Dell has made in their wisdom, or more likely in their knowledge of the uberfanboy’s deepest thoughts, the World of Warcraft Dell XPS laptop. Really. You can get a beefy laptop that plays World of Warcraft well, emblazoned with Horde or Alliance logos, along with a backpack full of WoW stuff, including copies of the game (…a bit pointless, given the type of person who’s actually going to buy it), strategy guides (…), fantasy novels (…right…), beta keys (useful), and even a figurine of your character… That last one even makes me think about getting it… except that I really think I should reach 60 or 70 first…

[Via ExtremeTech]

…Guh? It’s an option that when activated does not add anything to the history, cache or anything, keeping whatever happens in that session from that point onwards “Private”. “Off The Record Browsing” if you will. Great for online banking and other applications where you don’t want your loved ones to see where you’ve been online.

And yes, it’s practically tailor-made for “adult” material viewing.

Via Diggnation and Apple

On my Mac, I use something called “ecto“, which is a bit of blogging software that allows you to lay out the post, to put pictures where you want them, and generally prepare the post offline before posting it on the big wide internet world. Sure, you could edit the blog posts in Microsoft Word or Open Office, and quite frankly for the whole “writing” bit they would be better, but ecto does more than that.
Within ecto, aside from allowing you to write posts, it gives you all the options you need that are in your WordPress control panel. Tagging, Categories, Time Delayed Posts and so on. You can even see a list of the most recent blog posts on the site, edit them within ecto, and then republish them with minor edits.
And as for you multiple blog managing people, you would probably like it for it’s ability to switch between blogs and blog systems with ease. For example, I can very easily edit Blatantly Random and then switch to the Stick of Wrong Dev-Blog, then switch back to BR, with no problems at all.

If you do a lot of blogging, I would highly recommend ecto. It works on both the Mac and the PC, and there’s even a 50% discount on a copy if you buy both versions at the same time. At the moment it’s in version 2, but soon enough there will be version 3, which promises some big changes if this one doesn’t quite tick all your boxes.

So, I disconnected the monitors, peripherals and power leads, shifted the main PC box to my custom made kitchen-worktop desk, and prepared to work…

As you can see the computer has no window mods on the side. My last computer had windows all over it, including the top, oddly. It also had blowholes, but I figured it would be better to have a much larger fan instead of a window and a tiny fan this time. Cue buying a case with a built-in ubersized fan. Really.

Anyway, my internals looked like this:

I first off moved the hard drives up by a space each. This allowed for more freedom with the power cables, and less stretching between the components. It also gives a bit of space at the bottom of the drive bays to put something extra there if I need to in the future.
Secondly, the SATA cables to the DVD-RW and one of the hard drives were routed through the other side of the drive stack, minimizing their visibility. the old fashioned ATA cable got folded along the same section, downwards under the lower hard drive, folded up to the drive connectors, and then the remainder got pushed in between the drives. There’s no real airflow traveling there, so there’s no problem with doing this.

I did use too many power extension cables when I added the second drive many months ago, partly because I was trying to take as little time as possible to install it. With more time available, I could remove most of the extraneous extensions that I didn’t need, reducing the number to a single splitter due to the fans. The fan at the back got lowered a bit to give more available cable so things could be connected sans extensions this time. I don’t see the real need to use an extension cable for something so trivial. All the peripheral molex connectors are now congregated at the bottom and in one place, making it easier to connect them all together. The cable for the large fan, although tightened to keep the system tidier, has enough of a spare “loop” so the door can be removed without disturbing too much of the insides, but not too much that it gets caught up in the large fan’s blades.

The most difficult bit was the audio cable that feeds from the front bays to the back of the case where it connects to the motherboard. There isn’t really enough spare cable to maneuver it to a tidy place, but I ran it between some PCI slots, but only just. The cable is falling out of that tidy place, but if any extra cards are put in it won’t interfere too much.

You’ll notice the lack of card components in the PC. I’m using onboard sound etc, because these ones serve me just right. All that’s there is an Nvidia card and some random wireless networking card. There’s less components to make the system warm.

The last things I did were to de-dust the system, and remove the fluff from the fans. That big fan had a surprisingly low amount of fluff, probably because it spins so slowly compared to other case fans (About 1/3rd of the speed). It was put back together, turned on, and worked again. Only time will tell if it gets any cooler.

And now, for the “After” photos…