At long last I have the beast within my grasp! The Velociraptor 600 GB Sata III, I have heard the rumors of its capabilities but its different when its in your hands. When you want a fast hard drive and its not an SSD then your option is the Velociraptor line from WD. I remember their 150 GB and 300 GB drives but this is the new iteration, I preordered the 600 GB Velociraptor to build with a system later this year but here it is in all its glory. Its laying in a box next to two RMAed Hitachi 2 TB drives, Velociraptor sits among them as the pride of the pack.

The Velociraptor is a high speed and high performance drive with Sata III with a 6 GB/s communication interface, but the motherboard has to have the equivalent Sata III connection on the board. In my case I do have a board with two Sata III connection which will help me take advantage of these ridiculous speeds. If you are looking for a solid high performance drive then you can’t go wrong with the Western Digital Velociraptor, it comes in 400 GB and 600 GB.

I have been using a few Android phones for a while now and overall they have made huge strides with the different iterations of the Operating Systems. I know for one that I am looking forward to seeing a sleek Android tablet since it feels more internet oriented then the Apple OS which is more Application oriented and Apple does have a lot of amazing applications. I hope they keep improving on this operating system and more amazing phones keep coming out, I for one am loving the HTC Desire.

The Good:

• Accurate Touch Screen
• Big and Bright Screen
• Very good Camera and Flash
• Excellent Battery Life (Much better then the Nexus One)
• Charges very quickly (Nexus One used to take too long to charge)
• Solid EDGE/HSDPA/3G connectivity and smoother switch over to Wifi when available, Data is excellently managed and integrated (Nexus One was choppy at times)
• Solid feeling phone
• Much better loud speaker
• HTC already upgrade from 2.1 Eclair to 2.2 Froyo smoothly
• HTC Sense adds a light smooth interface on top of Android which is intuitive

Zain Settings:

• Go into Mobile Network, Click “APN”, Options “Add New”
• Name it “PPS”
• Username “PPS”
• Password “PPS”

Make sure to save it and Edge/3G worked where ever there was coverage

My original Philips Bodygroom was fantastic, but somehow its broke and I’m still not sure how that happened. Then I saw Mark’s post about a newer version released, so I decided to purchase it from Amazon since it wasn’t available here at the time. I got it within a week, it looks cleaner and sleeker then before, and I really like the new update. On another note this is always a sensitive subject when discussing the nether regions but I don’t think so when you want to be clean, and this does it smoothly and safely.

Overall it is even better then before and I thought that first one was great, this is even better. So you have two sides, one is the normal Bodygroom type head and the other is the small trimmer. Two buttons to activate one or the other, you can have both on at the same time but I wouldn’t see why you would do that. Mine came with the American plug but works with 100-240 Volts so I just used an adapter for it. The adapter is simple and can be stowed, and it easily charges the unit in a very clean way. I can say that it is a fantastic product, and my recommendation is to use it with water and the shower gel for the safest and most successful trim of your special areas. At the time of this review I saw that it is available at XCite in Al Rai but I’m not sure how much.

Price: $70
Rating:

Doxie’s new USB-powered device simplifies the oft-tedious task of scanning photos or documents with its easy setup and an intelligible Internet integration. It’s small portable USB Scanner, works with both Macs & Windows, it works in black and white, grayscale or color and processes documents or photos at up to 600dpi. It automatically adjusts photos by cropping or straightening, you can also play with the saturation, contrast and brightness before saving it which is pretty cool, not like the old days when you had to rescan it.

One of the features that makes the Doxie so convenient, their free web application integration called the Doxie Cloud allows for uploading of photos or documents straight to sites like Tumblr, Flickr, Evernote and now to iBooks. The Cloud also provides a short URL so you can seamlessly share the photo via e-mail, chat or Twitter. Documents and photos can be saved as PDF, JPEG or PNG formats, which is great for sending the images to Google Docs. And, the best part is that you can digitize hand written notes & documents because of its built-in Optical Character Recognition capabilities. I haven’t looked at a scanner probably since 1999, since I don’t think they have really changed too much, they are bulky, and take up too much space. For once a scanner which address people’s needs at high quality and very portable, its a brilliant little device and very reasonably priced at $130.

Link: Doxie

Seems there is a lot of talk about stopping Blackberry service in the GCC and some talk in Kuwait. Kuwait’s simple story is that they want to block some sites from being accessed as all internet, email, and messenger services are routed through Blackberry’s servers which circumvent most of the blocking requested by MOC from the ISPs. Now Saud is announcing they will stop BB service by this Friday, and UAE by October, so even if you are roaming there you won’t have Blackberry Service.

A lot of people love their Blackberry and can’t stop using it, but as soon as the service is disconnected they mentioned that they will switch over to the iPhone right away. I know a lot of people mentioned that all these smart phones have IM Clients that rival BBM but in reality none is simpler and more standardized then Blackberry, and it just won’t be the same in that case. I know that I have my Android and its a great phone but if they plan on disconnecting Blackberry any time soon I don’t think I would going back to SMS or enjoying the instant messaging as I do with BBM.

