How many models of the same monitor do we need? If you’ve ever tried skimming though all of the monitors for sale on the web you were probably baffled by the endless number of monitors that appeared to be exactly the same price, size, and even brand. This can make the final decision on a purchase a chore. The trick is you need to know what to look for.

The obvious features that are important in a monitor are: the brand (not very important for some tech products, but definitely important for displays), the size, and the screen resolution. The other important, but not always obvious features are: the brightness rating, the contrast ratio, and the response time.

The following LCD displays are ranked according to the following performance metrics: Price << Size << Response Time. Most are full HD resolution (1920 x 1080), have average to above-average brightness ratings, and above-average contrast ratios.

Hanns·G HW-191APB 19″

Features:

• Size – 19″
• Max Resolution – 1440 x 900
• Brightness – 300 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – 700:1
• Response Time – 5ms
• Led Backlit – No
• Input\Output – D-Sub
• Speakers – Yes

Street Price – $114.99
More info on the Hanns·G HW-191APB

Acer G215HAbd-1 21.5″

Features:

• Size – 21.5″
• Max Resolution – 1920 x 1080
• Brightness – 300 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – ACM 50,000:1
• Response Time – 5ms
• Led Backlit – No
• Input\Output – D-Sub x1, DVI x1
• Speakers – No

Street Price – $129.99
More info on the Acer G215HAbd-1

ViewSonic VA2231w 22″

Features:

• Size – 22″
• Max Resolution – 1920 x 1080
• Brightness – 250 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – 1,000:1
• Response Time – 5ms
• Led Backlit – Yes
• Input\Output – D-Sub x1, DVI x1
• Speakers – No

Street Price – $149.99
More info on the ViewSonic VA2231w

Hanns·G Hi-221DPB 22″

Features:

• Size – 22″
• Max Resolution – 1680 x 1050
• Brightness – 300 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – 1000:1
• Response Time – 5ms
• Led Backlit – No
• Input\Output – D-Sub x1, DVI x1
• Speakers – Yes

Street Price – $159.99
More info on the Hanns·G Hi-221DPB

SCEPTRE X246W-1080p 23.6″

Features:

• Size – 23.6″
• Max Resolution – 1920 x 1080
• Brightness – 300 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – 1000:1
• Response Time – 2-5ms
• Led Backlit – No
• Input\Output – D-Sub x1, DVI x1, HDMI x1
• Speakers – No

Street Price – $179.99
More info on the SCEPTRE X246W

SCEPTRE X270W-1080P 27″

Features:

• Size – 27″
• Max Resolution – 1920 x 1080
• Brightness – 400 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – 1000:1
• Response Time – 2ms
• Led Backlit – No
• Input\Output – D-Sub x1, DVI x1, HDMI x1
• Speakers – Yes

Street Price – $279.99
More info on the CEPTRE X270W

ViewSonic X Series VX2739WM 27″

Features:

• Size – 27″
• Max Resolution – 1920 x 1080
• Brightness – 300 cd/m2
• Contrast Ratio – 1200:1
• Response Time – 1ms
• Led Backlit – No
• Input\Output – D-Sub x1, DVI x1, HDMI x1
• Speakers – Yes

Street Price – $349.99
More info on the ViewSonic X Series VX2739WM

Disclaimer: The State of Affairs received no direct compensation for writing this article and is in no way directly affiliated with Acer, Hanns-G, or ViewSonic. We are direct affiliates to NewEgg.com, but that affiliation does not sway or influence our recommendations.

Technorati Tags: best lcd monitor, best monitor, best monitor for the money, best monitor for the price, for the price, monitor for the price, best price monitor, best money monitor, lcd display, hd display, hd lcd display

Introducing the Rock Paper Win App for Android. The Rock Paper Scissors App where you win, every time. Impress your friends with your psychic powers. Challenge your brother or sister to the game that’s fixed from the start.

