I picked up yet another small form factor system again yesterday.

And boy is this one SHINY!!! Size wise well... it's a small form factor unit for generic parts (instead of custom made ones) so here's a size reference shot.

I basically needed a system for file archival purposes, so I threw in the cheapest 160GB Seagate SATA drive I could find, an added plus of the Seagate HDD is that it's slimmer than other 3.5" drives... or maybe that's how big they are right now?

The casing (and motherboard) that I got from Ifician has enough space for one 3.5" hard disk, a floppy drive and a 5.25" drive.

The board I got is an Intel D945GCLF2, it's one of those boards with everything built in and all you need to get it running is to plunk in a stick of ram and a drive.

The board is interesting because it has the Atom 330 processor on it, which is essentially a DUAL CORE Hyper threading enabled Atom processor. Which means you get to see 4 processor bars when you bring up Task Manager in Windows. Which is cool.

The Atom 330 is more than capable of handling your typical day to day computing tasks of web browsing, office work, etc. etc. But I was also interested in checking out video performance. Cause the board comes with a S-Video out port which means it is possible to build a simple media playing PC from this unit.

After a few tests, the 330 seems to be adequate to play most 720P HD quality videos (as long as you're not pulling them from the network)  Just forget about 1080P videos and you'll be ok. Then if you need better sound outputs, well... there IS a PCI slot on the board.

Bought a new toy to play with today, I guess you can call them building blocks but not in the usual sense. Basically they look like this.

A bunch of ball joints, connectors and beams. Put a few of the basic parts together and you can get something simple like this.

So you end up with something looking like a Stikfas figure without the personality since the parts are generic. But of course, because this is basically just LEGO for making figures. You can go wild and make weird things such as.

What the heck is this supposed to be?

I guess I wanted it to be a ship of some kind but guess that didn't work out too well. But my main creation is this little guy.

A chicken walker mech with an auto cannon for the right arm and a (out of focus) beam canon on it's left. And because the beam canon needs to be oversized and menacing.

It can open up in ATTACK MODE!!! God I need to get that sheet of white foam so I can take pictures with a cleaner backdrop...

Anyway? What is this thing that I bought?

They're called ASOBLOCK, and while they cost a lot I considered it a little birthday present for myself since I couldn't find a Rovio this time around...

How much it sucks that WZ has still not understood how to blow his nose. He caught a little bug going around and was waking up every 2 hours at night due to the clogged nose.

Vaporrub helps... a bit. Trying to suck the mucus out was a totally futile action, it's hard enough trying to get the temperature through his ear.

Finally!! The Silverlight Streaming Service is now ready and compatible with Silverlight 2.0 Release version! To celebrate.. let's have a quick deep zoom album…. hmmm.. maybe I should just throw images in without worrying about how well they look?

Hmmm.. maybe I should make one of the panoramas I made. So here they are.

Microsoft's PDC conference is happening right now and already a boatload of announcements have been made about upcoming technologies, platforms and overall cool shit coming from Microsoft.

WAAAAAY too many to mention here so check out the official site at http://www.microsoftpdc.com