Memory toys are in excess

ANOTHER SET OF COOL TOYS in an irregular regular series of articles. We start out with wretched excess. What do I mean? Well, OCZ has done it again, when most people are talking about less power, OCZ talks about more. No, not their really slick adjustable power supplies, but their new High Voltage RAM.

The aptly named EL PC-3200 Voltage eXtreme Gold Edition memory is simply DDR-400 memory specced at 2-3-3 timings when running stock voltages, but it drops to 2-2-2 when you crank the power up to 3.2 volts. Most sane people would never do this, but the overclocking fringe will eat this memory up.

One thing you don't want to mix with high voltage is water, in fact most electronic devices don't like a good soak. If you have an iPod mini and don't want to fry it next time you go scuba diving, take a look at H2O Audio. They are coming out with a waterproof case for the littlest of the color-coded Jobsian creations, so you can lounge in the hot tub and be in complete control of your iPod. You can read about it on the site here in a day or two when the product is officially launched.

Moving back to computers, we head back to CoolerMaster, and their new Thermal Sensor Cable. While it may not seem like much, it is just a cable with a sensor on the end that can plug into any of the temperature monitoring devices on the market. This means the power is now yours and you can monitor your machine the way you want.

Last up, we get to one of those 'about #*&$#^ time' browsing features from Opera. They are not slowing down in the browser innovation arena, and just came out with a technology that I am going to have to get as soon as I am done writing this up. It is called ERA, for Extensible Rendering Architecture, and it makes things neatly fit on a single page. If you are sick of scrolling left and right for oversized HTML monstrosities, your fix has finally arrived. ERA should debut in Opera 7.60, the beta of which you can download now. Get it and banish the ugly scroll bars forever, happy surfing campers. µ