I have been reading comics again since the iPad came out and I can’t download them fast enough. Some series I go through them and love them, and some of them really suck. Surprisingly one my favorites right now is Black Panther & The Immortal Iron Fist but I finish those within two days at the most, UnCanny X-Men was pretty good as well. Civil War was fantastic but I hated the ending, not what I expected. Thor is really good as well, I’m just hoping they release more of his series. They release new comics every two to three weeks but sometimes it still just isn’t enough in my case. I’m looking forward to reading Captain America, and I haven’t even opened up the DC Comics Application yet.

• The Black Panther**
• The Immortal Iron Fist**
• Annihilation**
• Civil War**
• House of M
• Hulk**
• The New Avengers*
• Thor**
• UnCanny X-Men
• X-23: Target X*

“With no solution available and in the public interest … Blackberry Messenger, Blackberry E-mail and Blackberry Web-browsing services will be suspended until an acceptable solution can be developed and applied,” Telecommunications Regulatory Authority director-general Mohamed al-Ghanim said in a statement carried on state news agency WAM.

I was surprised as anyone else for UAE’s and Saudi’s announcement that they will be cutting off all Blackberry Service of all kinds. Meaning that even if you have a service from another provider from another country it will not work in the UAE or Saudi.

There were announcements a few months back that they were contemplating shutting down the service in Kuwait, but luckily they are too lazy to go through the politics to do it, and it would be an damage many of the telecom company’s bottom end.

They cite security reasons as the main reason not censorship, but the reality is that they have no control over Blackberry services what so ever when people use them. In reality it’s very difficult to figure out someone from their Blackberry PIN, and so they can broadcast msgs, send items to people without having it intercepted or scanned. Blackberry came on fire over the past two years in the MiddleEast, everybody wanted the service, and it really took off. But the authorities weren’t to happy, in Emirates they have a lockdown on communications of all sorts, but this one seemed to have slipped them and they aren’t too happy about it, and the same goes for Saudi.

Now for the real interesting part, last year there was a little debacle with Etisalat trying to install spyware on their handsets through a Blackberry software update. That was really the Spyware product of SS8 which can monitor communications of Blackberry, but it was removed by RIM the manufacturer of Blackberry and people were pissed. Now here is the little details they fail to mention, SS8 develops products such as these but they have to take license proprietary software from RIM to use it. SS8 is only licensed to sell the software in the US, Canada, and the UK which they have to the governments, and they aren’t licensed to sell in any other country including the Middle East, that is why they were pissed about the Etisalat debacle in 2009. So I think the tactic of Saudi and UAE are trying to put pressure on RIM to allow SS8 to sell in the Middle East or the service will be shut down and they will lose a large amount of revenue. I don’t know if they do or don’t block the service in a few months but its going to be a hell of a blow to RIM’s income.

There are a lot of motherboards out there these days, some more powerful then the other. Its really a huge selection of bords chips and ram. I’m always looking for a perfect combination for a Home Theater PC, something just strong enough to play HD video without any glitches and small enough not to look obtrusive next to your tv. To have both strong machine and a small HTPC you need to start off with the mother board, and for this case the Zotac Motherboard was perfect for the job.

The Mini iTX motherboard can fit in any case no matter how small it is, and for a small motherboard it packs a lot of features. Its an Intel Core i3 motherboard, meaning that this little guy can pack a punch, and it has a lot of features. I installed 4GB GSkill Ram which really did the job, I played everything possible on it and it handled it without a hitchYou seriously couldn’t ask any more from such a board, if media playback is your task then this is the best board.

Pros:

• HDMI output with Audio output included, unlike other HDMI output Graphics Cards
• 10 USB slots, how many more could you want
• Built-in Wifi
• Small footprint – Mini iTX
• Plays 1080p, 720p, and BluRay without an issue
• Very reasonable price

Link: Amazon
Price: $129
Review:

From iPad to Mac Book Pro updates to the Mac Mini to the iPhone 4, Apple is just releasing product after product, from new product to updates, they are on a run. Usually they give some of their products some time to iterate, but somehow they all came together at the same time, new products and product updates. Now they have the last few updates for the year, I don’t know what they have planned next.

Last Update:

• Mac Pros Now Have Up to 12 Cores
• Apple’s LED Cinema Display Now Comes In 27″ Size, Dropping the 24″ & 30″ screens
• Faster New iMacs Can Run Both SSD and HDDs at Once
• Apple’s Magic Trackpad, No More Mouse

Link: Gizmodo

Concepts like these are really cool, putting together an animated design acting as tiled photo display on 20 iPod Touches. This would be considered an expensive animated tiled imaged but still very cool, whats great is they took the concept and programmed it to output this into 20 iPod with one controlling iPod. It’s not very hard but still not easy to design a program such as this, but I love the idea. The wood part I would be able to do but the programming is out of my league.

Link: UnPlugged