I have been following Mac Funamizu’s work for quite a few years now and have always been in awe at his thought processes that results in his conceptual designs. Mac Funamizu is amongst the best, he is a web/graphic/industrial designer working in Tokyo, Japan. His blog petitinvention has a wealth of some of the most gorgeous designs I’ve seen.

These are some of my favourites.

This first design is a transparent futuristic desktop known as Zafiro. It resembles designs that wouldn’t be out of place in Sci-Fi movies such as The Island, or Minority Report. Transparent OLED panels are already out and about today, but not perfected just yet. Several transparent OLED designs were shown off at the CES show this January.

Zafiro concept

Aluminium Bevel

Data disk docking?

Deformable metal keyboard

My second favourite design of Mac’s is known as Looking Glass. It seems to resemble a futuristic tablet modelled on the Augmented Reality concept, where live overlays can be displayed on a device pointed at a building, or shop. Augmented Reality technology has been around since early 2009 and 2010. AR will become popular on high end mobile phones through the latter stages of 2010.

Looking Glass

AR means you can point the tablet at a building and get overlay info

Grab incoming weather data

My third favourite is called iPetals, a stunning solar charger and stand. Just gorgeous. You are better off checking it out on Mac’s site though as he has a ton of cool designs that are somewhat awe-inspiring. Mac also resides on Twitter!

Awww it’s so ickle and cute!

It’s also been a while since I wrote a hardware review so here comes one based on what seems to be the present rated netbook on the market. The Samsung NC10 Netbook. This little bugger is to be the replacement for my Dell XPS 1530, which is soon to be given a new home!

You can find the review surprisingly in the reviews section!

OK, Is it wrong to be turned on by this hunk of hi-tech kit? It is amongst the most over the top, powerful cards I’ve ever set my eyes on! Featuring a colossal 1.91 Billion transistor count, and a dual 256 bit memory interface giving you a gigantic 230GB/sec of memory bandwidth it certainly packs a  punch against modern graphics cards.  It is a greedy bugger though demanding in excess of 280 watts of power!

That sexy slab of PCB contains 16x128mb GDDR5 DRAM chips, so thats 8 per GPU!  – 2GB in total. No dual GPU board has had me this excited! Nom nom!

Review @ Anandtech

Does it impress?

Oh yes! After almost blowing £1,100 on a better specification XPS laptop, which was sadly from the older XPS range I ended up being talked in to buying the M1530, the bigger brother of one of the best laptops from 2007, the M1330. Despite having a 2-3 week delivery delay on their laptops they managed to get it to be extremely fast. I ordered the thing online on the 3rd January, and it arrived on the 7th of January.

I have spent the past few days jotting down notes and have come up with my first review of 2008! Top dogs!

How neat is this? The pictures tell the whole story anyway.

This is the SATA HDD Stage Rack, which is a Mac and PC compatible device that connects via USB 2.0. Simply plugging in a hard drive ala Atari 2600 Cart style will allow the drive to show up on your computer. There are two versions – the 2.5" for notebook drives and 3.5" versions for standard desktop hard drives. The stage rack sadly does require an external power connection, however I know little else right now. It also has a glowing bl00 light – these things are important in any device! I can only find this device on Amazon US so far, but I want one!

My ‘Junk Cupboard’ is packed with old hard drives, mostly of the IDE variety sadly so I’m hoping that an IDE version gets released in future. The button at the front looks like an eject button to ‘pop’ release the drive safely too. Hopefully these devices won’t be too costly.

Bit large innit?

Blimey! My current stunner of a PC case, the legendary Coolermaster 201c wasn’t large enough to accommodate the needs of my new PC rig. The sheer size of my Ninja Scythe CPU heatsink made me realise that it’s time to upgrade the case. After weeks of hunting for a decent one under £150, I had narrowed down my decision to two cases. The Antec Nine Hundred gamer case (approx £100), or the Coolermaster Stacker 830 (£170). The latter is regarded as one of the largest most spacious cases you can buy. As I’m an old school Coolermaster fan, even though their products aren’t as good as they used to be, I purchased the Stacker.

It arrived last week. The box was so large that my local City Link delivery driver now hates my guts. I was at work when it arrived, but my dad sniggered like hell while he watched the guy attempt to remove the gigantic box from his van. I could have passed out upon seeing the size of the box when I got home. Upon taking the thing out, one thing was clear – It’s a bit bloody BIG.

