I'm a big fan of MAKE the magazine for builders, inventors and general fiddlers of hardware. But I'm not such a keen fan on their blog feeds. Particularly those that include a movie in their content.

For some reason, the movies in those feeds are set to start automatically on page load, without requiring a click to get them started. Now on an individual page for the item I can understand it, but in a feed it just becomes annoying.

While I'm feed reading I could be reading all sorts of posts and other pages in other tabs or windows, and I could easily be viewing 20 or even 100 feed items in one page.

Continuing todays unofficial topic of low-cost and low-power motherboards, I thought I should mention the EFIKA mainboard. I've mentioned EFIKA before as an organisation who are trying to think beyond the ordinary grey/beige box design and think more about the power that we really need on the desktop.

Since that post back in February, EFIKA have released a version of their mainboard for just $99 (see The $99 EFIKA - on the Road to Mobility). Like the VIA boards, the $99 EFIKA mainboard includes pretty much everything you should need in a very small and capable format. You'll have to add storage, RAM, a PSU and keyboard/monitor, but you'll save the planet and the electricity bills.

Continuing todays unofficial topic of low-cost and low-power motherboards, I thought I should mention the EFIKA mainboard. I've mentioned EFIKA before as an organisation who are trying to think beyond the ordinary grey/beige box design and think more about the power that we really need on the desktop.

Since that post back in February, EFIKA have released a version of their mainboard for just $99 (see The $99 EFIKA - on the Road to Mobility). Like the VIA boards, the $99 EFIKA mainboard includes pretty much everything you should need in a very small and capable format. You'll have to add storage, RAM, a PSU and keyboard/monitor, but you'll save the planet and the electricity bills.

Continuing todays unofficial topic of low-cost and low-power motherboards, I thought I should mention the EFIKA mainboard. I've mentioned EFIKA before as an organisation who are trying to think beyond the ordinary grey/beige box design and think more about the power that we really need on the desktop.

Since that post back in February, EFIKA have released a version of their mainboard for just $99 (see The $99 EFIKA - on the Road to Mobility). Like the VIA boards, the $99 EFIKA mainboard includes pretty much everything you should need in a very small and capable format. You'll have to add storage, RAM, a PSU and keyboard/monitor, but you'll save the planet and the electricity bills.

VIA technology make a lot of computing equipment, but what they are really known for is their x86 compatible low power all-in-one CPUs and chipsets. Not only are these little motherboards small enough that they can be incorporated into home cinema equipment and not look out of place, but they are also low-power and therefore often silent, so they don't sound out of place either.

They are quite powerful for their small size though. I used a Mini-ITX box first as a desktop, then as a Windows Server 2003 box and finally as a Windows XP unit for digital video recording in the lounge. With the right power supply and hard disk it was quiet as a mouse, and produced so little heat that I could put it in the cupboard without worrying about it overheating.

VIA technology make a lot of computing equipment, but what they are really known for is their x86 compatible low power all-in-one CPUs and chipsets. Not only are these little motherboards small enough that they can be incorporated into home cinema equipment and not look out of place, but they are also low-power and therefore often silent, so they don't sound out of place either.

They are quite powerful for their small size though. I used a Mini-ITX box first as a desktop, then as a Windows Server 2003 box and finally as a Windows XP unit for digital video recording in the lounge. With the right power supply and hard disk it was quiet as a mouse, and produced so little heat that I could put it in the cupboard without worrying about it overheating.

VIA technology make a lot of computing equipment, but what they are really known for is their x86 compatible low power all-in-one CPUs and chipsets. Not only are these little motherboards small enough that they can be incorporated into home cinema equipment and not look out of place, but they are also low-power and therefore often silent, so they don't sound out of place either.

They are quite powerful for their small size though. I used a Mini-ITX box first as a desktop, then as a Windows Server 2003 box and finally as a Windows XP unit for digital video recording in the lounge. With the right power supply and hard disk it was quiet as a mouse, and produced so little heat that I could put it in the cupboard without worrying about it overheating.

As a fan of both Apple an Sun equipment, yesterday was something of a red-letter day for me. Sun announced the release of their new UltraSPARC T2 processor, the successor to the popular (and my personal favorite) multi-core and multi-threaded CPU. The new T2 CPU supports 64 threads using four threads per core on an 8-core CPU. It also incorporates enhanced cryptographic acceleration (for your SSL enable websites and applications), and built-in 10GBbit Ethernet. Hopefully we'll be seeing systems using the T2 CPU that operate at the same level as the original T1-based T1000 and T2000. You can read (and watch) the announcement UltraSPARC T2 Processor. Both the T1000 and T2000 that I've used had an incredible amount of power that it was difficult, in a test environment, to maximize and measure.  Obviously I can't wait to get one of these to test.