Items tagged with mod
Ask a bunch of gamers to make a list of the most enduring video games on all time, and most lists would have Super Mario 64 on it. Many have been playing this game for years and there is a certain familiarity with the 3rd person viewpoint. An enterprising geek with time on his hands named Kaze Emanuar has taken that familiar game and turned it into a first-person title. The result is a bit terrifying and completely changes the dynamic of the game. Looking through Mario’s eyes makes the game much creepier. The mod is called “First Person Mario 64” and features a camera view that puts you at Mario’s eye level, allowing you to look Bowser right in the eyes. Emanuar is a bit...
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Lenovo introduced their Moto Z family last year with high hopes of being something different. The evolution of smartphone design has been more iterative than innovate in recent years from most manufacturers. The Moto Z smartphones, however, offered modularity to allow the phones to adapt to a user’s in-the-moment needs. The Moto Mods concept is an intriguing one, but was ultimately met with mixed reviews. It is certainly the best execution we have seen to date with a growing selection of mods and simple plug-and-play operation, but many users are put off by needing to keep the phone-sized mods around. There has also been a fair question of if Lenovo would stick with the platform, as LG...
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One of the neat things about Android Wear is that manufacturers have stepped to the plate with different physical designs to suit a variety of style preferences. Android Wear smartwatch owners also have access to a host of watch faces. However, if there's a downside, it's that swapping out wristbands hasn't been as quick and easy as it could be. Google realized this, so it took the bull by the horns and created a new line of watch bands called MODE. Developed in partners with b&nd by Hadley Roma, the new MODE bands feature a simple mechanism with a slide button to snap and swap watch bands with minimal effort. The new standard brings parity with ease of changing out bands on the Apple Watch....
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Cyanogen is rolling out a new MOD platform that will give third-party app developers deep-level access to its operating system. The benefit of letting developers dive beneath the surface of the OS is that it allows them to tap into functions that were previously off-limits, which in turn opens the door for added functionality. Through a previously announced partnership with Microsoft, the Redmond software giant's already been taking advantage of deep level access in Cyanogen OS. Most notably, Microsoft was given the keys to bake its Cortana digital assistant directly into the next version of Cyanogen, and when that happens, Cortana will be more functional than it is on other Android devices,...
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Well that was fast. For those of you who purchased (or are considering the purchase of) a Kindle Paperwhite ebook reader from Amazon, you can already jailbreak the device. The modded code is "heavily based" on a previously known hack for the Kindle 4/Touch, updated with a handful of tweaks and a new delivery method. It's a fairly simple process, as far as installing modified code goes. To perform the jailbreak, Kindle Paperwhite owners need only download a file and upload it to the root directory of their Paperwhite device via USB, and then restart. The code takes over and does the rest. With a jailbroken Kindle Paperwhite, owners can install third-party apps, use the device as a weather display...
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The case lighting trend has softened somewhat in recent years, but serious case modders still know that a job isn't done without a little flash. NZXT is offering a bit of help to those who are tired of the same 'ol, same 'ol, and the new Sleeved LED Kit offers a very new look in a very old game. Traditional lighting methods involve cold cathodes and even solid LED boards that take up additional case space, but this next generation of case lighting is tailor made for smaller cases and unconventional shapes. Basically, this new kit is a snake-light run of lights that emits a constant glow throughout the strand, and users can adjust the light brightness to low, medium, and high levels with red,...
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Got a hankering to get your mod on? Not afraid to turn little machines into big hits? NVIDIA, in conjunction with CPU Magazine and Modders-Inc, has announced its second major contest in just a week, this time promising 15 minutes of fame and a new "dream" rig to the person with the best ION design. Slated to be the second coming of the integrated graphics set, ION hasn't seen a whole lot of action just yet here in America. It's been fitted in a few machines here and there, but overall it has yet to really grasp the imagination of the PC buying public. Evidently the company is hoping to change all of that with the ION Case Mod Contest, which is open now to US and Canadian citizens with ideas of...