Having space for 9×5.25" drives, and up to 9x120mm fans, this thing is utterly massive. So big that it barely fits under my desk, and I really struggled to get any good photos of it. Tried to take a photo of it while it was stood upright on my bed, but it just toppled over! There’s so much space in there, that you could fit a small moon in there and that’s with my components present! So far I have 5x120mm fans in there, and the system is totally silent, miles more than my last rig in my Coolermaster 201 case. It’s so quiet that at night the only sound I can hear, is the low frequency hum from my sub woofers.

So far I have…

• Moved this blog to a new host
• Rebuilt my PC in to a wee overclocked beastie
• Installed WordPress 2.1 & K2
• Installed Windows Vista Home Premium
• Got myself one of those girlfriend things (not the inflatable type)
• Cried as Lotus Organiser 6.1 wouldn’t work (does now)

To say I’ve been busy is an understatement. Given the circumstances I think I’ve managed to juggle events in my career and my social life rather well! Winter over here in the UK isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. I had been expecting a ton of snow to drop between Jan and March 2007, so far we’ve seen one full night of snow, which saw the UK grind to a halt as about a foot of snow hit London alone. Man, when I was a child the snow was so deep that they’d be waist height to me, and things were fine. Obviously the UK wasn’t as crowded back then, but you get what I mean. Right now as I type this, it’s sunny out there with a chilly ice cold wind. Even my father’s flowers have started blooming – they’re confused too!

I’ve had a few emails asking if I’ve ‘Died yet?’, so no I haven’t done so. I’ve just been rather busy that’s all. I’m currently doing a small (well it was meant to be) write up on Windows Vista’s key features that newbie’s can expect to encounter. Now I was meant to finish it this weekend but half of it has been cleverly left at work! Lastly, I met the lovely Deena at my local gym two weeks ago and we’ve been dating since then Valentine’s is coming up people…get those Tesco’s cards on standby…

I’ve been feeling quite poor recently, after the New Years celebrations. I’ve felt unfit, and unwell as a result too, so I really need to get back into shape, not that I went on a mad drinking/eating spree during the festivities, but I did stop going to the gym for a solid 3 weeks and I can now feel the effects of that decision. This unwell feeling isn’t helped by the fact that my Laptop has died, while I awaited parts for my new PC (below). I was meant to use the lappy to write reviews while my main PC was out of action, but that plan backfired. So after spending well over £1100 on components for a new PC, I’ve not got to get the lappy repaired too. Great

More Power!

I’ll possibly be away for a few days while I do a total rebuild on this PC, which is an ancient beastie. To be honest I don’t need to build a new rig, but given that Windows Vista arrives towards the end of January, I do want my machine to handle this bloated behemoth of an Operating System (OS). I’d roughly guess that about 90% of PC users who want this OS will end up doing a rebuild of their machine.

It’s slightly absurd that an OS should require so much resource power just to bloody run, but that’s just typical Microsoft. I’m going to stick to XP for as long as I can though, because I’ll be buggered if I’m paying £220 for the Home Premium Edition, I’ll wait for a price drop. I’m not too clear on the upgrade version yet as the info is a bit clouded. So this Friday 5th, my new PC parts will arrive along with XP Media Center 2005. Hopefully everything should go well, because I’ve got a heap of reviews needing checking.

This new rig will be mainly built for non gaming use, as I have the Xbox 360 for games now. So I’ll be doing video encoding, general office use, blogging/php work, photo editing and multimedia on this new rig for the most part. One half of me doesn’t want to spend the best part of £750 on new parts, given that this machine still does and can easily do anything that I normally throw at it. Hell XP flies on this. However it struggled with the Windows Vista Beta, although it was a beta. See ya soon!

So I’ll be moving from:

Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ (running overclocked at 2.4ghz)
1.5GB of DDR3200 Ram
3x160GB Hitachi Deskstar Hard drives
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
Nvidia 6800GT (running dual 19" Widescreens)
Geforce 2MX PCI (running one 20.1" Widescreen)

To:

Abit AW9D-Max Motherboard (its got blue leds!)
Intel Core 2 DUO 2.4ghz (will be overclocked)
2GB of DDR2 PC6400 Ram (further 1gb to be added later)
1x160GB Hitachi Deskstar (got enough external storage as it is)
Creative Audigy 2 Sound (I’ll stick with this for now)
Gainward Geforce 7900GT (to drive my dual 19" screens)