The Rock Paper Win App lets you win every time. If you’re first player, you will win automatically every time. If you’re second player, make your selection and hit the hidden button towards the bottom of the screen (red box not visible in the app). You can tell when the second player is going to win when you see the discrete white dot in the upper left hand corner appear (see screenshot #2).

Buy your copy today and start proving your undeniable skill to always win at rock paper scissors.

Technorati Tags: android app, rock paper scissors app, rock paper scissors, mobile, rpc app, rpc android app, rock paper win, rock paper win app

Now available for your Android Mobile Device or Phone. The classic 2 player, turn based strategy game, Rock Paper Scissors App is here. Challenge friends and family to the kid safe and friendly game anytime and anywhere.

The Rock Paper Scissors App is a 2 player app where you battle your opponent to see who is the true champion of rock paper scissors.

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Gaming laptops are becoming increasingly hard to find these days. With the slowdown of mobile graphic cards production, laptop manufacturers are forced to choose from fewer and fewer models. Luckily, there are a still a few cards that appear to be in moderate production that can deliver a high quality gaming experience in a reasonably priced laptop.

A few of the better cards still being produced are the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650, the nVidia GeForce GTS 360M, and the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870. All are leaps and bounds a head in pure frame rate of other competing cards. I spend a good week researching these laptops and have checked every benchmark possible to guarantee the quality of these cards. For the price, these laptops can’t be beat.

As always, prices for gaming laptops can change, if there is a price change or the laptop is no longer available, drop a comment below and I will try to find a comparable model with similar capabilities.

Budget Gaming Notebook

TOSHIBA Satellite L655-S5111

Features:

• CPU Type – Intel Core i3-370M 2.4GHz
• Screen – 15.6″ Widescreen
• Graphics Card – ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650
• Video Memory – 1GB DDR3
• Memory- 4GB DDR3
• Hard Disk – 500GB SATA (5400rmp)
• Native Resolution – 1366 x 768

Performance: Med-High Graphics Detail

TOSHIBA Satellite L655-S5111 comes with the new Intel Core i3-370M. For graphics, the screen is a nice 15.6″ led back-lit widescreen and the video card is the well respected ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650.

Will play most newer games on med or high detail.

Street Price – $699.99
More info on the TOSHIBA Satellite L655-S5111

Highly Recommended Power Gaming Notebook

TOSHIBA Qosmio X505-Q892

Features:

• CPU Type – Intel Core i5 460M 2.53GHz
• Screen – 18.4″ Widescreen
• Graphics Card – NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M
• Video Memory – 1.5GB DDR5
• Memory- 4GB DDR3 1066MHz
• Hard Disk – 500GB SATA 7200rpm
• Max Resolution – 1680 x 945

Performance: Ultra (max) Graphics Detail

Sporting the top-of-the-line NVIDIA graphics card, the GeForce GTX 460M, you can’t beat the price and performance of this machine. The TOSHIBA Qosmio X505-Q892 is a killer deal at this price. Most NVIDIA powered high end laptops go for over $1,400, this one is less than $1,200 (for the time being, I expect that to change).

Expect to play most modern games on ultra (max) detail and have friends and family drool at the sight of your portable gaming experience.

Street Price – $1,079.99
More info on the TOSHIBA Qosmio X505-Q892

Power Gaming Notebook

MSI GX740-235US

Features:

• CPU Type – Intel Core i5 450M 2.40GHz
• Screen – 17.0″ Widescreen SXGA+
• Graphics Card – ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870
• Video Memory – 1GB DDR5
• Memory- 4GB DDR3 1066MHz
• Hard Disk – 320GB SATA 7200rpm
• Max Resolution – 1680 x 1050

Performance: Ultra (max) Graphics Detail

The MSI GX740-235US is a definit power gaming laptop. Many owners have vouched that the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is capable of playing Starcraft 2 on high detail with no problems. That is mighty impressive for a laptop.

