First, I want to say that I am not an artist, and my drawing talents are really very weak, but I enjoyed being able to use a drawing tablet on more than one occassion since receiving it.

The Adesso Z12 is a twelve inch by ten inch tablet with a ten inch by six and a quarter inch drawing area. The whole unit is very lightweight, and I found it to have a very solid build quality, especially for how thin it is.

While I probably won’t use over half of the features it includes, the Z12 has 1024 level pressure sensitivity and 2000 LPI resolution with twenty-eight programmable hot keys. Read the rest of this entry »

While at the post office recently, I saw what had to be a twelve year old girl purchasing a stamp for a letter she wanted to send, and after receiving the stamp, she looked at her mother, and pointed at the wrong corner of the envelope. The mother corrected her and the girl placed the stamp on the envelope and then once again looked confused. The mother grabbed it and tossed it in the mail slot.

Had this girl never sent a real, paper letter before? I was shocked, but this brings me to my point: Shutdown Day is May 3rd, please participate!

If you are a parent, teacher, or otherwise able to shape the minds of the youth of today, get them to shut down their electronic devices and do things manually. A paper letter is a great thing to receive, and I am saddened that the youth of today aren’t taking part in sending them on occasion. Sure, the girl could have been a little slow, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most children around her age haven’t had the experience of sending a real letter, as e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, cell phones, and the like are continuing to make snail mail a dead medium for communication.

Sure, it might be odd to go without technology for a day, but it will help your state of mind, and balance your life a bit better. Besides, on May 4th, we can turn all of our gadgets and gizmos back on and catch up on what we missed before Monday rolls around.

Gadgetell has a great story about a car theft and the community forum that helped get it back.

Cyber crime often makes the news, but this time a “Cyber Village” was credited as the crime fighters. The cast of characters (other than the thief) were all members of the beyond.ca car enthusiast’s forum. You see, the car was stolen the old fashioned way but was recovered within 48 hours by cyber tracking. Even without a GPS tracker on board the crime was solved by people that shared a love both for cars and for the internet. Fortunately there were cyber friends available to answer Mr. Ironsides desperate plea.

While I have participated in many forums, this makes me wonder how helpful they would be to me if a similar situation arose. I have to admit though, I am hear more and more about how YouTube, Facebook, and forums are helping solve crimes, find people, and make this world a better place, undoing one bad thing at a time.

Would your cyber friends have your back? Stuff like this definitely makes me want to be even more active in some of the online communities I am in. You never know when you will need their collective resources, or when they will need yours.

I can’t stand playing certain downloaded games on my Nintendo Wii. The control scheme is set up that playing certain Super Nintendo games, just doesn’t work out well, and oddly enough, Nintendo never created a way to remap buttons on my Gamecube controller to make things easier.

Both my wife and I have been craving an old Super NES controller for the Wii, and it looks like that time is here, at least for Japan, and soon Australia.

Like the Wii’s “Classic Controller” this one connects to the Wiimote, giving it a wireless connection to the console. I love the look and button placement. Oh, how I want you old school controller.

Found via OhGizmo!

Pretty much ever computer component increases in speed over a short period of time, but hard drives haven’t seen the same sort of speed increases as RAM, CPU’s or even at the rate that the storage capacity on hard drives is expanding.

Western Digital has released a new hard drive technology nicknamed VelociRaptor that is upwards of 35% faster than previous Raptor technology.

The hard drive spins at 10,000 RPM and features a 3Gbps SATA interface, 16MB cache, and comes with an IcePack Mounting Frame to keep the drive spinning cool.

It will be available exclusively to Alienware’s ALX gaming computers sometime this month, and then separately in your favourite computer stores starting the middle of may. Expect it to retail for around $300 USD.

Will this be enough to hold off the advances in SSD hard drive technology, or are hard drives as we know them doomed?

Not a big deal here in Canada, as we can’t access most of the wonderful movie titles in iTunes, but it seems like Steve Jobs wasn’t able to live up to the promise he made on stage of having a thousand titles in ready for the movie rental service by the end of February.

