TRN's Weekly Review, CES 2014 Highlights

Seeing as over the past week CES 2014 has been going on in Las Vegas I though that I would make this weeks weekly review a CES special and share with you what I thought the highlights of 2014 were. While I was not able to attend CES 2014, I have been following it and have found some it very it interesting while most of it not very interesting.
While there was a lot of focus on new 4k televisions with curved and bendable displays this year at CES 2014 this was not the most interesting thing to do with 4k that came out of CES for me. There has been much speculation saying that Nvidia's G-Sync will only be compatible with 1080p TN panels which disappointed a lot of people; however, this was certainly proved untrue by Nvidia as they had a Asus 4k display with a G-Sync module attached running a real world scenario in a game. This is certainly good news for both monitor and gaming enthusiasts a like in the near future they could be seeing the beauty that is 4k combined with G-Sync which will mean no screen tearing along with all of the other benefits of G-Sync. At the demo you were actually able to switch between using G-Sync, V-sync, or neither and the difference was apparently remarkable; with V-Sync there was no screen tearing but big drops in frame rate, with nothing on there was large screen tearing and drops in frame rate, but with G-Sync there was no screen tearing and the frame rate remained at 60 fps throughout.  

Carrying on with PC related things revealed at CES Corsair released a few new interesting things including some new cases. The most interesting was the 760T. The most interesting thing about this case was full acrylic side panel window to really show off your set up and the hardware that you have inside of your rig. The chassis of the case is based upon the 750D, which in itself was a great case, and it maintains almost all of the 750D features. This means that it can be used for a fully custom water loop as it supports a 360mm rad in the top, 240mm rad in the front, and then 120mm rads in the bottom and back. If you are not a fan of that full acrylic window then you can buy the 730T case which is the same but without the window. I think this is a really good looking case with lots of potential for water cooling as well as many things.

One of the more funny things to happen at CES was Michael Bay going off stage mid-way through the Samsung TV presentation. Samsung probably thought that they had hit the jackpot when they got Michael Bay to endorse their new televisions at CES but boy were they wrong. After a Teleprompter fail mid way during his speech Michael Bay said that he would "wing it". Well after a few awkward silences Michael Bay clearly could not take any more of it and walked off stage apologising. I personally think that this was rather amusing but did not look good on Samsung's behalf.

The main focus on CES, alongside with televisions, was were able technology. The amount of coverage that I have seen on Smart Watches, fitness bands, and smart bands was ridiculous so I just talk about one of them, the Pebble Steel Watch. The Pebble Steel has changed the aesthetics completely of the original Pebble and also changed some of the hardware, for example the old Pebble charge will not work with the new Pebble. The main thing about the Pebble Steel is that it is made out of stainless steel. This lends itself to more formal wear than the original Pebble but I personally am not a fan of the new aesthetic.

As a PC enthusiast the most exciting thing to come out of CES 2014 was Project Christine. This Razer's attempt at a fully modular PC. It is nowhere near being complete but what we have seen so far looks amazing. They have a wonderful industrial design going on with many different modules over the whole case, if you can call it a case. One of the most amazing things about it is that it completely oil cooled which makes it incredibly quiet. Because it is oil cooled no fans are required meaning that it can be so quiet. If this were to come to market it will allow so many more people to get into upgrading their PC who had not before because they were too afraid to open their PC. I personally think that this is an amazing idea but will not be with us for a few years unfortunately.

Thank you for reading my highlights of CES 2014, I hope you enjoyed it and if you did please share it on Facebook and Twitter and if you want follow me on Twitter here:
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Steam Mover, how to move steam games and programs to a secondary drive

If you follow me on Twitter you will know that I recently got a new SSD. One of the main problems of getting a new SSD is that in order to get the programs you want from your old HDD to your new SSD then you have to uninstall them and re-install them on your new drive, this can be a huge pain if your moving steam games that are very large files. I was actaully going the other way, moving programs and games from my new SSD to my old HDD; this is because I cloned my HDD onto my SSD using the Samsung software which meant that I had many unwanted programs on my SSD making it almost full.
This is where Steam Mover comes into the equation. As you can probably tell from the name of the app its intended use is to move steam games from their original file location to a new file location but it can be used on any program you want. This is effortless and the makers of this program deserve a round of applause. If you want to download the program follow this link:
http://download.cnet.com/Steam-Mover/3000-2248_4-75764205.html
Once it has downloaded locate where it downloaded to and open it up and double click on the steam mover.exe:

When you double click on it the program will open up, I suggest you make a short cut to your desktop so you do not have to find it each time. When you first open the default file location you will be looking at folder where all of your steam games are by default and it should look like this with all of the games that you have downloaded:

To find the program that you want to move just click on the first three little dots thing (the circled one):

It will then come up with this and locate where the programs are you want to move and select the folder that they are in:

Then click on the second three dots to locate where you want to put it. Once you have selected where you want to move it to, then click on the file so that it is highlighted:

