The Zone

Just when you thought Vista was bad....this was taken yesterday!!!

Found while we were browsing for some free iPhone apps, we unfortunately stumbled upon the River Oaks Baptist School app. While the name itself is innocent, the robbing title of the app is true about education and its increasing cost =D

MIT has made a great video explaining how OLED technology actually works; by using a pickle! Maybe science teachers and lecturers may take advantage of educational material such as this, something that we lack, at least when we were still in school. Props to Professor Vladimir Bulovic for the video!

Watch it here

You can even download it in .mov format here

An interesting video just popped up today showing how USB flash drives are made. Thanks to some lucky journalists who managed to gain permission to record the plant's workings, we get to see how these drives can be affordable, and its all thanks to volume! Even if its eight minutes long, one should check it out to see the huge production scale, its truly awe-inspiring.

As accidents and deaths from texting while driving arises, someone somewhere has gotten bored of cleaning up after the victims and produced the video above as a deterrent. Its rather real and graphic, and as such, the shock value will definitely hit drivers for the first few months when the ad is shown, although its long-term effects are still debatable. Somehow, our own road safety ads are much more artistic than this gore-fest, don't you think?

Mac fans please don't weep, Ice-T was just giving his seven-year old Powerbook a good farewell. Then again, he didn't do the right thing; it isn't RoHS certified, especially when it was made seven years ago! Viewer discretion advised.

We wish we could participate and try our luck in this simple survey, but we are employees and are barred from it! A lucky person can win a trip to Shangri-La's Rasa Ria Resort, have a holiday on us! Hurry, only three more weeks remaining till the end of the survey!

http://sites.hardwarezone.com/sea/readerssurvey/my/

Kids and their tantrums! What would you do if you've learnt that your Level 70 character was killed by the swipe (or signing) of a credit card? 

Image from Google Blog

When you are a Googler (meaning that you're workingat Google), you tend to resort to offbeat ways when solving problems. One fine day, Google decided to clean up its lawn as a way to remove weeds and a potential fire hazard, but instead of putting their lawnmowers to the task, goats from a nearby 'holistic land management site' called California Grazing were employed instead. No joking! 

Transcend has proudly announced that its StoreJet 25M and StoreJet 25C portable hard drives have been awarded the prestigious "Red Dot" award for excellent design quality by the International Jury of 2009 Red Dot design competition. The judges commented favorably on the StoreJet 25M's superior shockproof design concept that incorporates an attractive anti-slip silicone outer shell and advanced military grade anti-shock technology - a combination that not only offers excellent protection against impact damage, but also prevents the drive from slipping or falling in the first place. The eye-catching StoreJet 25C was praised for its luxurious polished stainless steel case with piano-gloss finish connection panel that makes it a truly fashionable piece of technology. The judges also noted that the distinctive textured backing of the StoreJet 25C not only provides a stable non-slip base for resting the drive on a table, but also added character and enhanced tactile feel.

Unlike other LED manufacturers, Samsung made an outstanding effort to make its LEDs stand out, as evidenced in this video. Whether the video is digitally enhanced or not still stands open for discussion, although its funny effects will definitely lighten up your day

Ensuring that workers in office cubicles do not die of boredom whenever there's a lull in their workload, Casual Collective has compiled a bunch of free games which makes multiplayer gaming fun and easy. Requiring no high-end graphics card, large amounts of memory and gaming-grade input devices, all you need to do is to register (for free), build up a network of like-minded people and play!

Deep within a former nuclear bunker, one of Sweden's largest ISPs, Bahnhof has created a server farm that's comes straight out from a science fiction movie. Named Pionen, the facility is fleshed out with two submarine engines for a total of 1.5 megawatt power output, a 'cool' 1.5 megawatt cooling system while triple redundancy over fiber and copper lines protects its customers from Internet outages and the apocalypse!

Its interior is bedecked with waterfalls, smoke machines and a whole lot of cool textural effects on the walls, floors and even ceilings! Definitely a cool place to work at!

Hard Drive maker Seagate has taken quite a bit of flak lately from members of its own forum when instances of their 7200.11 hard drives, particularly the 1TB model have been failing due to a firmware problem. Till date, the company has not released a new firmware although you can check if your drive is affected using SeaTools. 

More information on the forum threads below;

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=3668

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thread.id=4452

Dutch outfit SPRANQ creative communications Utrecht has created a new font which purpotedly saves you ink and consequently, the world. Dubbed Ecofont, the font style which looks like Dutch holey cheese (as seen above) uses approximately 20% less ink, just by introducing holes into the facetype! After using it for a couple of days, we'll have to say that it takes time getting used to, and fonts below 10pts might look as though they're been nibbled by a rat. A must-try if you want more ways to save costs, especially during in these tough times, you can download Ecofont right here.