Matt's Blog

Archive for June, 2007

Ms. Danielle’s Giving Away a Microsoft Zune

Friday, June 8th, 2007

Ms. Danielle is giving away a 30 GigaByte Microsoft Zune! Her very pink blog site is fairly new (newer than my Blog) and she talks about a variety of topics.

If you remember (or, if you read this Blog back then πŸ˜› ), I entered a similar contest over at John Chow’s Blog. Well, it’s the same Zune! Ms. Danielle won John’s contest and decided it to “contest-it-off” on her Blog. In fact, John himself won the Zune. Quite a cycle that’s going on with this Zune!

The Zune in question is brown and is the 30GB model. If you’ve never heard of the Zune (have you been living under that rock again? πŸ˜› ), it’s a Music/Video player that has WI-Fi built-in which allows you to share songs with friends thatΒ also have a Zune (only for 3 days or 3 listens, whichever comes first). It’s a competitor to the iPod. It retails for about $250 USD.

It’d be pretty sweet to win, since you can’t buy Zune’s in Canada, yet…

Okay, I promise, the next post I Publish on this Blog will not be a Contest Entry. πŸ˜›

Win a USB TV Tuner at Beyond the Rhetoric

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

Currently, you can win a USB TV Tuner over at Michael Kwan’s Blog, “Beyond the Rhetoric”.Β  He’s giving you a chance to get up to 5 entries into the contest (or is it 4… hmm…). All of which are fairly simple. You can read the specifics on the Post.

The USB TV Tuner is from ADSTech and is worth about $80 USD. It has time-shifting and PVR capabilities. It even allows you to record TV Shows to a CD or DVD. This thing will plug into an empty USB port and either using a TV antenna or connecting a TV cable to it you’ll be able to watch (and record!) TV on your computer! No special video card required! You can see the product page for it here. This is definitely a well worth entering into contest!

If you’ve never heard of Michael Kwan before, he’s a freelance writer. He also guest posts over at John Chow’s Blog and the BlueFur Blog. So, chances are, if you read any of those 2 Blogs, you’ve heard of him.

His Blog looks pretty interesting, but I’m not the biggest fan of the theme… Grey,Β  white and redish-purple just don’t go together all that well. It needs some more colour in it.

So, this is my second entry, favouriting his Blog on Technorati was my first, and the following screenshot, proving that I’m subscribed to his Blog, will by my third entry:

I'm Subscribed to Beyond the Rhetoric

Heck, maybe I’ll even go for a fourth entry by going for the Top Commentators spot for June! Maybe… πŸ˜€

64 and 128 GigaByte Solid State Drives, Now We’re Getting Somewhere

Monday, June 4th, 2007

SanDisk and PNY have both announced the latest additions to their Solid State Drives (SSD) line. SanDisk with a 1.8 inch 64 GB UATA (Ultra ATA) SSD, and a 2.5 inch 64 GB SATA (Serial ATA) SSD. Then, PNY with the considerably larger 2.5 inch 128 GB SATA SSD. Now, this is progress. Finally, Solid State Drives are now being made in more “acceptable” sizes. Previously, you were only able to buy them in 32 GB sizes.

If you’re not familiar with Solid State Drives, they are basically a Hard Drive without any moving part. Elaborating even more on that, it’s basically a bunch of sticks of super-fast, non-volatile (well, sometimes volatile is used, but not for home-use) RAM, put into a standard-hard-drive-sized container. If you want the specifics on SSDs, check out the WikiPedia Page on it.

SanDisk’s SSDs are available now, and PNY’s SSDs will be available in the 3rd quarter of this year. Currently, SanDisk’s SSDs are only being shipped to OEMs. Of, course, that’s not to say you can’t buy one, of course someone is selling them to end-users.

SSDs have almost come to the point where you don’t just use them for the OS and Programs and store your files on a normal SATA Drive. Soon, you’ll be able to have enough room on it to take advantage of the super-fast access times to store all your files on (not to mention the fast boot times πŸ˜€ ).

Probably once they get to like 250 GBs and become cheaper, they’ll start to be used more. I’ll probably even buy one when they get bigger, and come down in price. πŸ˜€

Source: CrunchGear.