The rest of the hardware is no better then the recommended gaming laptop I reviewed above, but the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is a step ahead of the GTS 360. If your willing to shell out the extra cash for the better graphics card, you won’t be disappointed.

Street Price – $1,099.99
More info on the MSI GX740-235US

Disclaimer: The State of Affairs received no direct compensation for writing this article and is in no way directly affiliated with MSI, Acer, Toshiba, or ASUS. We are direct affiliates to mwave.com and newegg.com, but the affiliation does not sway or influence our recommendations.

Technorati Tags: best gaming, gaming, laptop, notebook, gaming notebook, 2010, best 2010, best laptop 2010, best gaming notebook 2010, laptop computer, laptop for gaming, gaming notebook review, laptop for under, under 1000, affordable gaming notebook, notebook for price, cheap gaming laptop

Google Storage for Developers is a new cloud based storage service that is currently open to a limited number of developers in the US. With Google Storage, Google is now a direct competitor to Amazon’s family of Cloud based web solutions, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. Well I just received my invite for Google Storage for Developers and my first order of business was too test Google Storage’s speed vs Amazon’s S3 speed and my VPS’s speed (added Amazon CloudFront Speeds).

I have been using Amazon’s S3 and CloudFront service to serve static image files for the past 6 months and have been very happy with their speed and reliability. I also recently switch from a shared web hosting solution to an unmanaged VPS hosting service and wanted to see if my LAMP VPS server would be faster than Amazon S3.

I chose 3 images with varying sizes, 1 small (4.83k .png), 1 medium ( 389k .jpg) and 1 large (5.65mb .jpg) and loaded them up multiple times (no cache). Here are the speeds I ended up with. Note these test results are meant to be taken with a grain of salt. This is just an example of the speeds you will find with these types of services.

All speeds are averages.

The clear winners in the test were Google Storage For Developers and Amazon CloudFront, with my LAMP VPS in a distant fourth. Amazon S3 actually performed better then Google Storage with the large image file, but was slower then Google Storage in the small and medium size image test. One aspect of the test that I found very interesting is that my LAMP VPS was very consistent in it’s speeds where Google Storage, Amazon S3, and CloudFront were not. Nevertheless, this test does show that geography is a very important factor when serving image files on the web.

So what does this all prove? Something, but not everything. It does show that serving images from the cloud is a better solution then your LAMP VPS and also shows Amazon CloudFront is faster then Amazon S3 (to be expected). Perhaps a LEMP VPS would perform better, but that still does not address the problem with geography. I will be sticking with Amazon S3 and CloudFront for now, but may move to Google Storage in the future. If you are interested in trying out Amazon’s Cloud based services you can follow the link below. As of right now you will need to request an invite before trying Google Storage For Developers.

Google Storage For Developers
Amazon Web Services

Feel free to share any test you have done yourself if the comments section below.

Technorati Tags: amazon s3, google storage, google storage for developers, vps vs amazon s3, amazon s3 vs google storage, amazon s3 speed test, google storage speed test, vps speed test, amazon cloudfront, cloudfront vs google storage

It’s time for some more gaming laptop reviews. It’s been 6 months since the last set of reviews and I must say I am impressed with the options available right now. 6 months ago in January, it was hard to come up with a list of good deals. This was in part because of the holiday season ending and a lack of new mobile graphics cards being released around that time. Luckily, ATI has released some great new cards that have created better competition with Nvidia’s aging recycled releases.

The baseline price starts off at $850 $680 for the budget recommendations below. I always strive to come up with a sub $800 recommendation, but if the performance can’t match the price, I simply can’t justify the review. The top end price is $1400, but is a definite extreme gaming notebook in a class of its own.

Disclaimer: The State of Affairs received no direct compensation for writing this article and is in no way directly affiliated with Gateway, Toshiba, ASUS, MSI or Newegg.com.

