CRISTAL allows you to control your entire living room from a Multitouch Table
by Uzair Sajid on August 16, 2009, under Hardware, TestTube
One rather good use of the Microsoft’s Multitouch-cable Surface table would be to control you’re living room – which CRISTAL aims to achieve.
Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces – or CRISTAL is a research project by the Media Interactions Lab backed by the Upper University of Austria of Applied Sciences. CRISTAL is a simple interface that allows you to take control of your digital living room by allowing a simple and intuitive touch based interface to your devices.
Like you can dim your lights by dragging on them on the coffee-table display and play movies stored in your HTPC by dragging and dropping them on the HDTV. Just watch the videos after the break to get a better idea.
ASUS P6X58 Premium – World’s First USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s Motherboard
by Uzair Sajid on July 23, 2009, under Hardware
Photos of the first commercial motherboard to support USB 3.0 and SATA 6 GB/s speeds have been released by – you guessed it – a Chinese hardware forum. The motherboard is for Intel’s X58 platform (Core i7 for the n00bs) and supports six triple channel DDR3 memory slots, and three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots among other features.
As the name implies, the board is aimed at the upper end of the mainstream and enthusiast market and thus would be priced around $250 for sure.
Among other things, it has eight SATA ports, ten USB 2.0 ports (six onboard), two Firewire (one onboard) and an IDE port. For expansion, the board has two legacy PCI slots and a PCI Express x1 slot. You also get dual gigabit LAN, optical and coaxial audio out along with the regular 8 channel audio.
Overall, it sounds like a good board though only hands on testing would reveal just how good it is. Head over to XFatest for more photos.