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For a long time geek like me, who got his start in computing by spending countless hours in front of a Commodore 64, Ben Heck's latest mod is about as cool as it gets. Using the original parts from a working C64, Ben crafted a fully functional laptop, complete with a custom enclosure and 15" LCD screen."This project somehow has the distinction of being both the longest and fastest portable electronics project I have ever done. I originally started making a C64 laptop in the fall of 2006, and kept pecking away at it every so often. Finally, a few weeks ago, I said “screw it” and started over.I redid everything in a week and a half - the shortest project ever. (The previous record hold was the...
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There are some rumors circulating this morning that it is possible to enable the fourth hidden / disabled core in a triple-core Phenom II X3, by simply enabling Advanced Clock Calibration (ACC) in the system BIOS on motherboards outfitted with SB750 southbridges and AMI BIOS derivatives.So far, a couple of stories have surfaced that claim to have unlocked the fourth core in a triple core processor using ASRock M3A790GXH/128M and Biostar TA790GX motherboards. And in their testing, the processors simply worked just like a quad-core.Although we do not have either of the ASRock or Biostar motherboards used in the reports in house at the moment, we tried to replicate their success with an Asus M4A79T...
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Underneath Stockholm, deep in the bedrock exists a data center better than any high tech lair Hollywood could probably dream up. Bahnhof, one of Sweden's largest ISP's has created a bunker of high tech goodness that is surely to astound. The facility is called Pionen and once you get past the 16 inch thick entrance doors into the once nuclear bunker now converted to a data center, the spectacular sights that await are simply breathtaking. Replete with waterfalls, greenhouses, German submarine backup engines, and simulated daylight this facility has the added benefit of being able to withstand an almost direct hit by a hydrogen bomb.The space Pionen now occupies was originally built during the...
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Faced with concerns that users might switch over to IE8 or Google's new Chrome so they can browse porn, er, we mean privately, Mozilla has reversed course on Privacy Mode, which had been out for Firefox 3.1. The upcoming release will indeed support Privacy Mode, popularly known as "Porn Mode." Both IE8 in its current Beta 2 form and Chrome in its (barely) beta form support Privacy Mode.In a note from this week's weekly status meeting, Mozilla said: "Private Browsing Mode: Ehsan [Akhgari] went and implemented Connor's functional spec bug 248970 -- way to go! Now back on track for beta date."Cryptic, but it means that bug 248970 has been addressed, and that entry in Bugzilla, Mozilla's...
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OCZ Technology Introduces the ModXStream Pro Series, Efficient, Quiet, High-Performance Power Supplies Featuring Cable Management Sunnyvale, CA—August 18, 2008—OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory and components, today announced the ModXStream Pro, a superior gaming-grade power supply series that offers consumers a combination of OCZ’s cutting-edge PSU architecture and an efficient modular cable management system. Designed for enthusiasts and gamers in 400W, 500W, 600W, and 700W configurations, the ModXStream Pro is built for unparalleled stability and will provide optimal high-performance power to the latest GPUs and CPUs...
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Ask the trivia question: What was the first computer? Most people would immediately answer: ENIAC. But ENIAC wasn't really the prototype of the modern computer, as it couldn't be reprogrammed to perform different tasks without taking it apart and rewiring it. A much more likely candidate for the first computer that resembles what we think of today when we say "computer" was a British behemoth called "Baby," and it's sixty years old today.The memory gave programmers a total of 1024 bits, or 128 bytes, to play with. This had to store both the program and all of the data to be crunched. By comparison, a modern 1GB DRAM chip can store around 8 billion bits. However, the size of the memory did not...
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Customizing your rig or morphing it into a different form factor has become passe. Or so says Google Trends. We checked out a graph of searches on "case mods" over the last four years and found that lookups on the term dropped precipitously for no apparent reason.Here's the indisputable visual evidence: Why did the interest in case modding slow down? It's hard to pinpoint, but perhaps the hobby of tinkerers and creative minds has returned to the underground. What do you think? Are case mods still hot or is the trend above an accurate indicator of interest in the topic?...
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There are some people that mod and tinker just because they can, and they usually end up with really strange contraptions that leave us in awe. The accomplishment of getting OS X Leopard running on a non-approved platform is amazing on its own, but getting it running on a tiny VIA-powered uMPC such as the OQO Model 2 is nothing less than legendary in our books:“While greeted with heaps of initial skepticism, forum jockeys over at OQO Talk now seem convinced that a junior member by the name of TRF has successfully hacked the OQO to run OS X Leopard. Adding a video filmed by Mr. Blurry Cam didn't hurt the cause.”If this isn’t a hoax or sham, which it still could be, what is most amazing is that...
