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Tech News: Nintendo Retro

A hacked NES that fits inside its own controller. Brilliant!

How would would you like to have an NES controller that housed an actual NES? Okay, the innards aren’t an actual NES; the creator used a third-party knock-off system packed with pirated games to do his mad-scientist work, but I’m still impressed. The controller plugs right into the television, has a bunch of games built-in, and, even more crazily, has a full-sized cartridge connector on the back. I’m not sure how comfortable it would be to plug in an NES cart while you’re playing, but the fact that you can at all is hiliarious.
by Ben Kuchera.

The History of uIP

The uIP embedded TCP/IP stack is not only used in Contiki but also in hundreds of embedded devices on earth, in space, and on the seven seas. But it all started with a Lego brick.
by Adam Dunkels.

Racing from idea to prototype at Macworld

SAN FRANCISCO–There were plenty of companies on the show floor at Macworld pitching their latest iPod accessories. But one tiny Vermont company used its booth to try to get some new ideas.
Mophie, which makes a line of iPod cases, used a good chunk of its booth to solicit attendees’ designs. The company got 150 ideas in about four hours at its booth. A quick round of online voting helped the company choose three finalists. By Friday, the last day of Macworld, the company had marketing pitches and rough, but working, implementations of all three finalists.
by Ina Fried.

Bending the laws of physics to increase storage capacity

If you’ve watched the storage market at all for the last ten years, you’ve seen a serious inversion in the relationship between price and capacity. In short, today’s hard drives pack a whole lot more punch for a whole lot less green. At the same time, however, the capacity available has only barely kept up with the demand. While hard drives have increased exponentially in size, so has the need for that additional storage space. Seagate is hard at work on a technology with the acronym HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording), which promises to change the way data is recorded by introducing new media and allowing for greater data density. First, though, let’s take a look at the current set of challenges for increasing storage capacity in tomorrow’s hard drives.

Seagate announces 2.5″ Savvio 15K

Today Seagate announces the latest addition to its Savvio line, and this one’s rather special. The new Savvio 15K is not only the world’s first 2.5″ hard drive with platters spinning at 15,000 RPM, Seagate also says it’s 10% faster than 3.5″ 15K-RPM drives, making it the world’s fastest hard drive. That’s a bold claim to make, but the drive’s 2.5″ form factor could actually help it on this front. Even with perpendicular recording, Seagate can only squeeze 36GB onto the Savvio 15K’s platters. That results in fewer gigabytes per drive actuator, but it’s the actuator speed that often limits performance in enterprise server environments. The fact that the Savvio 15K has less data per actuator than a 3.5″ drive can actually make it faster, at least in applications that emphasize random access times rather than sequential transfer rates.
by Geoff Gasior.

Thermaltake shows off PSUs and cases the joint

THERMALTAKE SHOWED off a bunch of interesting things last week at CES. The high points were power supplies, some interesting cases, and the most extravagant case I have ever seen. The first two are mainstream, so that is what we will cover here.
by Charlie Demerjian.

Windows based installer – testers and developers wanted

The aim of this installer is to provide an easier way for a Windows user to install Ubuntu without having to know how to burn a cd iso, set the bios to boot from cd, repartition the disks, set up a multiboot system, etc. It will not replace any of the current Ubuntu installation options, and will not require that windows is installed prior to the installation of Ubuntu.
from ubuntu forums.

Mac 911 – Feb. 2007
Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems

Converting VHS tapes to digital isn’t rocket science nor does it need to be expensive. You have a few ways to approach this.
by Christopher Breen.

Create a bootable WinXP CD slipstreamed with SP2 and hotfixes

Takeaway: Since Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, there have been more than 120 hotfixes and updates. So even if you’ve slipstreamed your copy of WinXP with SP2, you could be stuck applying patch after patch for each new install. Here’s a much better option: Slipstream your copy of Win XP with SP2, integrate the latest updates (and a few useful utilities), and then burn the image to a bootable CD.
by Louis Nel.

Hewlett Packard claims nano-chip breakthrough

San Francisco – Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday said it has invented a revolutionary computer chip that uses nanotechnology to achieve a significant performance boost.
from techmonstersandcritics.com