And you thought you were an avid gamer? This gaming fan has such a passion for playing, he just had to set up his own rig. What resulted was a head-to-head gaming system, much like the ones featured in many Japanese arcades. “In Japan, competition games like Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter generally have head-to-head cabinets and I wanted to recreate that feel at home with my own setup”.

Using his extensive 3D modeling knowledge, he rendered himself a design for his dream gaming cabinet and passed them along to a cabinet maker he had known when he worked in the video game industry. This monster houses a Playstation 3, with a PC running a AMD Athlon 64×2 Dual Core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a NVdia GeForce 7950 GX2 Video Card, all networked to his computer system inside the house for complete integration. He’s also my new personal hero. (more…)

No matter how much RAM or other hardware you shove in to your case, no computer system is immune from it. That’s right…a computer crash. Any system can burst at the seems with the high performance of our Web 2.0 world. It’s nice to have the knowledge to know that even though your system might crash, at least you don’t have to arrive back at your desk to a glaring blue screen.

The Kick-Off connects into your USB port, keeping a constant tab on your hardware performance. So what does the Kick-Off do that we can’t do ourselves? Let’s say the computer system that controls the network in your house were to crash, yet the resident nerd wasn’t home to fix it (probably at a anime convention). The Kick-off automatically reboots your system and even goes as far to cause a power off/on switch if needed.

For $179, the Kick-Off can be yours. Keeping your business up and running, connected to those series’ of tubes known as the internet. A bargain for any business who knows what down time feels like. — Andrew Dobrow

Product Page [Sophisticated Circuits, via OhGizmo!]