It looks thought like they made it over half of the way there, with around 604 titles available for rental, but that is still a fair bit shy of the original estimate of a thousand.

Macworld says that it is because of the movie studios, and not Apple that they haven’t met their goal.

When asked about the delay in movie rentals, Steve Jobs placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the movie companies, suggesting that deals over rights were taking longer than anyone anticipated.

Has this slow uptake by studios frustrated anyone or have those that used the service been happy with the selection and new additions to the marketplace? Let me know in the comments below.

I am a huge fan of comic book movies, especially when they include any sort of superhero, but I didn’t really enjoy the first Hellboy movie. I found it kind of silly, despite enjoying some of the special effects.

The second movie will allow us to get past the origin issue that most first movies in the genre have, and get right to the action. So will it be a better movie?

Well, check out the new trailer, and let me know what you think.

While still a rumour at this point, I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of having Hulu come to Canada. Currently, I have to cheat using VPN services and good proxies just to see the shows I want to watch. Sites with the Hulu videos embedded in them, might as well be a wasteland to me as I am unable to play any of them without jumping through the previously mentioned hoops.

From Gadgetell:

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Hulu’s CTO implied that they are currently working on making the videos available internationally but was mum on the subject of when it will officially be launched outside the US. It’s been said that the only thing preventing Hulu from streaming videos in other countries are the rights holders. No word yet from Hulu so let’s just wait and see if they ditch the drop down menu and go global for real.

My main question now is, how much content will other countries see? I know most of the visitors here are from the USA, but you might be surprised to know that not many of the writers on Forever Geek live in the USA. Currently, every other major video provider online has crippled the Canadian access to the service. We only get certain content, and it is never as good.

A shame really since there are so many great services, and so much great content.

Creating a device that can create copies of itself is something that many scientists have been working towards. Once you pair a self replicating device with programming to look for improvements, it opens up an interesting door to evolving machines.

You can find the development of this technology happening at the University of Bath in the UK where RepRap, or the self replicating rapid prototyper could replace other 3D printers currently on the market.

As a child, I always assumed this type of technology would be in my home by now, but the current generation of 3D printers cost around $25,000 and are still used primarily by big business industry to create parts for aircraft engines, spaceships and hearing aids.

From New Scientist:

Now Adrian Bowyer hopes to change that by making the first 3D printer capable of fabricating copies of itself, as well as a wealth of everyday objects. He reasons that prices would plummet to around $500 if every machine was capable of building hundreds more at no cost beyond that of the raw materials.

Better still, the machines could evolve to be more efficient and develop new capabilities, says Bowyer. Once he has the software to guide the self-replicating process, he plans to make it freely available online, allowing users to contribute improvements, just like the open-source Linux computer operating system, he says.

Personally, I am very excited by the development work being put into this technology. With the proper mix of software and hardware, we can probably expect the ability to “print” vases for flowers, cups, and other small objects with the first consumer level 3D printer, but even more interesting to me is the self replication part as this technology made many times smaller could be used for a variety of different uses. I am sure my imagination can’t even do this technology justice on where society will direct it.

What would you use a consumer level 3D printer for? What do you think of the idea of a machine that can create copies of itself? Let me know in the comments below.

As you have probably noticed, there are a few different writers on this blog, and I would love to have them bring you more content, and add new geek writers to continue to bring you new and interesting information, but writers aren’t cheap, and as such, we have found a great advertising service that we hope our readers will support: Scratchback.

The Scratchback widget allows you to add a text link advertisement to Forever Geek for only $10 a week. You will be supporting the site, as well as having the ability to advertising your own site or service.

We hope you will give Scratchback a try, and want to thank all of you reading this for your continued support.

Because office workers don’t waste enough time in their day, Linden Labs, creator of Second Life, and IBM are partnering to develop their own virtual world that will be hidden away behind the corporate firewall.

