Superstar” Compton Ass Terry is draped out in diamonds, standing next to luxury cars and spits threatening bars over blaring horns aka any rap video you’ve ever seen. But, the bravado definitely works for the full time skater and his crew. Check out the video above.
GFCNY’s resident producer Precize, recently collaborated with world renown fashion conglomerate Rugby Ralph Lauren for this classic 2008 Holiday Collection video. For those who haven’t familiarized themselves with Precize, he’s the producer who brought you Mickey Factz’ break through song, “Rockin N Rollin” and created the catchy Supra shoe anthem, “Da Supra Song.” Upcoming projects in 09′ will include a compilation LP that promises to deliver a unique mix of House, Jazz & New Wave for listeners with a new music video release in January. Make no doubt about it, the next generation is here.
Grand Theft Auto's Hot Coffee mod made the whole concept of transitioning from dinner and dancing to bedroom antics seem way too easy. Now it appears it might be harder to take that relationship to the next level, according to a new survey which suggests women prefer the internet to having sex.
The survey, which was commissioned by Intel, pinged 2,119 adults in an attempt to show how essential the internet has become, the Wall Street Journal reports. What Intel found is that 46 percent of women would rather put their sex drive on hold for two weeks than to go without internet access for that long. And it's not just older females who feel that way. According to the survey, 49 percent of women aged 18-34 feel the same way, compared to 52 percent of women aged 35-44.
Not surprisingly, the numbers are somewhat lower for men. About 30 percent of men said they'd rather go without sex for two weeks than internet access, but unlike women, that number goes down as the age goes up. Some 39 percent of men aged 18-34 prefer the internet to sex, but only 23 percent of men aged 35-44 feel the same way.
Hit the jump and tell us which you would rather give up for two weeks.
Image Credit: Flickr lochnessjess
Well this has been a long time coming. It seems that the iPhone Dev-Team has finally done the impossible -- they've gone and unlocked the iPhone 3G. The hack isn't out yet (the team says they're shooting for a December 31st release), and it requires that you've got a baseband of 2.11.07 or earlier, but when it drops, the crew seems fairly confident it will result in freedom from carrier oppression. The team is packaging the app -- formerly codenamed "yellowsn0w" -- into a user-friendly app a la PwnageTool and QuickPwn. Of course, you know how this cat and mouse game goes by now, so don't be surprised when Jobs and company come calling with an update that adds toast making to the official menu, but breaks your breaks all over again.
The masterminds at Puget Systems have decided to make the most of their extremely popular YouTube video, and offer a DIY kit so that the public can create their own mineral oil-cooled PC. Puget is claiming hat they’ve been using the system featured in their video for over a year now with no hardware issues.
Each kit will come fully loaded with an aquarium tank and cover, motherboard tray and IO panel, power/HDD LED’s, a power switch, SSD hard drive mounting bracket and a power cord with an extension to reach the bottom of the tank. That’s the base model, and it’ll run you $312.50. There’s also a higher end version with a radiator aimed at systems that are packing heavier hardware, such as quad-core CPUs, and any video card higher than an 8800GT. That version will run you $375.
So if you’re not worried about voiding the warranty on every component that you submerge in the liquid, head on over to Puget Systems’ site and pick up a aquarium to sink your hardware into. But keep in mind that once you submerge your hardware there will be no going back. According to Puget, “Mineral oil is very difficult, if not impossible to clean from your components once they are submerged.”
Image Credit: Puget Systems
With the capacity of hard drives breaking the 1-Terabyte barrier and prices being generally low, people are flocking to upgrade their storage. Ranging from home consumers, enthusiasts, system builders, and small to medium businesses, everyone can always make use of more space – but what if that space isn’t performing so well?
According to an eight-page (and growing) discussion on Seagate’s own support forum, users from all walks of computing are expressing concern over the latest Barracuda 1.5TB 7200.11 hard drive – claiming random, unexplained freezing.
The originator of the thread, a person that names himself ‘Nick’, said his Ubuntu v8.04 (Hardy Heron) started exhibiting strange and random freezes after he upgraded his mirrored RAID setup with two of the new Seagate drives. Quoting Nick on his explanation of the issue:
“Each time it freezes, the kernel log indicates an error ‘ata frozen’, ‘resetting’ and the command looks to be a flush-cache-to-disk command.”
