So, you want to play Crysis as bad as I do, but your PC barely has enough power to run MSPaint, let alone the sickest, power hungry FPS out there? Well, MaximumPC has put together a sweet gaming rig for under $500 including a case this time… versus the cardboard box they used last time.

The build includes a PowerColor AX4870 512MB Videocard ($175) and a Intel Pentium E5200 2.5GHz Wolfdale CPU ($71), both great choices in terms of power, but I think there are a few more video cards around the same price that you could substitute.

The Parts:
Videocard: PowerColor AX4870 512MB
CPU: Intel Pentium E5200 2.5GHz Wolfdale
Motherboard: MSI P43 Neo3-F LGA 775
Memory: Crucial 2GB DDR2 SDRAM 800
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-S223F 22X DVDR
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJS 320GB
Case and Power Supply: Rosewill TU-155 II 500 Black

I couldn’t find every, single part, but I found most at TigerDirect. If you are willing to spend a little more, for $89 more you can get a EVGA 790i Ultra SLI Barebone Kit – Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 OEM, 4GB OCZ Fatal1ty DDR3-1333, 1TB SATA2, Clear Side ATX Case, 550 Watts at just $589. Bring on the Crysis! [via Gizmodo via MaximumPC]

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Hollywood actor Kal Penn has taken a job in the administration of President Barack Obama. That’s right, Obama and Kumar are going to White Castle House!

Kal Penn, who appeared in TV show House and is best known for his role as a pot-smoking student in the Harold and Kumar movies (Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay), will work in the Office of Public Liaison connecting the President with Asian, Pacific Island communities and arts groups. Sources also say he will also be part of the Whitehouse Hemp Advocate Committee, but that is currently unsubstantiated…

Read more…

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I had two people ask me the past week, “How do you pay for hosting for your website? It’s so expensive…” Seriously? Have these guys even shopped around? I looked around and found 10 great hosts for about $5 per month, pretty reasonable.

Pull your blog off Wordpress.org or Blogger and get your own server (and I don’t mean the sketchy one to the left)–it’s not as expensive as you think! Then you can tell people to go to http://www.kittenreviews.com, instead of http://www.wordpress.org/sites/longurl/snoore/kittenreviews! What you do with your own web space is your own business!

IXWebhosting and FatCow have the best deals, at about $3.95 and $5.50 respectively, for pretty much unlimited everything, including MySQL which is used by Wordpress and most other blogging software.

Given the choice, I think IXWebHosting is the solid choice due to their stellar tech support record, price, and near 0% down time, but I think FatCow is just about equal and also great.

Go to www.deathcarrot.com/webhosting, or click on the tab above to see my top 10.

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It’s new, it’s tiny, it’s the NEW 3rd gen iPod shuffle and it was released on March 11th on the sly!

• 4GB or 1,000 Songs
• They come in Silver or black
• Controls have been moved to the headphones
• “VoiceOver” Text to speech artist and track names and battery life in 14 languages
• 10 hours of playback

Pick either a silver or a black shuffle up at Amazon for $79 and FREE shipping!

CUPERTINO, Calif., March 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced the all-new iPod® shuffle, the world’s smallest music player at nearly half of the size of the previous model, and the first music player that talks to you. The revolutionary new VoiceOver feature enables iPod shuffle to speak your song titles, artists and playlist names. The third generation iPod shuffle is significantly smaller than a AA battery, holds up to 1,000 songs and is easier to use with all of the controls conveniently located on the earphone cord. With the press of a button, you can play, pause, adjust volume, switch playlists and hear the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle features a gorgeous new aluminum design with a built-in stainless steel clip that makes it ultra-wearable.