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If you’ve ever wanted a laptop computer that resembled a thick book, you might want to make friends with a chap named Kyle Bean. His mod is certainly an interesting one, in that it puts the ‘book’ back into ‘notebook’, or the other way around.Here’s a little background on the project:With everything turning towards technology, we have adapted the out with the old, in with the new mentality. Designer Kyle Bean has created a design that illustrates the issues with “technology and the Internet, and the effect it is having on the way we source information.” We are becoming a society that is more virtual. We download music rather than purchase CD’s, we research on the net, rather than going to...
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CORSAIR ANNOUNCES WORLD’S FIRST HIGH-PERFORMANCE MAC MEMORY UPGRADE MODULES Mac Users Experience Up to 28% Performance Improvement Using New Corsair Low Latency Tuned Memory Fremont, CA, March 13, 2008 – Corsair, a worldwide leader in high-performance computer and flash memory products, announced today the world’s first high performance memory modules made especially for the Mac. The new Corsair memory modules are the industry’s first low latency modules specifically tuned for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro laptop computers. Memory bandwidth has a critical impact on the performance of many of the advanced computing applications used by Mac consumers. Corsair’s Mac Memory features...
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The Commodore 64 is legendary, and just last year celebrated its 25th anniversary. And now owners of the Nintendo Wii will be able to play classic games of that era via the Wii Virtual Console.Bala Keilman, CEO of Commodore Gaming, commented, “The massive impact the Commodore 64 had on video gaming is still evident today with many gamers remembering the computer and its games with great fondness. By working with Nintendo of Europe, we are ensuring that future generations of gamers can play some of the best and most popular titles that kick-started the computer games revolution and so keep the C64 legacy in gamers hearts.”Laurent Fischer, Managing Director of European Marketing & PR of Nintendo...
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Israeli mobile phone technology company Modu has announced their modular mobile phone system, the modu. By including only the components necessary to send and receive voice and data, their module is designed to be integrated into "modu mates," and "modu jackets": mobile phone skins and various electronic devices that need mobile connectivity. Leading mobile network operators (MNOs) with a total of tens of millions of subscribers have already committed to modu, signing strategic partnerships that will see the first modu products available in the fourth quarter of 2008. The MNOs are Telecom Italia’s mobile division TIM, BeeLine (VimpelCom) of Russia and Cellcom in Israel.modu ecosystem partners...
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How many of you reading this got started in computing because of the good old Commodore 64? Considering our demographic, I'd bet a whole lot of you spent many a sleepless night parked in front of that unassuming brown and grey contraption grinding your way through Impossible Mission or experimenting with some BASIC programming. Well, can you believe that awesome little machine is about to celebrate its 25th birthday? To commemorate the milestone, CNN has a story posted with plenty of great information, including videos, pictures, and current collections. Here's a snip from the piece..."Often overshadowed by the Apple II and Atari 800, the Commodore 64 rose to great heights...
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Comcast-related news hasn't been positive lately, at least from a user's standpoint, as Comcast has been proven to be blocking P2P communications. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has weighed in on that one. This week at the CableNEXT conference, some positive news: Comcast Chief Technology Officer Tony Werner said in his Wednesday keynote that 20% of homes would be DOCSIS 3.0 capable by the end of 2008.Cable companies may have made a name for themselves as speed kings early in the broadband wars, but the current bandwith limitations of DOCSIS 1.1 leave it looking paltry indeed when compared to Verizon's FiOS 50Mbps down/30Mbps up packages. DOCSIS 3.0 won't completely close the gap...
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Today’s power supplies are a far cry from those that were available just a few years ago. With the increasing power demands of the latest GPUs and high-end processors, the need for ample, stable power has increased exponentially. With more and more attention being paid to efficiency and energy conservation, one has to question though, just how much power do you need? Not too long ago, a 750w PSU was considered huge and today we are seeing PSUs rated as high as 1600 watts. Naturally, the demands for such wattage vary depending on personal needs, but in most cases this kind of capacity is simply unnecessary, not to mention expensive. In this article we’re going...
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