Da-Banana

Android has really grown and no matter what carrier you go too, they have a pile of phones running this OS. Android 2.2 was probably one of the largest and most popular releases of Android bring a host of features to the phones as well as many speed improvements. Each phone maker customizes the Android interface to there own liking as well as each carrier throws in there own applications to the stock phone. This can sometimes slow down the phone and take up unwanted space. This is why there are numerous custom versions of Android available for people to install on their phones in place of the one provided originally. These are commonly referred to as ROMS. Cyanogenmod 7 is a popular ROM of Android which is for the most part a base Android, but with a few custom features and small enhancements to make it faster.  I've been running Cyanogenmod for over 6 months now. Moving from Android with HTC Sense I noticed a huge speed improvement right away. I also very much liked the...

I have been using Firefox for almost 8 years. I have loved being able to customize it with a few extensions  and such. This was the major thing that kept me from change to Google Chrome when it was first released because I am a huge Google nut. Firefox has served me well but recently I have felt it has gotten sluggish and unstable. Recently most of the features and extensions I used to use are no longer required or invalid, the biggest being Better Gmail to enhance my Gmail experience. Now most of the features it are supported directly in Gmail. With Firefox no longer missing any features added by extensions it becomes a direct battle between speed, usability and stability for me. For me this battle was quickly won by Chrome for several reasons. First is that Chrome has a few nice extensions that offer nice features for me like Google Voice and Flixter. Something similar is available for Firefox but it just works so nice in Chrome. Second is Chrome's syncing ability...

Today was the release for the new Android 2.2 to the HTC EVO 4G on the Sprint network. In this new version come many new features and I have been very anxious to upgrade. I ran the upgrade which was easy and went smoothly. Upon first boot, there were no noticeable differences but that was to be expected since the EVO has the Sense UI for the GUI. Since Android 2.2 had been out for a while, most of the major new features have been well known and can be easily found on many sites but I went through to test most of them anyways. Everyone know about the key new features: Flash 10.1 Faster Browser USB & Wifi Tethering What is less known are all the little changes that really add to the experience. After doing a quick overlook of the key new features it was now time to find all the little enhancements that aren't as known or popular. The first major thing I noticed was that the home screens swapped very smooth. Now, the EVO compared to other phones was faster, but 2.2 now makes it ev...

There are a plethora of free Linux games out there. Numerous FPS based on the Quake 3 engine along with numerous arcade style games and so on. As great as all these free games are the question still remains, can Linux be a profitable commercial gaming platform. Windows has controlled the commercial games market for years. Even Mac OS is lacking in this area. There have been some commercial games released to Linux. ID Software is well known for bringing its title Doom 3 and Quake 4 to Linux along with Epic Games and there Unreal Tournament 2004. In recent years there have been several startup companies that are handling porting games to Linux however most of these titles are older and lesser known. Linux Game Publishing is one of these companies. It was started back in 2001 and has ported Cold War, Shadogrounds, X2: The Threat and many more. If you look hard enough you'll find plenty of diamonds in the ruff like the new Linux port OSMOS that will provide hours of entertainment to bo...

OSMOS is a indie game released by Hemisphere Games. This game was released last year first to Windows (August) and then to Mac OS X (December) but it now has been ported to the Linux OS. The game costs $10, is DRM free and once purchased you have access to the Windows, Mac and Linux versions if purchased directly from the OSMOS website. If purchased through Steam, only the Windows version is available. The same applies for direct2drive. The game itself is simple in concept but surprisingly fun to play. This game can be easily played for a short time so you can quickly load it up and play a round or two if you only have a few minutes. The game doesn't require the latest computer either. I was able to play it on my HP DV2 with no issues on its mobile ATI 3410 graphics using the binary drivers. I also found it plays fine on my desktop with an ATI x1950 running the open source ATI drivers. This is quite awesome know that the open source drivers are able to handle this game since the AT...

The Intel Core i7 has been out for over a year now. It without doubt is the fastest processor and it's cost clearly shows this. The question is, is this excellent performance due to its heavily advertised hyperthreading (HT) or is this mostly and advertising gimmick. Lets take a look at the facts and see. An article at vr-zone.com shows that in the games Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 enabling HT actually causes a reduction in performance. In Crysis not even one frame per second but in Far Cry 2 it 9 frames shy. http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-core-i7-hyper-threading-helps-/6160.html At iXBT Labs, they ran tests disabling HT and Turbo Boost. In numerous cases, the HT either didn't help, offered very little gain or actually caused a drop in performance. In the games tested, only one game actually saw a boost in performance with HT enabled and it was only a 1% gain. The other 7 saw either no change or a slight drop. http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/ci7-turbo-ht-p1.html Another te...

For about a month now I've owned the new Samsung T260HD. This is a big monitor with HDTV capability. This monitor is magnificent. So, first lets start with its benefits. First, its big. This monitor allows you to view so much stuff at once. You can easily have a browser, chat, console and music player up and running and not interfering with each other. The monitor has a nice menu system that allows you to control all its features. You can easily switch between the different inputs and there isn't a long delay when switching. The best feature of this monitor though is that it can do 1080p resolution. Actually, its does higher than 1080p, so when you're running 1080p, you'll actually have black space on the top and bottom. The monitor doesn't auto adjust to the correct aspect ratio but it can with a click of a button on the remote. It also remember the last ratio for that input...so as long as you are not changing your resolutions often, its not a problem. Now for the...