“Imagine your music player talking to you, telling you your song titles, artists and playlist names,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of iPod and iPhone™ Product Marketing. “The amazingly small new iPod shuffle takes a revolutionary approach to how you listen to your music by talking to you, also making it the first iPod shuffle with playlists.”

iPod shuffle is based on Apple’s incredibly popular shuffle feature, which randomly selects songs from your music library. And now, when you can’t remember the name of a song or an artist playing, with the press of a button iPod shuffle tells you the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle can even tell you status information, such as battery life. With the ability to hold up to 1,000 songs and the VoiceOver feature, you can now easily switch between multiple playlists on your iPod shuffle. iPod shuffle can speak 14 languages including English, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

The new iPod shuffle comes in silver or black and features a sleek and ultra-wearable design with a built-in stainless steel clip. iPod shuffle is the smallest music player in the world and is incredibly easy to clip to almost anything and take with you everywhere you go. iPod shuffle features up to 10 hours of battery life.*

Pricing & Availability

The third generation 4GB iPod shuffle is now shipping and comes in silver or black for a suggested price of $79 (US) through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. iPod shuffle comes with the Apple Earphones with Remote and the iPod shuffle USB cable. iPod shuffle requires a Mac® with a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS® X v10.4.11 or later and iTunes® 8.1 or later; or a Windows PC with a USB 2.0 port and Windows Vista, Windows XP Home or Professional (Service Pack 3) or later and iTunes 8.1.

*Battery life and number of charge cycles vary by use and settings. Seewww.apple.com/batteries for more information. Song capacity is based on four minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding; in 256-Kbps AAC format, song capacity is up to 500 songs; actual capacity varies by encoding method and bit rate. [via Apple]

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The awesome guys over at ThinkGeek.com sent me some goodies to support my Stolen iPhone Cause and I’m gonna give them away to all you guys for being so awesome and because I love having strange contests.

Up for grabs first is a super cool Pogo iPhone Stylus: Since the iPhone’s (and iPod touch) glassy, touch sensitive screen is only sensitive to skin… a normal stylus don’t work. This is because it uses a technology called capacitive touch which measures the flow of electrons through your skin. The Pogo iPhone Stylus has magically solved this problem by tricking the iPhone into thinking it’s really a finger. How do they do it? Frankly I’m not sure      * Specially designed stylus works with iPhone and iPod Touch      * Enables precision selection of on-screen items (think games)      * Included clip keeps the Pogo Stylus handy      * Soft tip material keeps your screen clean while you tap $14.95 over at ThinkGeek.com

The Contest: tsteele999 won this time around, check back later this week for item #2!

1. Go to ThinkGeek.com

2. Find something you think is super cool and copy the link.

3. Make a comment on this post with the link, the name of the item, and why you think you item is super cool (I like the Dismember-Me Plush Zombie, because as all of you know, I have a zombie fetish).

4. Sit back and wait to see if you win, I’ll pick the name sometime Sunday evening. Good Luck!

*** For an extra entry (limit 1 per person) Tweet, “Deathcarrot.com is giving away some cool gadgets for free from ThinkGeek.com! http://tw1.us/b4 #DCcontest RT” ***

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Debates are raging as to what the future of movie distribution will look like. There are those who claim that physical discs like DVDs, Blu-ray, and whatever format will eventually supplant Blu-ray will always deliver a superior viewing experience versus anything that will be available via streaming. Pundits on the other side of the debate, say that as broadband’s footprint continues to expand and quality is improving.

Interestingly, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is siding firmly with the latter camp and it would even appear that Netflix is gearing up to move all of its eggs from the mail-distribution basket to the online streaming basket. Hastings indicated that perhaps as soon as later this year or sometime in 2010, Netflix might start offering online-streaming-only subscription plans beyond just its current Starz plan.

I am super excited that they are even considering this move, because 90% of my Netflix experience is via my Xbox 360. Streaming is one of the best things Netflix ever did, keeping me occupied while I have to wait for the snail mail to come! [via Slashdot]

Try Netflix streaming to your Xbox 360 for 2 weeks completely FREE
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As of Feb 17th, 2009, only 9 days after posting, the www.deathcarrot.com and Twitter community donated enough money for me to get a new iPhone — this really is the iPhone that Twitter bought! Thank you so much for your kind words and extremely generous donations, I could have never done it without every single one of you.

Etchstar.com has agreed to etch the names of all the donors into the iPhone for me and I’ll am sending it off sometime this week!

Unboxing pictures coming soon!

