Sure, there’s always the pukelight for good times around the house, but sometimes you’ve just got to do some damage — which is where The Torch from Wicked Lasers comes in. The 4100-lumen flashlight is being considered for the Guiness Book of World Records, and can ignite paper, light cigarettes, melt plastic, and even fry an egg — but only has a fifteen minute battery life. Check a video of The Torch taking out a pile of plastic bags after the break, and hit the read link for even more high-candlepower destruction.

[Via I4U News]

This one sure hasn’t generated much, if any, fanfare, but it looks like those that take their Rock Band wailing (a little too) seriously can now get their hands on a new and improved (and official) microphone. According to the appropriately-named Rocker74 of the ScoreHero forums, you’ll have to drop a hefty $50 to your hands on it, but for that you’ll apparently get a microphone that is heavier and “definitely” higher quality than the standard issue mic. There still doesn’t seem to be any official word on the microphone, however, so availability might be hit and miss for a while yet.

[Thanks, John P]

Update: As some of you have pointed out, it appears that the microphone’s packaging says its for PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, which would certainly be an interesting development, given that we still haven’t heard anything official about Rock Band for the Wii. More on that as we get it. [Thanks, garfep]

This one sure hasn’t generated much, if any, fanfare, but it looks like those that take their Rock Band wailing (a little too) seriously can now get their hands on a new and improved (and official) microphone. According to the appropriately-named Rocker74 of the ScoreHero forums, you’ll have to drop a hefty $50 to your hands on it, but for that you’ll apparently get a microphone that is heavier and “definitely” higher quality than the standard issue mic. There still doesn’t seem to be any official word on the microphone, however, so availability might be hit and miss for a while yet.

[Thanks, John P]

Update: As some of you have pointed out, it appears that the microphone’s packaging says its for PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, which would certainly be an interesting development, given that we still haven’t heard anything official about Rock Band for the Wii. More on that as we get it. [Thanks, garfep]

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3160815AS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

What can I really say?  It’s a Hard Drive under $50 and double the capacity of the two 80gig HDD’s I have in right now.  Funny thing is I have my main Operating System on a Western Digital Raptor 74gig 10,000 RPM Hard Drive, and the output of this drive is the same as the Raptor.  The only advantage the WD Raptor has over this drive is faster seek times… which matters more for database driven systems and the like, not a huge difference for desktop applications… kinda makes me wonder why I paid $150 back in the day for the WD Raptor in the first place.

Oh well, I’m not complaining about either.  I have the Operating System, a few small programs, and games installed on the WD, larger programs, and a storage dump on the Seagate, music, and media files on the other drive.  My computer starts up quick enough (with most start-up programs coming from two sources), and does what I want it to.  I’m testing out the Seagate to see about later this year getting three more and putting four of them in RAID 5EE for ultra fast transfer speeds (also with a RAID controller that gives me a dedicated 500mhz processor for the Hard Drive, and 256mb DDR2 of dedicated Hard Drive cache)

Stats for both the Western Digital Raptor, and Seagate Barracuda:

[caption id="attachment_15" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="HD Tune Benchmark WD Raptor"][/caption]

I thought the spike or drop in performance in the middle of the drive may have been a fluke, but I’ve tested it many times, it does the same thing every time.  Even with other hard drive benching software.

[caption id="attachment_17" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Seagate Barracuda 160GB HDD"][/caption]

The Seagate does not have as “straight” of a line across as the Raptor, but it has a much higher maximum output speed, no degrading performance spike in the middle, and a much higher capacity.  The higher capacity could be to blame for the sharp decline in performance towards the end of the drive.