Technorati Tags: best gaming, gaming, laptop, notebook, gaming notebook, 2010, best 2010, best laptop 2010, best gaming notebook 2010, laptop computer, laptop for gaming, gaming notebook review, laptop for under, under 1000, affordable gaming notebook, notebook for price, cheap gaming laptop

Google has made yet another big announcement this week with the release of Google SSL Search Beta. This addition to Google’s lineup makes a big step forward in enhancing privacy while searching for content on the web.

Right now, if you are searching on Yahoo or the standard Google web search, your search terms are not encrypted. This means, if a hacker had access to the network you are using (your home or local coffee shop for example) they would be able to see, in plain text, what you were searching for.

Google SSL Search Beta takes the next step and encrypts the search data, so hackers won’t have access to it.

Think of SSL encryption as this. If I was sending you a message in mores code, I would send you a series of short and long beeps. If I used SSL encryption, my message would be rearranged and jumbled to a point where nobody would be able to understand it, except you and me.

How to use Google SSL Beta as the default search in Google Chrome

The first thing you may want to do is ensure all of your searches are made using Google SSL Search in Google Chrome. To do this we will create a new search engine in Chrome and set it as our default.

1. In chrome, click the wrench icon in the upper right corner and look for the Options selection.



2. In the new window that opens, look towards the bottom for Default Search and click on the Manage button



3. Next you will see a screen that shows all of your available search engines. Some of these are from sites you have visited in the past.
   Off to the right, click Add…



4. The first option is name and can be anything you would like to call it, the second option is keyword and can also be anything you would like, as long as it is unique from your other search engines, and the third text area is URL which should be copied from below. Here is what I used

Name: Google SSH

Keyword: google

URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s


5. After clicking Ok to confirm your new search engine, select it from your list and click the button on the right called Make Default



6. Done!

Now all of your search’s in Google Chrome will be secured with 128bit encryption. There are a couple of caveats right now with Google SSL Beta. First off, SSL can reduce load times, but should be marginal as Google is so fast already and secondly, only your standard web queries will be encrypted at the moment. If the future Google image search and news, for example, will also have the option to be encrypted.

Hence the beta tag.

For more info on Google’s SSL Search, check out the SSL search help page.

Technorati Tags: google, google chrome, chrome search, google ssl, google ssl search, ssl search beta, google ssl search beta, google beta, default search chrome, default search, chrome tutorial, chrome search tutorial, how to

The science of sleep is a fascinating subject that obviously, we can all relate too. Why do we wake up feeling exhausted sometimes and completely rested other times, regardless of how long we sleep? Do we transition from each sleep cycle seamlessly or do we waver from different “levels” of sleep during the night? These are the questions that I had and they are what lead me too this amazingly cool and scientifically fascinating device called the WakeMate.

What The WakeMate Is And What It Isn’t

In the most basic sense, the WakeMate is a alarm clock, but more precisely, it’s a alarm clock that learns your sleep patterns and intelligently chooses when to wake you. While you sleep, the WakeMate monitors you movement through a sensor that attaches to the wrist. This method is known as actigraphy and has been used by doctors and scientist for many years in the study of analyzing sleep.

Here are the basic steps in using the WakeMate

1. Slide the WakeMate around your wrist (like a wrist band)
2. Set the WakeMake alarm clock application on your smart phone
3. Sleep!

The WakeMate will then analyze you sleep pattern and will wake you at the optimal time during your 20 minute “wake up time” window. The fact is we don’t fall asleep and stay asleep at the same depth during the entire night, in fact there are many points during the night when we are sort of half-asleep. What the WakeMate does is trigger your alarm during one of those half-awake moments, thereby saving you from being woken during the deepest parts of your 20 minute wake up window.

Very cool indeed.

I don’t personally own one, so I can not speak from a user standpoint, but the science behind the process of using a actigraph is very sound. Traditionally you would go to a doctor who would then provide you with a actigraph unit to take home. After gathering some data at home, you would take the unit back to the doctor who would then analyze the data and give you more insight into your sleep patters. That same data can now be complied at home, without needing a doctors assistance.