The system is said to be useful for sales training and collaboration exercises and will be integrated with other back-end applications. This will allow workers to manage business data from within the virtual conference room.

Is this something we really need? I never got into Second Life, and as such, I am not sure if I can really understand the fascination with adding such tools to the workplace. I feel like Second Life doesn’t provide the interaction needed to truely be more productive than other groupware applications.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Source: ZDNet

Ask any geek what his dream is when it comes to the Internet, and one of the first responses they will probably give is a faster connection. DOCSIS 3.0, a standard that promises more speed for cable Internet users is already being rolled out. Originally scheduled for 2009, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota have become the first markets to test out the new technology.

The speeds promise 50Mbps down, and 5Mbps up, and that will allow you to download a 4GB DVD quality movie in about ten minutes.

The upgrade in speed will set you back a wallet-hurting $149.95 per month, but with Hulu, Skype, and other online services, do we really need subscription television and phone service any longer?

And here I am all excited about finally getting a 10Mbps service here in Ontario, Canada.

Source: Engadget

A friend of mine on Crenk, just let me know that AT&T is looking at getting in bed with Microsoft when it comes to their Surface platform.

With AT&T the Surface will have the capabilities of dragging videos, photos, ring tones, songs and dropping them into the phones.

Sounds to me like the feature was already planned, but now they have someone paying for its development, and AT&T will probably get nearly exclusive rights to have their products work in a more advanced way with regards to the Surface product. If Surface ever really catches on.

I really don’t think Microsoft and Apple should take on such exclusivity deals as it creates a bad environment for consumers. Who wants to buy anything that might not work with another product or service? These days, I like my products to work independent of brand.

I used to play the tabletop version of Warhammer 40,000. It included small plastic and metal figurines, but the set-up and take down time was just too long, and with the major rule changes, I just wasn’t enjoying myself as much. Add to that my love for real time strategy games on the computer, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War was a hit in my opinion.

Now, it looks like THQ is working on the second installment of the popular title. With three expansion packs out on the first game, I continue to wait for the Tyranids, an insect like race, to be added to the mix, but so far, no luck.

If you recently bought the third expansion, Soulstorm, you will be able to participate in the multiplayer beta test of Dawn of War 2, sometime in the future.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is set in the grim, war-ravaged world of Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe – a dark, futuristic, science-fiction setting where armies of technologically advanced warriors, fighting machines and hordes of implacable aliens wage constant war. Developed by critically acclaimed RTS developer Relic Entertainment, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II ushers in a new chapter in the acclaimed RTS series, as ancient races – including the dauntless Space Marines and savage Orks – clash across ruined worlds on a mission to claim the galaxy and preserve their own existence.

Powered by the re-vamped Essence Engine 2.0, the next evolution of Relic’s proprietary game engine made famous in the award winning Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II will deliver fast-paced RTS action with ferocious melee and ranged combat in fully destructible environments. Immersing players in an in-depth non-linear single-player campaign and a fully-co-operative multiplayer mode, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is set to deliver the most visually-stunning Warhammer 40,000 setting ever created.

I am looking forward to its release, and hope that they bring about the addition of more of my favourite races. I mean, Dark Eldar before Tyranids? What were they thinking? Expect to see much more of Dawn of War 2, as 2009 gets closer.

One of the most geeky, coolest, and cutest things I have ever seen: a three year old girl recounts Star Wars: Episode IV.

One of my loves is renewable resources, solar power, and other technology really gets me excited, but one of the biggest issues plaguing the technology is its cost and appearance. The Tesla Roadster might be expensive, but it isn’t ugly.

The Tesla Roadster is an electric car that has acceleration that can push you back into your seat so hard that you can’t move your head from the headrest, and it is going into larger production than the one hundred boutique, collector vehicles that were previously sold.

Tesla Motors is now taking orders for the 2009 run of the vehicle and already 900 cars have been reserved. I wonder how long it will be before I see one of these cars on my local streets, and if the continued sale of these cars will help promote the battery powered electric cars in our society once again.

Details from Engadget.