Content and news by Rob Williams

For the second quarter of 2006, 22 percent of all televisions shipped were LCDs, up from 17 percent for 1Q 2006. DisplaySearch’s data also shows the effect increased LCD panels sizes are having: the mean screen size for LCDs jumped to 28.3″ from 27.0″ the previous quarter. Perhaps most significantly, the price gap between plasma and LCD TVs in the 40-43″ range fell below $300 for the first time.

I have an LCD TV, albeit a small one, but I can say it’s picture is brighter, sharper and more robust than any Plasma I’ve ever seen. If prices continue to drop, there’s no doubt that Plasma will eventually be phased out.

To give television news broadcasts a gritty, live-from-the-studio feel, an anchor will sometimes appear with a bank of barely-viewable video screens behind him. But the screens did not go unnoticed, recently, when a Swedish news broadcast inadvertently showed a pornographic movie in the background.

I think the funniest part of this is that it wasn’t even intentional… or a joke. A worker simply watched a sports broadcast earlier in the day and forgot to turn the channel back. Classic.

Mac entrepreneur Phill Ryu today launched My Dream App, a new American Idol-inspired online competition where contestants can win the chance to have their killer app idea realized by experienced Mac developers. Over forty industry luminaries, including Apple founder Steve Wozniak, have signed on to My Dream App as guest judges to help contestants hone their ideas.

Though the Idol thing is getting a little thinned out now, this is actually a cool idea. Having the Woz back it up should give it a needed boost.

HKEPC reports NVIDIA will be releasing its new G73-B1 graphics core in September. G73-B1 is NVIDIA’s first 80nm product and set to take on ATI’s upcoming Radeon X1650 family of graphics cards. NVIDIA is expected to launch two variants of G73-B1. One variant will be a standard die shrink of the G73 core and fully pin compatible with current PCBs. It appears G73-B1 will be passively cooled like current 7600GS graphics cards. There’s no word on the core clock of G73-B1 cards yet.

The sample card has a rather strange cooler, but the jump to 80mm is what’s important. Hopefully we will be seeing even small fab processes in the near future… such as 65nm.

Cases & Enclosures
• Antec NSK6500 – DragonSteelMods
• Icy Dock MB452 Drive Enclosure – XYZ Computing
• Logisys HD-Silencer – Extensive Mods
• SilverStone LC-19 Slim SFF Case – ModTheBox

Cooling
• Thermalright Ultra-120 Low Noise Heatsink – Frosty Tech

Memory & Storage
• Silverstone FP34 3.5″ Card Reader – Virtual-HIdeout

Motherboards & Processors
• EVGA nForce4 SLI x16 – Motherboards.org

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Altec Lansing iM500 Portable Audio System – Think Computers

Displays & Video Cards
• ASUS’ PG191 Gaming LCD Monitor – BIOS
• Compro VideoMate H900 TV Tuner – XS Reviews

Complete Systems, Competitions & Etcetera
• Oppo Digital LT-2007 – Digital Trends

My first experience was not good – as IE had crashed – well it was running at almost 100% CPU and eating all the resources (click the image to see details). Which meant at the end of the day I could not kill that process and I had to restart the machine. But, since I am running IE 7 (Beta 3), I am not sure if there is an issue with IE itself or if the problem is with writely.

So, Writely (which wins the stupid name of the year award) is a tad buggy. That’s no surprise since it’s such an early version. The problem I see though, is the fact that any information you input into the program, Google -will- have access to. Like the searches, it could also be used against you in the future. If that kind of thing doesn’t bother you, give it a try.

The Teac GF-350, a machine that makes it possible to turn old records into CDs, is a heavy, standalone cabinet clad in black wood. Lifting its lid reveals a standard, no-frills record turntable. The back panel has stereo inputs for connecting a tape deck. And the silver front panel harbors an AM-FM radio, stereo speakers–and a sliding tray for the CD player/burner.

This is actually pretty cool, and for $330, it’s not that bad of a price considering what it does.

the artists argue online distribution leaves them with too small a profit. And, they say, iTunes wrecks the artistic integrity of an album by allowing songs to be purchased by the track for 99 cents. Some bands, such as AC/DC have released albums on other, more flexible sites, but not iTunes.

I can understand a lot of these bands concerns, and hopefully something will get settled out of this. But hey, Bob Seger has a new album coming out!

Schmidt is frustrated that “When you watch the television you see ads that are clearly not targeted for you.” What does he plan to do about it? Google is preparing to deliver “targeted measurable television ads” and Schmidt says Google has “a good shot at it.”

Well, I am tired of seeing Oil of Olay and Tampax commercials, so this can’t be so bad. I think it’s ‘clean and clear’ though… Google wants to own the world.

After 26 years I discovered that I see the world in a different way than all others see it! I’m a successful web designer, and a lot of people were asking me “so, what do you see!!”. This post is to make you see what exactly I see.

I caught this posted over at Digg.com, and while it’s not really tech-related, it’s quite interesting. If you ever wanted to know what it’s like to be color blind, than you will want to give this quick article a read!

The ASUS WL-700gE is more like a combination of a wireless router/gateway and a thin client system, and the feature-set is rich, rich, rich. Read on and make awe-inspired gasping noises at all the appropriate places.

