Hey, looks like LightScribe has come out with an even cooler way to label your disks.

LightScribe Direct Disc Labeling today announced the launch of the LightScribe Design Center, a free resource available on www.lightscribe.com offering more than 400 CD/DVD labeling designs with themes such as weddings, music, gifts, travel, photography and business. Anyone owning a LightScribe-enabled computer or external CD or DVD burner can visit the LightScribe Design Center, explore free designs by theme and immediately create visually striking full disc designs – complete with personalized photos and text.

In addition to offering hundreds of designs free of charge, the LightScribe Design Center has the following CD/DVD labeling resources:

Photo Labeling Center: Customer can combine digital photos with text to create personalized and one-of-a-kind disc designs.

Disc Sleeve Designer: With this easy to use tool, customers create vibrant customized designs for jewel cases and disc sleeves by choosing a background, dragging art, adding text, and printing.

Creative Extras: Customers can design labels with themes that include creative extras like matching mailers and custom cards. Users can create printable mailers in minutes.

Find out more over at LightScribe’s website.

This is the coolest DIY project I have seen in a long time, and definitely an interesting project if you want to live off the grid. Fifteen columns of soda cans are used to harvest the suns rays and provide some pretty good water heating performance.

According to the maker:

Peak BTU performance was observed during the noon hour period in October 2001 wherein the temp rise was 50 to 54F degrees resulting in a 9000 to 9720 Btu or 2636 to 2847 Watts. Peak BTU performance will actually increase in colder weather due to the rise in temperature between input and output temperature and a lower angle of incidence.

What you need is a whole lot of soda cans, some conductive black paint and the time, patience and skills to pull a build like this off. Check out the video for some more technical details. [Cansolair via Hacked Gadgets]

Link to the original article…

I swear that Tweaktown has a hidden webcam or something in my house. My little Shuttle boxed up computer had some A-Data RAM with some red metal heat spreaders that due to my fondling with the system enough times, it had actually come loose and was not probably properly dispersing heat.

Enter this tutorial about how to replace memory heat spreaders by Tweaktown.

- This will void your warranty!
- Do not attempt this mod unless you can afford to replace the RAM if you happen to break it!
- TweakTown and its associates are not responsible for any damage or harm caused in any way!

It even goes into how to freeze your RAM… you know I have to link that type of action. Wish me luck… perhaps my RAM heatsink replacement operation will go without a hitch.

Via is at it again. Not content with making motherboards and CPU’s that could easily fit in your pocket - wow, the geek jokes are endless on that one, they’ve now come out with a motherboard that supports dual displays. Yep… their platform that fits in the palm of your hand now supports dual monitors.

The key to the outstanding multimedia performance of the VIA EPIA M700 is the latest media system processor from VIA, the VIA VX800. An all-in-one, highly integrated digital media IGP chipset, the VIA VX800 offers incredible versatility and multimedia performance on the latest display standards on a single chip measuring just 33×33mm…

As today’s information, entertainment and commercial display system feature ever more immersive content, the VIA EPIA M700 addresses the increasing demands for enhanced media playback and visual clarity across multiple displays in digital multimedia applications with support for dual-DVI or DVI plus HDMI configurations with unique resolutions, pixel depths and refresh rates.

Featuring a 1.5GHz or a fanless 1.0GHz VIA C7® processor, the VIA EPIA M700 leverages the uncompromising multimedia performance of the VIA VX800 unified chipset with its integrated VIA Chrome9™ HC3 integrated graphics core for DirectX™ 9.0 3D graphics and up to six-channel VIA Vinyl HD Audio rich surround sound, while the VIA Chromotion™ video engine provides advanced hardware video acceleration and an improved visual experience for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, VC1 and DivX video, plus a VMR capable HD video processor.

As multimedia file sizes grow, so speedy server connectivity is becoming increasingly important in dynamic digital signage and kiosk solutions, so the VIA EPIA M700 boasts two PCI-Express based Gigabit LAN ports to facilitate wideband data transfer for large video and other files over networks.

Read more over at Via’s website.

Seriously… I was just talking to a friend about an idea just like this where the copper plate over the heatpipes in most heatsinks seem to cover the most effective portion of the CPU cooler, the heatpipes (!!) while I was helping him build his own machine:

“Today we are looking at a product from Sunbeamtech, the parent company of Tuniq, maker of the popular Tuniq CPU coolers. Our sample today is called the Core-Contact Freezer and I think everyone reading this is going to look at the biggest feature of the CCF and wonder why they didn’t think of it first. I know I did.

The Core-Contact Freezer features four 8mm heatpipes that contact the CPU’s Integrated Heat Surface (IHS) directly. This was accomplished by flattening the round pipe at the contact area with the CPU. The result is eliminating the copper plate between the CPU and heatpipes and in theory removing an extra surface for heat to travel through at a key area.”

Read more over at Tweaktown.