General

If you don’t know what this is, YouTube it after you finish with this article. Any explanation I give it cannot possible do it justice. Essentially, kinetic typography can be described as a relatively new form of art that involves a systematic and dynamic displaying of words in an animated fashion, in conjunction with audio of a speech or another spoken line.

That was a mouthful!

Basically, it’s a video where the words of the audio transcript fly on and off the screen in animated ways such that they keep up with the audio. It’s sort of like the old bouncing ball lyrics you’d see at the bottom of your childhood sing a long videos, except on steroids.

Creating a kinetic typography piece of even a short speech or audio of a famous movie scene is an EXTREMELY time consuming process. That means two things: there aren’t a whole lot of kinetic typography videos being made and that the ones that are made are VERY meaningful to the artist who created them.

Again, there is no possible way I could describe this type of art in a blog post like this and convey how utterly awesome it is. So do yourself a favor and YouTube it!

Seriously. They are. Have you even used a good quality wireless mouse from a reputable brand? There is absolutely NO noticeable difference in accuracy, speed, or reliability. The only really noticeable difference is that… well…. the wire is missing!

“Yeah, So what?” you might ask. Well, the best thing about a wireless mouse is the amount and degree of freedom it affords you. You can lean back and relax and still adjust your volume. You can lay in your bed and keep control of your DVD functions. And you can even hand it to your friend who’s sitting next to you when he is unsuccessfully trying to verbally to navigate you to a website, and let him take you there himself. Trust me, it’s a lot easier.

And the performance of a good wireless mouse these days meets or even exceeds the performance of a wired USB mouse. And the reason is simple. Wired devices run on frequencies just like wireless devices. Therefore, if your wireless mouse runs at a higher frequency than your wired mouse (which can often be the case) then your wireless mouse will actually have a faster connection to your PC than your wired one.

Pretty cool, isn’t it?

That’s right. We’ve reached a new, depressing landmark in global warming history. A nation has finally superseded the United States in terms of total green house gas emissions.

China’s modern industrial revolution paired with a socialist government that lacks the incentive to initiate and enforce environmental controls has led to the birth of an environmentally unfriendly monster.

You can read news reports of a giant smog cloud created by China that is slowly creeping across Asia and on its way to Europe. It’s blocking out the sun over the cities and towns it floats above, and even immerses them in a fog-like cloud of pollution. It’s sad really, looking at the satellite photos of the thing. What are we doing to planet earth?

But another question is, do we really have the room to point the finger at China? We’re not exactly innocent here when it comes to environmental awareness. And the United States is still, by far and above, the greatest contributor of global greenhouse gasses when you look at total historical amounts emitted. So where do we go from here? Can we trust that China will reform like we have done? Or do we have to take action?

This is one of the more popular questions amongst newbies in the PC building arena. I’ve been asked it many times over and have yet to find a good, short n’ sweet explanation of what it is that I could link to instead of explaining it myself each time. So I decided to make that link myself : )

To understand what over clocking is, you need to understand the basics of how a computer component operates. Essentially, what a processor, graphics card, or memory does is take a little bit of electricity, run a series of operations and calculations using that electricity, takes a bit more electricity, runs more operations and calculations, and so on and so forth. These are called “cycles”, and cycles are expressed in Hertz. That’s the “1.5GHz” reading you’re used to seeing on a computer’s spec sheets.

What over clocking does is force your computer to run more cycles in a given period of time. So, instead of performing 1.5 billion cycles, or 1.5 Gigahertz, you force your computer to run 2.5 billion cycles per minute, or 2.5 Gigahertz.

As complicated as it sounds, that’s really at it is. Simple enough, huh?