Funny Picture of the Week

Saw this and it's great.

Another Game to Try

Been playing this game off and on the last couple of days. The game is called Cursed Treasure and it's a decent example of the tower defense style of game play. If you like tower defense games this one is definately worth a shot.

Interesting Items

I got a chance to play with a few interesting items today that are worth mentioning. The first was a KTI UB09 USB. The cool thing about the UB09 is that it's a Alarm Clock, it's cheap [$10], it's a USB 2.0 hub, and it tells current temperature + it looks pretty cool. Honestly, $10 isn't bad at all for a half decent alarm clock and it's nice to have a USB hub on your desk to keep from having to reach around to the back of the case. The temp readout is nice bonus, that I think makes it worth the money easily.

Picture of the Week

Cross-Over Super Mario

Here's another quick game to try out: Cross-Over Mario.
Basically, this is Super Mario from the NES recreated in flash, but you can play as:

Mario

Link (From Legend of Zelda)

Bill R (Contra)

Simon (Castlevania)

Mega Man

Simon (Metroid)

The interesting thing about the game is that the other characters bring over their game elements from their games i.e. Mega Man slides, charge blasts, etc.

This isn't a great game to play for an extended time, but it is an interesting game to play if you are like me and actually played all these games back on the origional NES as a kid.

Video Game Characters vs Video Game Voices

I stumbled on this interesting link today.

The site has pictures of some of the most famous game characters such as Mario, Solid Snake, Sonic, Agent 47 and others. The site ends with a joke about Kevin Smith aka Silent Bob doing the voice acting for Gordon Freeman of Half-Life fame. [Gordon hasn't spoken in the entire series].

Take the site with a gain of salt though, I didn't verify they are correct.

Interesting Product for Home Media Sharing

While I was working today I stumbled on a pretty great media sharing box, the GMG 3583NAS-NL. What's so great about it?

1. It's an enclosure with gigabit networking & wireless networking + it can do USB 2.0. That means it's very flexible and you don't even have to have it near your router / cable box. [Although you can and get a bit of a performance boost].
2. The unit is fairly smart and apparently does some form of linux natively [didn't dig too deep]. As such, it can do alot of things you wouldn't expect out of a network attached storage box like: Torrent files, share printers [ CUPS? ], run a DHCP server or a time server.
3. It's a RAID enclosure. Although it's limited to a max drive size of 1 TB, for most people that's more than enough to store all their music and such. Since it's a RAID enclosure you have 3 options:
   
   • RAID 1: Your files are written to both drives ever time you write a file, so you are safe if one goes bad.
   • Raid 0:Basically your files are split in half, 1 to drive 1, 1 to drive 2-- but they write and read at the same time-- so it's faster. One drive dead, you lose everything. [But you also get one big 2TB area].
   • Non-Raid: You could simply leave it alone and have two drives independantly in the enclosure.

The box is pretty cheap too at $89.99 and there's a coupon on DirectronDeals that can take a bit more off.  I think it's a good value and worth checking out even if it's limited to 1TB drives.