Then click the blue arrow pointing to the right in the bottom right hand corner and it will come up with this command window:

When the command window closes the process is done the command window will close and the program will have changed file location. The whole process is pretty quick considering the size of the files. It is possible to undo the change in file location if you moved it to the wrong place by clicking the blue arrow pointing to the left:

Notice that there will still be a file in the original file location but this is just a short cut to the new file location.
If this helped you remember to share it and follow me on Twitter:
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TRN's Weekly Review, NSA developing a code-cracking Quantum computer

Hello and welcome to the second edition of my weekly review of technology news. Today I am writing about: the latest cryptocurrency "Coinye West", League of Legends has been hit by hackers, Facebook has been sued, Nasa have been using Oculus Rift and the Xbox Kinect, and the NSA are developing a code-cracking Quantum computer.

Ok so the first piece of news this week that amused me was the latest cryptocurrency "Coinye West", as you can probably guess this is a Kanye West based cryptocurrency. If you go to coinyewest.com you will be taken to there website where there is a countdown to when you can start mining this coin as well as some other information. However, despite being named after him, Kanye West actually has no affiliation with the cryptocurrency. This made my weekly review this week is because, for me, it epitomises how ridiculous this whole cryptocurrency thing has gotten. There are so many new different currencies to mine now that it has become stupid. There have been a lot of new cryptocurrencies hitting the market over the last few months since Bitcoin went big but they have not got as much publicity as this but still have been mined heavily. People have been taking these new currencies as a kind of get rich quick scheme. This is because if you mine early on in a cryptocurrency's life then it is much easier to mine and so you get more coins of the currency but as more coins are mined the difficulty increases and so you are less likely to find coins. This means that if the price of the currency does go up later on it in its life time there is the possibility that you could earn a lot of money. This happened for people who caught on early with Bitcoin back in 2009 when it launched but it is becoming less and less likely now that these currencies values are going to go up as much Bitcoin did as there are so many of them.


So the second piece of news this week is gaming related. The very popular on line game League of Legends was targeted by the hacker group Derp. Derp began the attack on Monday by DDOSing US and European servers to get them offline and then later on they did the same to the Asian servers with the same result. One popular League of Legends player PhantomL0rd was documenting the attack on daily Twitch stream and this led Derp to begin to target him. This eventually led to the hacker group to follow him to every game he tried to play and take their servers down. This meant that EA, Blizzard, Battlenet, DOTA 2, Quake Live, Club Penguin, and Reddit all had problems. Also PhantomL0rd's personal details were leaked onto the internet which then led to someone prank calling the police and saying that there were hostages being held at PhantomL0rds house. I think some of what they did went too far, such as releasing personal details onto the internet and causing problems with lots of websites rather than specifically targeting one website/game. However, I do find it amazing that one hacker group can cause this amount of issues.

So Facebook has got itself in trouble this week. They have been sued over allegedly sharing the content of private messages with advertisers and marketers. Apparently as people have been sending messages which includes links to websites, Facebook has been scanning the content of the message, following the link and looks for information so that they can get an idea of the message senders internet activity. This is very useful information for advertisers as they can provide adverts to that user that they are more likely to click on and buy things from. This violates the Electronic Communications  Privacy Act and California Privacy. The people who are accusing Facebook of this are trying to get Facebook to stop doing this and they are looking for as much as $10,000 in damages for each user who has been affected so you could be coming into some money soon. This is another example of how out of control the internet has got in recent years with pretty much all of the big companies spying on us or selling our personal information to advertising companies.

The penultimate piece of news is quite an exciting piece of news I think. NASA have been using the Oculus Rift and the Xbox Kinect to control a robot arm. You can see a video of it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqNC72fgetc
NASA has been using these two pieces of technology to control a robot arm called JACO in real time. NASA say that it works by using the position tracking of the Kinect and rotational tracking of the Oculus to create a first person view for the user. Once it has been set up the user can do simple tasks with the robot arm. If this is successful it could have huge implications for NASA and space exploration in general as we could use the technology to operate things like the Curiosity Rover more accurately and be able to pick up things of interest. The immediate implications of the tests being successful would be using the technology on the Robonaut 2 humanoid on the International Space Station.

My final piece of news is the most interesting and shocking in my opinion. Edward Snowden has been at it again leaking more information about the NSA, this time saying that they are developing a quantum computer which will break the encryption which makes messages secure. It is believed that the NSA has spent $79.7 million on it but that they have not got a working machine yet. Once working the computer would be used to break encryption systems used on line and by foreign governments to send private messages and keep them secure. There have been many revelations about the NSA over the last year and many of them have been shocking, this is another one of those. Once again they are going too far and in my opinion America is becoming less of free country because the NSA is spying on everyone.

Well that is the news for this week, I hope you have enjoyed and if you have remember to share it on Twitter and Facebook and follow me here:
https://twitter.com/TechRandN.