I'm off to Las Vegas for Blackhat 2008 and Defcon 16. I can't wait to see what Kingpin and Lost have in store for us this year.

I built my desktop PC in August of 2006, nearly two years ago. I purchased two Seagate 7200.10 320GB Barracuda's for my main drive. I had done some research and found that these would give me a good deal of speed (when in RAID) for a decant amount of money (way less than a WD Raptor).

Since the drives were SATA I didn't think twice about the jumpers on the back because they are traditionally used for ATA master/slave settings. I figured they were for factory settings that needn't be changed. It turns out I was wrong! Those jumpers have been cutting my drive performance in half. Seagate uses them to ensure that SATA/150 is the default drive configuration for backwards compatibility. My system has supported SATA/300 since its build date. So i popped the little buggers out and did some testing. Turns out that they made a big difference in performance. Test results below...

I'm finishing up a PCB project that's nearly a year old and I thought I'd share a tasty time-lapse video of the assembly process.

Since I'll be roaming around Blackhat and Defcon once again this year it isn't a bad idea to carry around some sort of correspondence card. I've avoided creating a business card because of the challenging nature of their design. In order to stand out from other cards a business card has to offer something unique. It has to dazzle its recipient, either in its unique size, material, or design.

Lately I've seen a few skinny or mini cards being handed out, small 1"x3" cards. I've only been able to find two printers that produce them at the moment, Zazzle.com and MOO.com. Both companies offer 100 cards for about $20.00. Zazzle is a tiny bit cheaper than the later and offers a few different paper types, both front and back can be printed with graphics, however you are limited to a single design for the entire set of 100. While MOO only allows a single side to be a graphic, you are allowed up to 100 different graphics per set of 100.

I have a few designs in mind that would fit perfectly on these mini cards, I suppose I'll test the waters by printing my own before I drop $20.

Update @ 1:33pm: Matthew Inmen did exactly this. However, he's a much better artist than myself.