The Prius of Hard Drives

After my dad's hard drive died, I upgraded him to a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT. It's a hybrid hard drive, with 500GB of storage on a 7200RPM spinning platter, and 4GB of flash memory. By storing frequently used files in flash, it can boot and load programs faster.

And it works. Boot up is noticeably faster, as are common program start ups. It's slightly nosier than the stock 5200 RPM drive, but I think the performance boost is worth it.

The coolest aspect is that by learning what files he uses often, it will get even faster over time.

Wikipedia in your pocket

One of my favorite aspects of my iPhone is the constant access to information, especially Wikipedia. While sometimes of questionable accuracy, it's still a huge compendium of the worlds knowledge of nearly everything.

For those who are too young, or not inclined to have a "smart phone", the Wikireader looks like a really cool gadget. A single-purpose device for browsing articles, with the entire Wikipedia database in memory. The screen is black and white, and it doesn't do pictures, but you get all the answers at your fingertips, with an extremely long battery life and no need for signal.

I think it would be a great gift to my little cousins when they get old enough.

Mmmmm... Candy

Halloween is coming up, and if you're supremely lucky, at the end of the night you might find some Coconut M&M's in your bag. M&M has been testing a lot of new flavors, and while I'm not a fan of pretzel or any of the dark varieties, the Coconut ones are great.

Though they're hard to find, and not available in anything bigger than a small bag, there's nothing stopping you from getting a LOT of small bags!

Worth the wait?

After nearly 10 years of waiting, Blizzard finally decided to release StarCraft 2. While basically the same, except with prettier graphics, cutscenes, and actual 3D models, it's a nice balance of old and new.

The train level is cool, and the timed levels such as the lava and zombie (a.k.a infested terran) levels are a cool twist.

I still wish I could zoom out to see more of the map, but I guess I can't have everything.

Was it worth the wait? I think so.

Still.... StarCraft 3 in 2020!