Generally a kernel error of ‘ata frozen’ implies that data has been sent to the on-board disk controller and it refuses the incoming request / data since it is already busy doing something else and must clear its command queue or cache before proceeding. A lot of other forum users have been expressing concern about similar issues with the same drive model – but the common aspect of across all the issues is that the drive freezes when the user is streaming data in some way or another. Some users have worked around the problem by disabling write caching, although ending up with generally slow to very bad performance.
We also find that the apparent problem does not just affect RAID configurations, users with SATA controllers that do not have a RAID feature at all have claimed the ‘freezing’ issues as well. A lot of users claimed they have contacted Seagate technical support and have gotten either no response or no solution. One forum user alleges that he/she was told by Seagate support: “Unfortunately, we do not support Linux.” And, “Again, these drives are not meant to be used in a RAID environment so we are not going to be working towards a solution for this environment.”
The funny thing about that response is that Seagate’s web page for the Barracuda 1.5TB 7200.11 drive claims a RAID environment as ‘best-fit’ for this drive. The product page for this drive can be found here. Look in the ‘Best-Fit Applications’ section to see what we are talking about.
On the flip-side however, one user is claiming that a Seagate support individual has told him, “This is an issue we are currently working on. I know it’s a hassle for now, but we’re working on it as quickly as we can. As soon as we have information available we’ll let you know.” – which was over a week ago now. Complaints regarding the issue have also cropped up on other forums, such as MacRumors Forums, Slashdot, and even Newegg. It appears there is definitely something going on, but exactly what has yet to be known – Seagate has been unavailable for comment regarding this issue for more insight.
FYI – Toms had reviewed this drive back on October 2 of this year, and did not find any issue similar to alleged problems.
Following up Gizmodos cheap HDTV battlemodo, the HD Guru (who helped us out there) has three reasons why you shouldn't buy TVs from what he calls "tier three" brands like Insignia: price, quality and comparison.
On the price front, as many of you pointed out in the comments of the cheap TV battlemodo, the price difference between cheaper "Walmart" sets and name-brand ones is increasingly miniscule: The Toshiba Regza that trounced all was only slightly pricier, and there were plenty of Black Friday deals on sets from Panasonic and Samsung that brought them under $900.
The price thing wouldn't matter so much if you got the same thing across the board for your money, but you often don't. The HD Guru says that lower tier manufacturers might skimp on construction, using lower quality power supplies, for instance, with repair costs running as high as purchasing a whole new set. Besides, as you can see over the HD Guru site, the warranties tend to be less robust.
And on comparison, well, they tend to lose to the name brand competition. He says that the reason Vizio's plasma lost our battlemodo to the Toshiba Regza LCD is that it might have used a cheaper, older generation panel bought from a panel maker's excess inventory, since it performed similarly to panels from Tier 1 manufacturers made years ago.
Of course, that doesn't mean they're universally terrible sets—as we mentioned in the battlemodo, even the cheapest sets are going to be a whole new world compared to whatever standard def set you've got in your living room, and many people never experience problems with their "Tier 3" TVs. If you've got one, how's the ride been? At the same time, with name brand TVs often just as cheap, why not go with the (more) sure thing?
[HD Guru]
Who doesn't dream of wandering the fields of ancient Japan, wielding a katana for truth and justice? Though the samurai age is long over, you can still ennoble your privates with awesome samurai underpants.
Samurai-themed underwear have become something of a runaway hit in Japan. Each piece is made to resemble the armor of famous Japanese samurai, such as Tokugawa shogunate founder Tokugawa Ieyasu or military hero Oda Nobunaga.
They can be found on Japanese company Sido's website, but everything is currently sold out. If you wait for them to restock, each piece will cost you about $100.
[Japan Probe]
After a heated argument over who ought to get dibs on the remote control, a Minneapolis woman decided to drive her point home by stabbing her boyfriend in the gut. Oprah would not approve.
Brittney Love Venton of St. Paul is now charged with second-degree assault and is being held on $50,000 bail. Her boyfriend, Nicholas Smith is in stable condition and is in a local hospital recovering from the stabwound.