Now, the WakeMate does not provide the same amount of information that a polysomnogram would. Polysomnography monitors many parts of the body while you sleep such as your brain waves, rapid eye movement, and heart rhythm. It’s a very involved and complex test that is usually used for patients with specific sleep disorders. A actigraph is a much more realistic means of monitoring our sleep cycle and circadian rhythm’s personally, yet effectively.

The WakeMate is only available for pre-order right now, but it should be shipping by September later this year according to their website. If you’re looking to get a better nights sleep and have something really interesting to talk about at work, check out the WakeMate website for more info.

Technorati Tags: wakemate, analyze sleep, analyze sleep patterns, analyze sleep cycles, actigraphy, how-to, sleep test, sleep research, sleep stages, sleep cycles, sleep solutions, sleeping better, restful sleep

Disclaimer: The State of Affairs received no direct compensation for writing this article and is in no way directly affiliated with the creators of the WakeMate, we simply thought it was a cool idea. Also, we are not doctors and don’t pretend to be, so if you feel you have a serious sleep condition, consult your physician.

About

This plugin allows the <video> and <source> elements to be posted in your bbPress forum. This makes it quick and easy for forum members to add videos to their posts.

Here is the list of allowed tags and allowed attributes.

<video>

• src
• type
• autoplay
• poster
• controls
• width
• height

<source>

• -src
• -type
• -media

Installation

1. Add the `allow-html5-video.php` file to bbPress’ `my-plugins/` directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in bbPress.

*Make sure you have set up your webhost to allow the correct MIME types for OGG and OGV files.

MIME Type: video/ogg
Extension(s): ogv ogg ogm

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some example embed codes?

Example #1 (Works in most modern browsers)

<video src="test-video.ogv" controls>
Your browser does not support the <code>video</code> element.
</video>

Example #2 (Should Work in all modern browsers)

<video controls>
<source src="test-video.ogg" type="video/ogg">
<source src="test-video.mp4">
Your browser does not support the <code>video</code> element.
</video>

What codecs are recommended?

Theora for .ogg and .ogv
.h264 for .mp4

Does it work with other video plugins?

Yes, it works with other video plugins (bbvideo and others).

Compatibility

Tested up to: 1.0.2
Requires at least: 0.8.4

Changelog

- 0.9 -
*initial release

Download Allow HTML5 Video

Allow HTML5 Video is based off of mdawaffe’s and qayqay12′s Allow Images plugin.

Technorati Tags: html5, bbpress plugin, bbpress plugins, allow video bbpress, bbpress video, bbpress download, html5 video, html5 source, bbpress forum plugin, forum plugin

At last, there are finally some good recommendations for gaming laptops in 2010. I have attempted to come up with a list of gaming laptops for over two months now, but with the holiday prices bouncing around faster than an electron in a super collider, I just couldn’t recommend any solid deals.

Now that the market has finally calmed down, there are some pretty great laptops in the reasonable price range of $750 to $1000 dollars. I attempted to find a recommendation below $750 dollars, but the gaming performance of the laptops in that price range simply can’t compare to the laptops below, even for a casual gamer. If you are looking for a laptop over the $1000 price range, I would recommend pricing out a custom laptop through a company similar too Alienware.

The first two recommendations are great budget laptops that are each powered by a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 1GB card. The third is powered by a very fast NVIDIA GTX 260M 1gb card.

Disclaimer: The State of Affairs received no direct compensation for writing this articles and is in no way directly affiliated with Gateway, HP, ASUS or Newegg.com.

Technorati Tags: best gaming, gaming, laptop, notebook, gaming notebook, 2010, best 2010, best laptop 2010, best gaming notebook 2010, laptop computer, laptop for gaming, gaming notebook review, laptop for under, under 1000, affordable gaming notebook, notebook for price, cheap gaming laptop