Vertical Technology Blog

About 4 years ago I considered myself a hardcore case modder.  I got a new case and took my Dremel to it and after 30 hours of work and many case fans later I had a computer case sporting no less than 9 LED 80mm fans complete with cold cathode lighting inside.  It looked great when it was lit up but it sounded like a B-12 bomber was in the room with you. 

Water cooling was always there, but out of my budget and to be honest I didn’t feel comfortable putting water that close to my precious gaming rig.  Hardcore Computer (www.hardcorecomputer.com) has an unexpected alternative.  They have created a dielectric mineral oil cooled PC they call The Reactor.  The really interesting thing is that the coolant is not piped throughout plastic tubing and blocks attached to critical points in your PC case. 

The whole computer is immersed in a case filled with the oil.  This has been done with a 10 gallon aquarium and cooking oil, but after a few days it will get a nice stench to it.  Standard platter hard drives are not used in their configurations.  Instead they use SSD drives so they can be submersed as well.  Hardcore Computer systems start out at $4000 and go up as much as $11,000.  Not a bad way to blow through your kid’s inheritance.

NetBlender has BD Touch technology that will work directly with BD Live and allow your iPhone or iPod Touch to interact with your Blu-ray player.  BD Touch would utilize the geo location features of your iPhone, the 3D sensors and easy to use QWERTY keyboard to enhance your experience.  This opens doors for you to enjoy a large amount of data trading between your gadgets.

You could keep detailed lists of your Blu-ray collection and get movie suggestions that match your taste.  While the movie is playing, trivia and extra information about the movie can be displayed.  Games and other features could definitely enhance things for you as well.  All of these things can happen as the Blu-ray is playing.

Also, your iPhone can be morphed into a lovely remote control for your Blu-ray player and keep things easily controlled from afar as you enjoy your collection.  It works over a WiFi connection, so no matter where you are located, if you have that, you can enjoy BD Touch technology fairly easily.

Grace Digital has a wonderful gadget named the XLink that is a cellular bluetooth gateway.  It utilizes your home phone convenience and merges that with your cellular phone usage.  XLink was super easy to set up and worked on my first try.  I followed the simple instructions, plugged the XLink into the phone and immediately found the XLink in my Bluetooth list.

The connection was easily established and the sound was clear.  It connected my cellphone with a standard cordless that I had in the house.  Then, I was able to use my home phone receiver but all the calls coming into my cellphone rang into the house phone.  I can see this being very practical for people with National plans that desire to call long distance with a cellphone plan but wish to use the home phone receiver.

Simple to use, very few buttons, easy to understand lights and the convenience of Bluetooth were great combinations.  Caller ID and Call Waiting work just fine, so you don’t sacrifice features, here.  You can also connect the XLink to your PC for more advanced use.

This DVD player was quite an experience for me as it’s completely feature-packed and with so much to offer, I wanted to test out the many different ways this player can work.  The OPPO 1080p offers extremely good image quality when outputting movies that I had on hand.  It has DivX/Xvid support, too, so you won’t find yourself having to convert movies in order to view them on your TV.

The player utilizes the 7.1 Channel audio with Dolby Digital Surround EX decoding, which means you will feel like you are in the middle of the movie and your speakers will bring you each delicate sound as it was meant to be heard.  You can also use the USB 2.0 for external gadgets that you store photos or videos on, and a slide show that uses the resolution of your HDTV to show your photos off to others.

And, to deliver you the best quality, the player uses HDMI for a crisp look and sound.  Delivering high-quality video and audio without the hassle of multiple cables, this is one feature I was quite impressed with.  I certainly recommend you look at the features on the OPPO site, I could only outline my favorites here, and the pricing of the OPPO is incredibly competitive, in fact I feel that it performs on the higher range and is priced with the lower ranged products, which makes it really shine!

OPPO also features a product comparison chart so that you know which player would best suit YOUR needs.