While conventions are great fun to attend as a passive "audience member" as you not only get to network but get tons of free swag, they are a royal nuisance when you are one of the people on the other side of the coin! It's not even the networking aspect which is the worse part (i.e. answering the same darn question ten bazillion times); no, it is all the prep work which goes on behind the scenes which can make it a real nightmare. Out of all the worse parts involved, the prep work of custom flash drives has to be right up there next to "designated driver" on the scut work list of things you do NOT want to be in charge of!

Just hours ago a new Linux KMS driver entered the world for the Cirrus GPU. Yes, as in that from Cirrus Logic for an ancient CL-GD5446 ASIC, this was a 2D-only 64-bit VisualMedia accelerator. But, fortunately, it is not for the actual hardware itself but rather the virtual incarnation that is emulated by QEMU and QEMU-KVM. Those running a Linux KVM virtualization stack with QEMU and the Cirrus adapter can now benefit from a kernel mode-setting driver.

The iPad follows most of its users all over the house, the main problem we have found is that we don’t have anywhere safe to set it in the kitchen. It either gets dirty or is to far away when you are cooking. Woodforddesign has found a solution for this, they have made a FridePad which is a holder for the iPad that sticks on to the fridge / freezer with a huge magnet on the back of it.

How well does this thing work and does it have a future? These are two questions we are going to take a look at today.

Everything you buy tends to be electronic based and of course this comes with a charger or power supply of some form. This wasn't really a problem a few years ago back but most people now have multiple devices that fit this category and as such have many chargers, I'd go as far as saying I have well over 30 different chargers in my room that are used most weeks! Unfortunately chargers are not only bulky and have a large length of cable but the real problem I find is that they are all very similar but not usually the same. This means it can take you a while to find the correct charger and untangle the mass of cables that inevitably get mixed up. For this reason I'd love a product that was able to charge all of my devices in one place, especially if it could be done wirelessly (as so to speak).

Powermat have as such built a device that could potentially solve this problem. It does after all seem a lot easier to walk into a room and place any device down on a mat and as you walk out to pick it back up and for it to be charged. However this to me does still feel and sound futuristic but maybe Powermat are ahead of their time.

Following up on our Thermal Compound Roundup - February 2011 and Thermal Compound Roundup - March 2011 reviews, we are adding five more thermal compounds to our roundup for a total of 15 different models from Antec, Arctic Silver, Biostar, Cooler Master, Coolink, Deepcool, Evercool, Gelid, Noctua, Prolimatech, Spire, Thermalright, Xigmatek, and Zalman. In this review we will see if certain products are superior to others.

Both TTeSports Conkor and Dasher mouse pads from Thermaltake come with simple but modern designs, and are built from high quality materials. The included carry pouches are a plus for people that go frequently at LAN Parties, but also protect them from dust accumulation.

Following our last reviews of the Areca 1880 RAID Card and LSI 9260-81 MegaRAID Card, we are going to take an indepth look at LSIs new release, the LSI 9265-8i MegaRAID Card, an eight-port PCI Express SATA+SAS RAID Controller that is configured for 6Gb/s devices.

With the speed and power of SSDs reinventing mainstream storage, RAID card manufacturers are challenged to deliver a product that can handle the massive throughput and high random reads of these solid state drives. Manufacturers then raise the bar by combining these SSDs into ultra speedy RAID arrays , the end result of which is shown in the LSI 9265-8i as we have today.