Normally I would not link to a simple router review, but this is not a simple router. By any means. Equipped with a 160GB hard drive, you can literally download torrents while your PC is off. Be the envy of all your friends… and check it out.

Cases & Enclosures
• Coolermaster Mystique RC-631 – Technic 3D (German)
• Thermaltake Armor Jr. Case – Think Computers
• Tuniq 2- Bjorn3D

Cooling
• Thermalright MST-9775 – Overclockers Online

Memory & Storage
• G.Skill F2-6400CL4D 2GB – Virtual-Hideout

Motherboards & Processors
• AMD AM2 4200+ Vs. AMD 939 4200+ – Overclockers Club
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Overclocking – 3D Gameman
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 – XS Reviews

Peripherals & Power Supplies
• Brando USB Radio – DragonSteelMods
• Cordgo – DragonSteelMods
• Enermax Galaxy 1000W PSU – 3D Gameman
• Logitech V450 Laser Cordless Mouse – Modders-Inc
• Matrix Orbital MX610 – ASE Labs
• OCZ GameXStream 700W – techPowerUp!
• RAPTOR-Gaming K2 – Cooling-Station
• SilverStone Fan Controller FP33 – DragonSteelMods
• Thermaltake Purepower Power Express 250W SLI PSU – Big Bruin

Displays & Video Cards
• ATI 8.28.8 Display Drivers (Linux) – Phoronix
• ATi Catalyst 6.8 with Control Panels – NGOHQ
• Catalyst 6.8 Comparison – Technic 3D (German)
• EVGA 7900 GT KO Superclocked – Technic 3D (German)
• HIS X1600 XT IceQ Turbo DL-DVI DVI 256MiB GDDR3 CrossFire – Hexus
• Neoseeker Catalyst 6.8 Report – Neoseeker

Complete Systems, Competitions & Etcetera
• Gateway NX100X Laptop – Digital Trends
• Globalsat Gv 201 Car GPS – Red & Blackness
• Sumi Omni Beanbag Chair – Tech Report
• Pikom PC Fair August 2006 Roundup & Booth Babes – PC Modding Malaysia
• Wolf Claw Devour and ZBoard Fang Gaming Boards Competition – XS Reviews

It was only a matter of time before a company would release speedy DDR2-1100 modules, and OCZ has officially become the first. As one would expect, with such speed also comes loose timings. 5-6-6… ouch! We will see if tightening of those timings is possible, and also see if we can push them beyond their 550MHz speeds.

John Carmack, Technical Director at id Software, presented a stream of technical consciousness at QuakeCon 2006. techFEAR pulls out some important points for review.

Check out the full article at techFEAR.

Last year Mindware Studios delivered its inaugural project (Cold
War) to Windows users, while last month they finally delivered the full
client to Linux users. We have managed to strike up an interview with
Mindware Studios to learn more about the company itself, their future
outlook, stance on Mac/Linux clients, and other technical details to
share. In this interview we had a word with Tomas Pluharik, the lead
designer of Cold War and the executive producer on some upcoming Mindware
titles.

Head on over to Phoronix for the great interview.

The ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe is an excellent example of NVIDIA’s nForce4 for Intel x16 SLI motherboards. The fact that I was able to install and run an X6800 Core 2 Extreme CPU on the board is a definite plus, as the new Intel CPUs are the fastest on the market today. If you want HDA and the new features of the nForce 590 series grab the 590 boards when they reach the market.

You can read the full review over at Motherboards.org.

ATI has released another new Catalyst driver package for its Radeon 9550 and higher graphics cards. The new Catalyst 6.8 driver package arrives less than a month after ATI released its previous Catalyst 6.7 driver package. This release brings a couple performance improvements due to improved compilers and optimizations. Certain OpenGL games receive performance boosts due to an improved shader compiler. ATI has also further optimized the transform engine to extract more performance. The release notes claim Doom 3, Quake 4, Chronicles of Riddick and Prey performance improve by 6.5%, 18%, 20% and 16% respectively.

Check out the full posting at DailyTech.

Users in the market for a TV-Tuner will have another option soon, courtesy of ATI and their new Theater 650 Pro chip and Catalyst Media Center software. We’ve taken a look at a reference Theater 650 Pro card at HotHardware.com, alongside a build of the new Catalyst Media Center software. Head on over to the site and check them out…

Check out the full article at HotHardware.

What we’ll call workstation-class PCs are those on the market today that demand a PSU with outlandish output power, rail options and cabling runs to suit. You’ll know instantly if you need one, and the likely spec. of such a PC means that you have the money to spend to grab a supply like those on test today. So to help you choose one from many, we’ve nabbed over half-a-dozen PSUs with high-end aspirations and subjected them to our test equipment. Read on to see what we found out.

Check out the full round-up at Hexus.

Think Geek has the Optimus Mini Three for sale on their site, but it will not be available for another month. The most you can do is get an automated e-mail sent to you when they are actually in stock.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. We have this Optimus Mini Three Keyboard in our hot little hands, it is very real and very cool. You want one, trust us. And that’s not the salesman in us talking… this is the die-hard geeky friend who wants to see you get some amazing tech that no one you know will have.

Of course we want one, but are you willing to pay $160 for one?