Witnesses told police the stabbing stemmed from an argument over a TV remote."One person wanted to see one thing, one person wanted to see the other, so she stabbed him in the stomach," said Juanita Luke, who lives in the apartment downstairs from the rental unit where Smith lives. "It was like a movie or a music video. It was between that."
She said she heard a commotion and went up to Smith's apartment, and saw the aftermath of the attack.
Right, so the next time you even think about not letting me finish that new Britney Spears premiere video, remember this: I. Will. Cut. You.
[Twin Cities]
The market is suddenly awash in solid-state drives thanks to the growing abundance and greater reliability of flash memory. Here’s what you need to know about today’s SSD storage.
Solid-state drives are new to the PC storage front, and they’re making waves by offering blistering speeds and greater reliability than traditional hard disk drives. For that, you can thank the NAND flash memory chips that make up every solid-state device.
If you’re not familiar with NAND memory, you need only look at your keychain. NAND is the technology that powers the storage on your USB thumb drive… and your mobile devices and the memory card in your digital camera. Whereas your tiny flash card might use but a single NAND chip, SSDs use multiple chips to achieve their higher capacities.
Storage that uses flash memory is quite unlike the hard disk drives used to hold your computer’s data. The latter rely on speedy actuators to read and write information on spinning magnetic platters. SSDs use electrical charges to read and write the state of individual flash memory cells. An SSD’s flash memory is nonvolatile: Unlike your computer’s RAM, an SSD drive retains your data when you switch the power off. And since the handshake is electric, SSDs can access that data in a fraction of the time it takes a mechanical hard drive to do so.
Sounds ideal, right? Actually, the performance potential of SSDs needs to be weighed against some significant drawbacks. We’re going to outline the pros and cons of the technology and how it compares to traditional hard disk storage. We’re also going to put seven leading solid state drives to the test and let the benchmark numbers do the talking. At this stage in the storage race, an SSD is a big investment; we want to help you maximize your return.
Before you make the move from a hard disk drive to a solid-state solution you need to be aware of what you’ll gain and what you’ll give up
An SSD’s biggest boon is its performance potential. Unlike hard drives, SSDs don’t have to wait for a physical arm to move read and write heads to specific points on a spinning magnetic platter. Reading from flash memory is a virtually instantaneous process, giving SSDs the ability to reach faster random read times and greater read throughput than magnetic hard drives.
Another advantage to SSDs is their relatively long life span. The NAND flash memory cells found in SSDs can last for years beyond the three- to five-year life expectancy of a magnetic hard drive. Because hard drives include numerous moving parts, they are vulnerable to wear and tear over time, especially if dropped or jostled.
An SSD can still break if you drop it, but as a whole, the lack of moving parts makes the category less prone to damage. If left unbothered, a solid-state drive can last up to 60 years longer than a hard drive in a similar desktop environment. And as an added bonus, SSDs don’t produce any noise and generate very little heat.
NAND flash is still a relatively expensive technology, limiting the capacities of solid-state drives and making for a high cost per gigabyte. Some manufacturers have managed to lower the cost of SSDs by using multi-level cell (MLC) technology to cram more bits of data onto a single memory cell. The problem is, MLC tech incurs a performance hit over single-layer cell (SLC) technology. The voltage complexities involved in maintaining the multi-bit cells can significantly slow the speed of write operations.
Unless a manufacturer specifies what kind of flash memory powers its drives, you won’t know whether you’re getting high-performance SLC or low-performance MLC flash. The price tag is the only distinguishing factor outside of benchmarks: MLC drives are among the cheapest SSD drives available (typically half the price of SLC SSDs).
Manufacturers claim SSDs offer better power savings than magnetic storage, but that’s not always true. This greatly depends on the construction of the drive: PATA- or SATA-based SSD drives tend to draw more power than typical hard drives.
Finally, SSDs can suffer from inferior random write and sequential write times because the data on an SSD is stored in kilobyte-size blocks. Adding more data to a block is a time-consuming process: The SSD copies the entire contents of the block to RAM, changes the data in the block, erases the original block of data on the SSD, and writes the changed block back to the SSD.
I Think 10" Netbooks are perfect, anything else is to small. But what do you think? How small is too small?
