Thermaltake is about to unveil its new case, named the LAN Box. Details of this chassis is not yet up on its main website but can be seen hereand it looks awesome. Basically it looks like any Shuttle barebone case, but has a neat handle on the top for convenient carrying and is probably slightly larger. This eliminates the need for a bag to carry your PC around. It also has decent ventilation, as you can see it incorporates 2 60mm exhaust fans and allows for an additional 92mm fan to be placed on the side. For further cooling, an additional 60mm fan can be added onto the chassis if needed. The ducts on top and the front help in airflow too.
Design wise, it can house a Mini ATX motherboard and full sized PCI cards. My guess is that it could probably hold 3-4 cards inclusive of the graphics card. There are 3 external front bays, 2 that can house 2 CD drives and one 3.5” bay for a legacy floppy or an internal card reader. Whats interesting is that the larger external bay can house a 7” accessory, and as in the picture, Thermaltake has included a 7” LCD touch screen. Now I’ve always thought that it would be neat to have one of these and if your miniPC has an acrylic side panel, you could actually hook up one of these quite easily. The only problem is how to run the cables from the LCD to the graphics card. Thermaltake’s LAN Box probably would have mechanisms to do this and I hope they are fairly simple and don’t require you use that bulky VGA DVI connector on the outside of the case. This design would need you to then place the case right in front of you if you don’t plan on using a monitor.
Ever since Nick Negroponte came up with the OLPC, there were a lot of competitors trying to gun for that market. Intel tried to come up with the Classmate PC, but did not turn out well. Even Nick’s OLPC itself was not as well received as all the hype before the launch. The only one that stands out of the bunch was the Asus EeePC.
Designed to be a low cost laptop, it comes with a 7”LCD and enough computing power to run Windows XP. Originally Asus preloaded the EeePC with Linux, but due to popular demand, they now have Windows XP flavors as well. There are also couple of different configurations for the EeePC, but each come standard with an Intel CPU and chipset, Ethernet, WiFi, SSD (solid state drive) harddisk (ranging from 2GB for the entry level one and up to 8GB for the high end ones), a media card reader and a built in camera with a mic. My only gripe with it is that Asus decided to underclock the CPUs in the EeePCs. As battery life strongly depends on the CPU, the Intel Celeron 900MHz CPUs that power the EeePCs were clocked to around 500Mhz to save on battery. Thankfully, there are now BIOS replacements (unofficial) and Linux/windows applications that allow you to overclock your EeePC to unleash its full potential.
Every once in a while, companies like Logitech or Microsoft would come up with a new keyboard that has some features that makes life easier, such as dedicated buttons for web browsing or media keys, or rechargeable cordless keyboard/mouse sets. However, these ‘enhancements’ are rarely used, and nothing really innovative has come up for the keyboard, until now. Introducing the Optimus Maximus Keyboard (OMK) by Art Lebedev Studios.
The OMK concept has been one of the world’s greatest vaporware until recently when Art Lebedev finally manufactured it and shipped out to early birds. Now what’s so special about this keyboard? Well the coolest thing about it is that each key is actually an OLED display! Yes people, a fully customizable keyboard that you can custom yourself for any language or any application. You can design your own icons and macros for every key, and best of all, there are 10 extra keys to put your shortcuts in, be it IE or Photoshop or even media control keys, the OMK can do it all. The OMK’s customizable layout allows convenient use of any language; from Ancient Greek, to Hiragana text, as well as of any other character set: notes, numerals, special symbols, HTML codes, math functions and so on to infinity.
The only downfall to the OMK is that the OLEDs are actually in a fixed position, and is covered by a transparent plastic cover (which you press) to prolong the life of the OLED displays which makes it a bit ‘different’ from your normal keyboard (some will find it hard to use, but others might not). Also pricing for the fully specced keyboard comes with a hefty price of USD$ 1500 so be sure to have a deep pocket if you’re willing to get this uber keyboard.
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