Hunter's Cool Computer Stuff Thread

[Phauss]

Anything from Xoxide qualifies for this thread.

With that out of the way, I'll start this thread with lighted SATA cables. That's right, BLUE GLOWY HARD DRIVE CABLES. Not some UV light reactive crap, these things have EL wire built right into them. From where? You guessed it, from Xoxide. On sale, too, at $8 a cable.

[Phauss]

Need more USB ports, an eSATA port, or an internal card reader to take up your 3.5" drive bay? Don't have enough 9-pin headers on your motherboard to install it? This PCI card has a header and two extra USB 2.0 ports. Since everything is handled by a controller on the card, there isn't any increased load on the southbridge on your mobo. Can't go wrong for only $8.



Unfortunately, the ad says that there are two internal headers, which got me excited, but there's only one. I'd like to find a card with 2 or more.

[Loktarr]

ooo I'm liking this!

[Phauss]

A mini keyboard! It's cooler than it sounds, trust me, and in this case, it's especially true. It's got a compact keyboard, touchpad, and a laser pointer, and the USB dongle has a slot in the device that it fits into for storage. Check it out for yourself at the VisionTek website.



It's compatible with PC, PS3, XBOX 360, Mac (lol), and Linux. Here's a quote from the item description:

The VisionTek CANDYBOARD is a mini keyboard, with a 2.4GHz frequency USB dongle, that looks just slightly bigger than a candy bar. It features 69 keys, a "capacitive-sensing" touch pad that's "comparable to a real notebook touch pad," gaming-oriented navigation keys designed to "be used as joystick controls," 26 LED's to use in low-light environments and Windows Media compatibility.

*drool*


The only drawback, if you ask me, is that the arrow pad is on the right side of the keyboard, whereas the universal standard seems to be on the left of a device/controller. I'm sure it wouldn't be anything difficult to get used to, though.

[Phauss]

PCI extension cables! PCI Express extension cables!! A better word might be ribbon, but if IDE is a cable, then this is a cable.

(PCIe x16 Cable)


Why would you want something like this? Suppose you wanted to make a case that was somewhat non-standard and you didn't have the tooling to cut standard-spaced PCI slots. This cable essentially lets you put them anywhere in the case, be it sideways, laying down, risen, or upside down. (I like the idea of side-panel PCI access.)

So there are a bunch of different kinds of PCI slots. Most commonly, there's PCI, PCI x1, and PCI-e x16 on consumer motherboards. Sometimes you'll see a PCIe x8, especially on boards that have multiple PCI-e slots, but I could be a little out of date with that info. Some slots have a 32-bit and 64-bit version, depending on your motherboard. Here's a handy chart sorting out where you can find some cables.

	32-bit	64-bit
PCI x1	$7	$7
PCI	$7.50	$12.50
PCIe x8	$52	$52
PCIe x16	$52	$52

You can probably find cheaper PCIe cables, especially if you wanted longer than 3 inches. (Tack on an extra $5 per inch. Ouch.)

[Phauss]

A Flash Decompiler!

First things first, there's a lot of content on the internet. In fact, that's all the internet is; pure content. A large amount of that content is in the form of flash. You may have saved some flash games to your hard drive and noticed that the files have a .swf extention.

Now, let's pretend for a second that the .swf was really a .zip and you were able to open it, finding all the stuff inside, like the graphics, layers and audio/video. With a flash document, that essentially means turning an .swf file back into its project format, the .fla, to view the elements.

That's essentially what this program does. So excuse me while I get the trial version and try a few things.

[Phauss]

Holy whoa, I've neglected this thread. Well, let's kick things off again with computer relocation!

What?

Standard HDMI cables are 6-15ft long at your local cable store. Computer speaker cable might be 6-10ft. Keyboard and mouse cables run to 10ft max. That means that the work station or media center is always within 10ft of the computer. If your computer is loud it ruins the media experience, and if it makes a lot of hot air it'll be a pretty warm room after a couple hours of gaming. If you just want a cleaner desktop setup, then getting rid of the tower would help out a lot. There's also the annoying issue of a coax outlet on the wrong side of the room and the resulting problem of trying to run coax cable across the room out of sight.

Alright, to the point.

Wall jacks! More specifically, modular wall jacks!

Start with something like this. This is a single-gang (or single wall plate-wide) wall plate with six keystone ports. You can get 2- or 3-gang plates for anything from just one port to 18 keystone ports, depending on the setup you want.


Of course, there are lots of wall plates out there:




From there, you can start picking what you want for the plate! USB, HDMI, RCA, VGA, 3.5mm Audio, CAT5/5e/6, and almost anything else can be found to fit in a keystone port. (I haven't yet found a DVI keystone jack, but I think the physical outlet might be too big to fit in a keystone port.)


Once you have what you want in mind, double-up on the item count, because you're going to need a second setup for the other end of the cable run. Find a good spot in the wall, send some cable through, pull the other end from the wall on the other side, and screw in the plates! Granted, that makes it sound like a 5-minute job (which it isn't), but once it's done, you can run your hardware anywhere you'd like in the house!

Even better: Some keystone jacks have ethernet on the backside (ie. HDMI on the front, ethernet on the back, fequently called HDMI over CAT5/5e/6). If you elect to run your outlets over ethernet cable, you could run all the connections to a patch panel. What does this mean? If you wanted a house-wide audio, run your source audio to a 3.5mm audio over ethernet keystone port, then run the ethernet to a patch panel/switch, then run ethernet cables throughout the house back to 3.5mm audio jacks where you want speakers! Or the same can be done for HDMI for multiple mirrored remote displays! Holy crap, there's a lot that can be done. I'll be daydreaming about the network possibilities if you need me.