[Image via sparktography]
Most of you know that seeing the difference between 720p and 1080p depends on screen size and how far away you sit—but, in the end, it really comes down to your eyes.
Basically, after a certain distance, your eyes can't distinguish the level of detail no matter how much resolution your screen has unless you're Superman or Batman.
In fact, a recent survey revealed that one in five HDTV owners can't even tell the difference between standard def and high def. I can't account for all the variables in your viewing arena, such as distance from the screen and how good your eyes are, but what about you? Do you think you can really tell the difference?
[Image via HDTV on the Dish]
American Toy and Invention Co. is selling a kit that'll let you build, implode, and rebuild a multi-story structure that looks strangely enough like the 5th Avenue Apple flagship retail space. I'm sure it teaches about the physics of demolition, but hey! Stuff's blowing up! Stuff with iPods inside!
The inventor, going by the name Advanced Engineering, is selling 4- and 8-story kits that both support rebuild and re-implosion. He says he's run out of funding to ship the product, but before his site went down due probably to intense interest, he was still selling a few kits for around $60. We hope he gets enough cash money to keep making these toys, it's a great idea and we're sure he'd have a market for it. [Boing Boing Gadgets]
YouTube may be full of robots, but few as charming as this little drummer bot. Armed with a rudimentary pill-jar plastic drum and a beep-bop-boop synthesizer, he somehow gets quite the groove on.
The Lil Drum and Bass Bot's creator Calculon320 claims only humble aspirations for the little $50 beat box—"plays his drum, provides his own soundtrack, simple object avoidance"—but there's an awesomeness here that puts even the Wall-E toys to shame.
Not only can he parumpapumpum with the best of them with his two swivel-action drumsticks, responding to tempo changes up to a super-vibrating roll, but in "object avoidance" mode, he can stroll up to a Lego Duplo brick or a wall and just start beating the hell out of it. To the rhythm. My favorite nuance is that the creator takes a robotic bummer—noisy servos—and turns it into a boon, a sort of wiki-wiki scratch track to accompany the beeping and drumming. Nice work Calculon320, if that is your real name. [Let's Make Robots via Make]
Just in time for new holiday computers and after its graduation from beta status, Google now lists Chrome as the default choice in its Google Pack software bundle.
Google Pack used to list Firefox as the default browser choice, but Chrome hasn't completely replaced the 'fox. Firefox (with the Google Toolbar) is still listed, second to last, just before Skype in Google Pack. Google Pack didn't knock our socks off when it first launched back in January of '06. It got a little better after they pulled the not-exactly-free trialware, but it still includes WTF-choice RealPlayer in it. Though it's a bit dated, check out Lifehackers response to Google Pack's initial launch choices: Lifehacker Pack.
Online shoppers looking to spend the holiday season firmly planted on the couch can add the iPhone 3G back to their lists -- we've just confirmed that Apple and AT&T have quietly brought back in-home activation. Sure, it's been available in limited circumstances before, but now it's here and for real, just like with the first-gen unit. Would-be unlockers looking to score a phone for $199 flat can't start celebrating just yet, though -- you'll still have to provide your billing details and face an ETF if you don't activate within a set period of time. Oh well -- at least it's convenient, right?
With all these companies honing in on bringing HD capabilities to handsets, we were beginning to wonder when someone would step up and lend a hand on the audio front. Thankfully, both Dolby and SRS Labs have come forward at Mobile World Congress to announce separate enhancements to mobile audio, so we'll touch on the former first. Dolby Mobile, hailed as an "audio processing technology platform that brings rich, vibrant surround sound to music, movies, and television programs on mobile phones and portable media players," is available as we speak on the FOMA SH905i and FOMA SH905iTV in Japan, but will hopefully float out to other handsets in due time. As for SRS Labs, it's boasting its own SRS CS Headphone technology, which reportedly "takes stereo or surround encoded 2-channel audio and processes it using an ultra-low-power Circle Surround decoder to create 5.1 highly accurate channels." Granted, we're still wondering exactly how 5.1 channels make their way though stereo earbuds, but we'd be up for a listen, regardless.
YouTube may be full of robots, but few as charming as this little drummer bot. Armed with a rudimentary pill-jar plastic drum and a beep-bop-boop synthesizer, he somehow gets quite the groove on.