The Donors:

Brian McCormack – BigFatDummy.com $100	Jason Winder – Webnet-it.co.jp $75
Daniel Rivera – $68	Scott Vann – $25
Selvin Ortiz – Kodespark.com $20	Jesse Bazelais – $20
Mitchell Leske – $20	Danilo Vujevic – Ukvgb.net $15
Amanda Kruel – Audrizzle.com $13	Jennifer Kirkland – $10
Martin Grider – Chesstris.com $10	Darrell Madore – $10
Bunjava.com – $10	Jonathan Davis – Snowulf.com $5
Meditationsolution.com – $5	Wilson – WilsonShow.com $5
SneakerWorldwide.com – $5	Nichole Wheat – $3
Jennifer Kerr – Jennypincher.blogspot.com $2	Steven Graziano – Arsdraconis.us $2
Shesgotcurves.com – $2	Brien Wiggins – Aggielandgh.com $2

Last but not least, the guys over at Cheese Blocks Effects sent me a guitar effects pedal, and I gotta be honest, it is the best sounding Tubescreamer I have ever heard. Check them out at www.cheeseblockseffects.com, they do tons of custom work and mods.

On Feb. 4th, some jerks broke into my jeep right outside my house and stole my iPhone, made a few calls, and then, I assume, removed the SIM card — It’s probably on Craigslist, Ebay, or in a pawn shop as you read this! Now, I haven’t had a normal job since October and Deathcarrot.com has pretty much been my only job since then. If you can spare any change or even a few dollars so that I can replace my stolen iPhone, it would be greatly appreciated.

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Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.

Man, look at that footage, the in game play portions look pretty impressive! I am totally stoked!

Resident Evil 5, is the forthcoming installment in the Resident Evil survival horror video game series, which is set to debut for PlayStation 3 and, for the first time in the series, on Xbox 360. RE5 is scheduled for release on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe.
Help me out, pre-order at Amazon =)

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By law, full-power television stations nationwide must begin broadcasting exclusively in a digital format by June 12, 2009. The U.S. Congress approved an extension of the deadline, which was originally set for February 17.

Way back in 1996 the U.S. Congress authorized the distribution of an additional broadcast channel to each broadcast TV station so that they could start a digital broadcast channel while simultaneously continuing their analog broadcast channel. Later, Congress set June 12, 2009 as the final date that full-power television stations could broadcast in analog.

Fast-forward to today, if you are a late-adaptor, your time is up now — today, nearly 100% of all major networks turned off their analog signals, forcing those with circa-90’s era bunny ears and black-and-whiteTV’s even further into the stone age.

The solutions are numerous and simple:

1. Get Cable or Satellite Service:
It’s 2009, Cable and Satilite Service can be had with 100’s of channels for under $30 a month and bundled with internet in some cases. I like the Dish Network, cheap, lots of channels, and the picture is crystal clear — only about $20 a month too.

2. Get a Digital-to-Analog Converter Box:
If you’d like to go the non-cable/sat route, you can get a converter box at Amazon for about $30-$40. Every U.S. household can get up to two coupons–each with a code good for $40 off the cost of eligible converter boxes on Amazon right now.

3. Stop Watching Traditional TV and Get An Over-the-Internet or Rental Service:
While you might not be able to completely replace your TV, you can do a darn good job. Hulu.com offers a free, legal way of watching some of your favorite shows (like Family Guy or 30 Rock) online, any time you want.

Other options include Blockbuster Total Access or Netflix, they let you rent DVD’s from their website and get them to your door in a day or 2. They also have a service where you can stream 1000’s of movies and TV shows instantly to your computer or TV (even your Xbox 360 with Netflix).

I hope this guide gives you an informed choice about your TV usage and provides an option that will fit into your budget. Again, cable and satellite TV subscribers with analog TVs hooked up to their cable or satellite service should not be affected by the transition to full-power analog broadcasting. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment.

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Mobileread just got a bunch of official-looking Kindle 2 photos, which show it in various states being held and read, plus info that it’s being released for $359 on February 24.

From the photos, it looks definitely a LOT thinner than the first, and maybe even a bit smaller too. Unless that man has gigantic hands, the Kindle goes from the tip of his middle finger to slightly below his wrist—not too shabby.

I think it looks amazing, but man, I just can’t afford another $350+ gadget, but then again, we don’t know with 100% certainty that this is the actual price and actual release date until we hear from Amazon. If I ever pay that much for what is really just an over-glorified digital book, please feel free punch me in the balls. [via Gizmodo]

Preorder Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

 

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