Category: Technology

. . . WHILE SWIMMING!

Pretty neat, a completely waterproof 128MB mp3 player.

Version 0.8 of the Mozilla Firebird web browser has been released, and with a new name for the project: Firefox.

Additionally, version 0.5 of the email client Mozilla Thunderbird has been made available.

For those of you living in Ohio, you might be interested in the new ability the state has made available to file your 2003 income tax forms online, for free.

The process takes you through all the forms and how to fill them out online, and even has the ability to directly deposit your refund into your bank account electronically.

For those of you MS Windows users who’d rather not be forced to use the Real One Player to view real-media content, you can try RealAlternative, which provides access to the proper codecs under MS Windows Media Player.

The local Microcenter was having a 10% off sale on all DFI Lanparty motherboards, which was good as the mainboard in my Windows XP machine had begun to act highly unstable, to the point of shutting down randomly.

The Lanparty series of motherboards are slightly more expensive than boards with similar chipsets, but they do come packed with features that will immediately catch the eye of overclockers and actual LAN party participants.

I ended up getting a Lanparty NF2 Ultra B.

Visually, the boards are interesting in that all the plastic ports are covered with a UV reactive material which glows nicely with a simple in-case light, which makes a nice show for those of us who’ve gotten into the field of in-case windows and other computer cosmetic modifications. Additionally, the board comes with two rounded cables (one IDE and an FDD) covered in a similar material.

The board itself has an nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, which I’d been looking for as a nice, powerful and far more stable alternative to the VIA chipset based alternatives. There’s an on-board 6.1 channel sound card, as well as two network cards, one of which even has gigabit ethernet capability. The 8x AGP port will be a nice upgrade from previous 4x slots, at least when it comes to my ATI Radeon 9800, and while I’m not currently finding a use for them, the Firewire and SATA Raid capabilities of this board are tempting me with future upgrades. The board’s BIOS has the ability to save up to four seperate configurations, which makes switching between diferent overclocking profiles a new and tempting possiblity.

The rather large box that the board came in even included such things as a “PC Transporter” case harness to help lug the case to your next lanparty, and a really nice bit of kit from FrontX which puts several ports in the front of the case in a drive bay slot to provide USB, Firewire and audio port access.

Basically, this is a really nice motherboard, and provides a really solid base for me to start upgrading the other bits and pieces, with a slightly newer revision of the AMD processor with twice the L2 cache and a third faster FSB being my next choice on the list.