Welcome back folks to this edition of weekly links, especially designed to occupy all of your free (non-gaming) time.

Read the ones you like and bookmark the ones you need.


Tech Hardware News

First Details Regarding AMD Bulldozer Emerge: 8 Cores with Multithreading - Interesting news from AMD. Crossing my fingers they beat Intel to keep the competition going.

Razer Announces Abyssus Gaming Mouse Kind of basic without a ton of buttons, but should work pretty good.

Intel Fast Tracking Pine Trail Debut - Really good news, especially for people looking to get a mini HTPC or nettop or netbook soon.

Boxee inks deal with first hardware partner: a 'Boxee Box' is coming and Boxee to Develop Set-Top Box -Boxee has been getting some good attention lately, and lots of people like it the easy to use HTPC interface. If they start putting out hardware and it is powerful enough, should be a really good option.


Dell Zino HD: $230 Mini Home Theater PC - More good news on the mini PC front. These would be really good just for a cheap desktop, but in the future a TV tuner will be offered, making it an awesome cheap and easy HTPC.

Intel to launch low-cost 40GB SSD, new enterprise lineup - These are going to be expensive as hell

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD6 -"A P55 motherboard that spares no amenity" -Says it has just about every feature possible.

Asus P7P55D Deluxe Motherboard Review - Good review of a p55 motherboard. Final thoughts says it should be on your shortlist when looking for a p55 MB.





Tech Sofware/Web News

Clicker Is a One-Stop Shop for Streaming Television - I haven't had time to more than skim the site so far, but it looks like they have a lot to watch. This along with Hulu, Fancast, Netflix streaming, and a few others is getting much closer to letting us drop the cable TV fees. It says they have "more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists,".

Comcast TV Everywhere Launching in December, Free to Cable Subscribers - Kind of along the lines of the link above, comcast will start offering streaming through your internet, so you can watch shows on the go or your home PC. I'm interested to see how this goes. I don't have Comcast, but still interesting.

EasyBCD Makes Tweaking Your Windows Bootloader a Snap I was first introduced to this program by Jeepo a while back, and it saved my butt with a bad install. Good program to keep in the back of your mind, especially if you ever try dual boots. Best part is it clean and easy to use, instead of using command prompts and stuff.

This Week's Best iPhone Apps -Bunch of new apps. Only one I grabbed was the Mall Navigation app. I hate going to malls, but with this app it means I can get it done quicker

Paint.NET Releases Big Update, Still a Killer Photoshop Alternative - Good news from Paint.net. Everyone should have this program on their PC, even if you have photoshop. It is super quick and easy to use for those minor toughups/tweaks. Way better than MS Paint.

Panda Cloud Antivirus Graduates from Beta, Now Free for Everyone - News about this everywhere. Has anyone ever used Panda? The "cloud" is supposed to "keep a list of malware from the community updated in real time".

CyberLink speeds up photo, video apps with GPUs - More good news about GPU processing, and how it can boost CPU. CyberLink claims "video encoding can speed up by as much as 500%" Anyone who has ever encoded a video knows how awesome that would be.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 2 Released, Fixes 190 Bugs - Good news, but I'm waiting for final release. If you want to just play with it without installing, you can always use Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3.6 Beta 2. Install to desktop then delete the folder when your done.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC to include DirectX 11 support Good news on the DX11 front. Hopefully this game turns out good and can be modded easily, since they have said it will have dedicated servers.

Amazon releases Kindle for PC application - I have tried the Iphone app, and it was interesting. Not sure if I would want to read a whole 1,000 book on a PC screen.

Youtube Goes 1080p and 1080p HD Is Coming to YouTube - Very interesting news. Will allow us to make some killer game videos and show them the way we want, instead of tiny and compressed. Already has me dreaming of some new ARMA2 movies.



How To and Guides

20 Essential Tweaks and Tips Every Firefox User Should Know

Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap

Build a Dirt Cheap and Powerful Media Center

Building a NAS? Skip the Performance Drives

Totally Texturize Your Taskbar - Can't wait to try this when I get Win7

Add CPU and memory meters to your Windows 7 taskbar

20 Essential Tricks and Skills Every BitTorrent User Should Know

iPhone cellular data not working? Try resetting your network settings

Guide To LED Technology If you are thinking about LED TVs, you need to read this.

100 wonderful photo effects Photoshop tutorials -Awesome roundup. I expect to see a ton of new sigs in the forums soon!! If you see one you like you can usually find a similar one for GIMP.

Protect Your Wi-Fi Connection at Airport Hotspots

Dual-Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu in Perfect Harmony Want something interesting to try this weekend. Go dual boot. This is one of the best guides I have read. He really wanted to make sure everything got along and you could access all your files from either OS.


Kind Of Off Topic, But Still Cool

NASA finds 'significant' water on moon -That is the really big news. And AWESOME NEWS

US Army Rail Gun Fires for the First Time

SEMA 2009: Mavizen introduces 130-mph TTX02 electric racebike Loving everything about it, except the price. Not much range, but really, how many people drive more than 38 miles to work everyday?

Rev for iPhone reaches 2.0, includes data-logging [w/ VIDEO] -This lets you see everything your car is doing, and in real time. A gearhead's dream toy for tweaking. If I had a bit of extra cash around, I would be buying this right now. Says it will be out for google phones in the future.

Meguiars Wraptivo brings vinyl car wraps to the masses This is awesome! We have talked about this in the General Forum (BMW owner tapes black car to white), but that costs a good bit. If they make it really cheap, this will be a hot item. Think about changing your car color any time you want, or cleaning up a bad paint job you have now. Check out some of the videos at the link in the general forum and there are a ton on Youtube.

Latest auto iPhone app: Augmented reality parked car finder - Never loose your car in the parking lot again.

The coolest CG car vid you'll see today - Really cool CGI video, and was awesome with the Left4Dead bits mixed in.

The 20 Greatest Tech Underdogs of All Time -How many of these have you wanted to own?

Garden Jawa – Utini! - I would take this over a garden gnome any day!

I Don't Want to Come In, I Just Want to Ring This Doorbell - I don't get the connection to Spore, but still the coolest doorbell I have ever seen. Trying to talk the wife into it now.

Download: Assassin's Creed: Lineage Full Movie Really awesome mix of CGI and real footage. You should download the full size version. That site is all about PC gaming and has really fast downloads. Movie is 30 mins. long.

That about does it for this week's edition. See everyone next weekend.