Widget - Sony 4GB and 8GB Memory Stick Pro Duo

Still in CES, Sony unveiled their latest gadgets and accesories. What caught my eye was the new Sony 4GB and 8GB Memory Stick Pro Duos that promise to increase mobile storage capacities.

I'm eyeing the 4GB one for my PSP and Sony Ericsson P910i. I'm just not sure if they would be able to use all that space right away, specially the 8GB version since the PSP as I recall can only support up to 4GB. Perhaps Sony will address this with another firmware update.

These would probably enter the market at a very high price, as they usually do. But we can expect the older models such as 1GB and 2GB Memory Stick Pro Duos to get some further price cut. Here in Japan, a 2GB sells for ¥15,000 or about $130. I've seen them go for $110 on eBay though. The high-speed 2GB version retails for about ¥24,000.

No price quotes are available as of this time.

Wet Dream - Western Digital D1500AFHD RaptorX

In this week's CES in Las Vegas, WD presented its latest offering to tech enthusiasts. The Western Digital D1500AFHD or simply the RaptorX gaming hard disk features a clear viewing window for the platter and the head.

The material is made from a special grade of crystalline polycarbonate developed by WD labs for 2 years. Aside from this innovation, the RaptorX also has a rotation speed of 10,000rpm - something previously only present on SCSI hard drives.

The capacity of 150Gb is a bit on the low side though, but if you need performance and beauty at any price, this baby is the right one for you.

Don't be fooled though, you can only see a portion of the insides of the hard disk through the small window. The rest of it is covered with black-ish material, but cool none the less.

Mod enthusiasts, amittedly myself included, have been trying achieve the same, but often with disastrous results. The RaptorX may not be perfect, but it sure is a step in the right direction. Get yours now for only $349.99.

Troubleshooting - "Page cannot be displayed" or "xyz.com could not be found"

I was in a predicament a while ago. I first noticed the symptoms when my bittorrent client (BitComet) could not connect to any peers other than for those in the DHT network.

When I tried browsing the internet, I'd get "Page cannot be displayed" intermitently, sometimes a refresh will do the trick, or refreshing until internet explorer says "Opening xyz..."

This went on for a good part of 5 hours before I found the solution. At first I thought it was problem with the bittorrent client since I was under a NATted corporate firewall. So I got myself BitSpirit, hoping that it could somehow punch through the security. No go.

Next I looked at transparent http proxy tunneling. These sevices will route all your traffic through your http proxy, usually at port 80 or 8080. There was HTTP-tunnel, but unfortunately even at just the Test connection step, it could not connect to its own servers. Fat chance.

I then browsed for anonymous proxy lists and found some hand full ranging from Croatia to India, from the Philippines to Mexico. I then filtered the list using batch ping and tracerts to get rid of the ones that have been taken down.

I still had about around 20 proxies left. I then *manually* changed the internet explorer settings and restarted the browser for each of these. Though I could browse the internet, it still had the same problem, intermittently showing the "Page cannot be displayed" every so often. It was really getting annoying.

Finally as a last resort, I tried resetting the TCP settings by:

netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt

and then running:

http://downloads.subratam.org/WinsockFix.zip

After a short reboot, viola! I was back on track again. =D

Everything worked perfectly after that. No more browser page reloads, and the peers connected smoothly.

It just left me wondering how it happened in the first place... hmnhh...