Asian Tiger

Insane! The Western Digital Raptor X is the first hard drive in the world with a clear top. Yes! You can now see the innards of a hard drive while it whirls around at 10,000rpms. Discard the fact that the Raptor X is a 10,000rpm, 16MB buffer, 150GB storage hard drive. It has a crystal clear top.

No big deal? What do you mean no big deal? Did you know that home modders until today has not been able to mod a hard drive? In Western Digital’s own words:

Underground modders have attempted for years in their garages to customize their hard drives with clear tops to see the precision mechanical components reading and writing like mad while they power through the latest game or demanding application. However, tolerances are so tight and materials so technologically advanced inside the drive that even the slightest speck of dust or gaseous contaminants, or disruption of the delicate and balanced drive ecosystem, destroys the drive, not to mention all the data. Keep in mind that read/write heads at the end of the actuator arm, which flip-flops the polarity of the magnetic particles on the disk surface, literally flies over the 10,000 RPM surface at one two-thousandth the width of a human hair. How did WD do it?

This new drive means a lot to the mod community. At long last, we are able to see it with our own eyes, how the read/write arm moves about picking up all the data upon our request. Finally, a modded computer is complete with the addition of the Raptor X.

To imagine how the hard drive will look like in action, imagine a very very fast lie detector machine (the tip that inks the paper). Yup! That’s how it looks like. If you have no intention of buying this revolutionary breakthrough technology, why not watch the video. Now, see this baby in action.

The Raptor X does not come cheap. It is currently priced at US$349.99 or RM1,301.49.

You definitely have heard of these in your lifetime:

• Nothing is free in this world
• There is no free lunch

So, does that mean that there is no such thing as free money? Today, I’m going to set the facts straight. There is indeed free money and it’s called contests. At the point of this entry, BlogParty is throwing in a US$250 contest. The contest is very simple; blog about their contest and provide a backlink to their main site. After blogging, submit your details at their site, site back, relax and cross your fingers. That’s all to it. So, there is indeed free money in this world.

One more thing to note, you will need a Paypal account for them to pay you if you win.

Recently, my hand started to itch, looking for a new mobile toy to play with. My current Nokia is still serving me well but like all geeks and techies, we long for new toys . The cheapskate side of me started hunting for new mobile phones and the Samsung SGH-X150 caught my eyes.

I have always been a fan of clamshell phones. My very first clamshell was the Motorola Startec and that phone will always be my favourite. Back to the Samsung, I asked the golden-haired promoter the price and he answered “399 ringgit”. Wow! Such a chun phone for only RM400?

I decided to check it out and was told that this is a very basic phone will very little feature. Just enough to make/receive calls and SMS. Just nice for me (not very techie, right?). I wanted to hunt for another phone before buying and so I dropped by another mobile shop. Being a typical cheapskate, I asked the price of the same Samsung. The guy said “499 ringgit”!!! My jaw and my pants dropped when I heard that.

“Wah! How come so expensive one? That shop only sell 399, you sell 499?”, I exclaimed.
“This one is SGH-X200 model-lah…”, the sales guy explained.

With that new information, I decided to study the difference of the models before I make my decision to purchase. The differences and similarities are as below:

Oh! Did I mention that the design for both models are the same? You can’t tell the difference between the two from the outside. The only difference you can see is that there is a light indicator in the front of the X200. It will blink steadly (blue in colour) during standby and if there’s a call/message, it’ll blink frantically. How do I know that? I bought myself the X200