Thursday, March 31, 2011

Review – Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 Championship PC Gaming Headset


Last we were lucky to receive the Sonar 5.1 Championship PC Gaming Headset from Cyber Snipa. I was fortunate to be able to take this headset to the past LAN War at Indiana University and really put it through the gauntlet so-to-speak. After a long tandem of hourly gaming, I’ve got the stats on this superior headset.

The Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 Championship headset is a bit unlike any other headset I’ve used. The design is really top-notch, and to be honest, it just looks really cool. It’s very comfortable on the top of your head, but you may run into problems if you have large ears like me. The ear pieces are comfortable, but smaller than they look. I first thought I could turn them, which would be cool, but they’re fixed and won’t slide.After a while, though, you don’t really notice the issue, so it’s not a big complication.

Technically the headset performs at the top of its class. It connects through USB, so it’s great for on-the-go gaming. The drivers installed instantly and the headset was ready to go. With 8 individual speakers, it’s great to use when you’re in a room with a lot of ambient noise. Sitting in a crowded area with gamers all around me yelling, computers buzzing, and people conversing everywhere, the Sonar did a great job of producing enough sound to keep me focused on the game.

Here are the tech specs on the speakers themselves:

SPEAKERS


Front Center Rear Subwoofer
Drive Diameter ø30mm ø40mm ø30mm ø27mm
Impedance 32Ω 32Ω 32Ω
Frequency Response 20~20KHz 18~20KHz 20~20KHz 10~400Hz
Output power 200mW 400mW 200mW 600mW
Signal to noise ratio >50dB >50dB >50dB >50dB
T.H.D 0.4% 0.1% 0.4% 1%
Sensitivity (S.P.L) 108dB 100dB 108dB

Along the connector cord is a channel controller that allows you to change the volume of the main, rear, center, front, and subwoofer speakers in the headset. These come in handy when you want to fine-tune the sound to any game, video, or style of music you’re listening to. Add that to the adjustment software that’s available for download with the Sonar, and you have limitless ability to adjust the settings to near perfection for your playing needs. I was able to hear every spoken word, every creeping monster, and every shot fired in my direction.

The Sonar even comes with its own carrying case once you take it out of its packaging. The case makes it easy to pack up and travel to wherever your gaming takes you, enabling you to take the headset along for the ride. It’s not one of those cases where it’s impossible to fit everything in. I takes about ten or so seconds to pack, zip up, and get going.

The Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 Championship Headset performed great for what it was designed for. With its travel case and USB connection method, it was a great headset to have with me when traveling to game. While it was a little bit uncomfortable to me, I eventually lost sight of that while using it. It did get a bit hot since the ear pieces are insulated to cancel out noise, which required me to take breaks. All in all the headset worked out great for me. Sitting at about $80, this is a perfect headset for the price, and Cyber Snipa delivered with it. If you’re looking for a cheaply-priced headset, the Sonar Championship is what I recommend for you.

Kororaa Linux 14 Beta 5


Chris Smart has released a new development build of Kororaa Linux 14, a Fedora-based desktop distribution: "Kororaa 14 (code name 'Nemo') beta 5 has been released for download, in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours with KDE and GNOME. If you've been waiting to try out Kororaa, this is the version to test! I have finally packaged up all of the system (configuration file) changes we make, into RPMs in the Kororaa repository. This means that future changes can be pushed out via updates - theoretically, no need to re-install when the new release comes out (unless you want to). New features: update to Firefox 4 by default for KDE and GNOME; packaged all Kororaa system changes into RPM repository. Bug fixes: fixed missing dictionaries in LibreOffice." Here is the brief release announcement. Download (SHA1): Kororaa-14-Beta5-i686-Live-KDE.iso (1,708MB), Kororaa-14-Beta5-i686-Live-GNOME.iso (1,521MB), Kororaa-14-Beta5-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso (1,753MB), Kororaa-14-Beta5-x86_64-Live-GNOME.iso (1,567MB).

Download Mirrors https://kororaa.org/download/

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Pioneer SE-NC31C-K Noise Cancelling Earbuds


Earbud style headphones already do a pretty good job at blocking out most ambient sounds and noises while you listen to music, but they’re not perfect. Neither are Pioneer’s new SE-NC31C-K earbuds, but thanks to built-in noise cancelling technology they manage to filter out about 90% of unwanted sounds, which could mean the difference between enduring crying babies for hours or catching a few Z’s on a long flight.

The earbuds feature some surprisingly hefty 14.3mm drivers which should deliver impressive bass performance, and the inline sound processing unit is powered by a single AAA battery which is promised to provide up to 120 hours of peace and quiet. Available now for a reasonable $99 given the extra noise cancelling functionality.

Toorox 03.2011


Jörn Lindau has announced the availability of a new development version of Toorox, a Gentoo-based desktop distribution, which previews the latest development snapshot of GNOME 3: "The next generation of the GNOME 3.0 desktop is near completion. If you want to test it, you can get the recent development release of Toorox 03.2011 'GNOME3-RC'. It's only available as a 32-bit image. It contains Linux kernel 2.6.37, GNOME 3.0 RC, X.Org Server 1.9.5, LibreOffice 3.3.2, IceCat 3.6.16.... Attention should be paid to the fact, that GNOME 3 needs accelerated graphics support. If the video driver doesn't support this, the desktop will start in a fallback mode" which can't represent all of the functions and the look and feel of the new generation of GNOME. This will happen, for example, if you have an NVIDIA graphics card. But this is no problem - click on Systemconfig in the black panel and start the NVIDIA driver." Here is the full release announcement with screenshots. Download: Toorox_03.2011-32bit_GNOME3-RC.iso (1,482MB, MD5).

Download Mirrors http://toorox.de/index.php/en/download

openSUSE 11.4 "Edu Li-f-e"


Jigish Gohil has announced the release of openSUSE 11.4 "Edu Li-f-e", a specialist edition of openSUSE designed for schools: "The openSUSE Education team is proud to present openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 11.4. This release includes the latest carefully selected software for students, educators, as well as parents. The software selection encompasses everything required to make a productive computing experience for either home or educational use without having to install anything additional. Right out of the box, educators and parents will be pleased to see over 150 applications to fit their student's needs. A wide range including mental exercise tools like Brain Workshop and GBrainy, science applications like Chemtool, mathematical programs like Euler, artistic development software like TuxPaint and GIMP...." Read the full release announcement which includes screenshots. Download: openSUSE-Edu-li-f-e-11.4-1-i686.iso (2,862MB, MD5).

Download Mirrors http://software.opensuse.org
http://mirrors.opensuse.org/list/all.html

Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-23

Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-23, a new stable version of the specialist live CD designed for disk cloning: "Stable Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-23 has been released. This release includes major enhancements, changes and bug fixes: the underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded to Debian 'Sid' (as of 2011-03-28); Linux kernel was updated to 2.6.38; Partclone was updated to 0.2.22; Live-boot was updated to 2.0.15; language files were updated; new packages were added - disktype, ufsutils; Memtest86+ was updated to 4.20; a mechanism was added to check if the saved image is restorable; a better mechanism was added to deal with multiple slices of a BSD system; 'noatime' and 'nodiratime' options are now used when mounting file system in prep-ocsroot...." Continue reading the release announcement for a full changelog. Download (MD5): clonezilla-live-1.2.8-23-i686.iso (128MB), clonezilla-live-1.2.8-23-amd64.iso (134MB).

Download Mirrors http://www.clonezilla.org/downloads.php