Waterjets.org have pulled out all the stops in their latest project, embarking on a new generation of Modding & Gaming. In the two photos below you can see some of the mods that the team there had produced. Who needs laser cutting, when you can have a water cut this clean and this powerful? The Xbox logos are clean as could be, and the case isn’t looking all that shabby either.

If you thought Seagate Barracuda’s 7200.10 750GB HDD was big, then this is going to blow you away! According to iTWire…

“Just in time be installed in the PS4, an Xbox 720, the Wii Wii, a TiVo for masses of HDTV recording, a computer running the successor to Vista or Mac OS X, Seagate wants you to store it all on a massive 300 TB hard drive.”

No typo. Incredible as it may seem, by 2010, Seagate have predicted that each single square inch of the platter will be able to store a mindblowing 50TB. So what does this mean? In uncompressed format, you can store the entire Libary Of Congress on a single disc, and still have room for a couple of HD Movies. How does it work? Well, holographic storage is rumoured to play a big role. I know I’m supposed to be a Geek, or as ‘A Day In The Life’ kindly put it, a cutey, but I’ve never heard of holo-storage.

Can you imagine trying to do a full disc defrag on this baby? It takes long enough on the Seagate Barracuda 750GB… So I can tell you that I’m not looking forward to a massive 10-day wait whilst in moves my blocks of data into the right places.

I’m not even going to speculate on the price of something like this. There would really be little point. Technology will have advanced by ‘010, I couldn’t get even close. But something that can store the equivalent of 6144 50GB Blu-Ray discs is pretty impressive stuff! That said, I can’t imagine it being terribly cheap. Now we just need a Terabyte USB stick, so we can make Windows Vista Readyboost worth it’s chips.

That’s a thought actually…

Here at Techzi, we’ve been busy getting ready for Christmas. Now only a couple of days away, we thought we’d let you know how we’ve been getting on.

Timothy, Aged 11, Guest Blogger, has spent quite a few days in New York. I’ll let him explain all that when he gets home though.

Seshi, Who shall now be known by her real name, Caitlin, Aged 12, Spiffy Graphics Artist, has been busy moderating the forums, kicking some spam-bot asses, and designing new uber characters to compliment the plots going on on the Roleplay boards.

Delta, also known as David, aka. me, aged 12, has been monitoring the site’s visitors closely, to see who reads the blog. In the past few days, we’ve had some pretty impressive guests! Thanks to MyBlogLog for letting me know!

Amit Agarwal, from Digital Inspiration had a good read over my blog, much to my surprise!

Chris Pirillo from bLaugh chimed in, only to find his own cartoons plastered over my blog…

No week would be complete without Michael Arrington stopping by for a chat either, that was extremely good stuff.

And Mark Seremet, co-founder of Take Two Interactive (Best known for the Grand Theft Auto series, Prey, Manhunt, Bully, Midnight Club, Red Dead Revolver and the Elder Scrolls games, as well as owning Joytech and several other major gaming publishers), had a good read of my blog, and I made quite good friends with him. He’s a great guy, and he said that he’d let the guys at Take Two know that I might be interested in testing some of their games. Now that would be cool…

All in all, it’s been a busy past week. Timmy promised to bring back some photos for us, and I know he’s already had a good luck round the Apple store in NYC, apparently the coolest one in the world.

Life is insane, yet brilliantly planned out. God knew what he was doing!

If you love your Xbox 360, but just can’t face not having your trusty mouse and keyboard at hand, incase things go real bad, then the XFPS360 is for you. Fusing PC gaming with the best of the Xbox 360, XCM is “bringing old school PC gaming to your living room”. Simply plug-in the dinky adapter into one of your Xbox 360’s USB ports, and it’ll let you connect either more USB devices or a PS/2 gadget. Of course hardcore gamers will much prefer a keypad and pointer to a heavenly, ergonomically shaped controller, but then again, who’s to stop them? There’s a hell of alot of pictures for you to drool over in the mean-time. Enjoy! Thanks to Team Xbox for tipping me off.

If your spanking new PS3’s 60GB HDD just isn’t big enough, then will 750GB suffice? At least, it’s the biggest that can be fitted to date, courtesey of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750 GB HDD. It’s only now, that after months of negativity driven in laser guided hoards towards Sony, that the console’s true hackability is starting to shine through it’s beautifully wrapped, plastic gloss coating.

Kotaku is reporting that, “Console hacking enthusiasts have already taken the first steps towards making the PS3 backup friendly, installing LINUX and using it to dump a 7.08GB ISO file from Madden 07 onto an external hard drive. Pool Boy over at PS3News points out that this is exactly how the PSP backup scene got started, and that the PS3 file structure closely resembles the one used in PlayStation Portable games.”

I came across a rather useful, and interesting site today, whilst browsing some gaming forums. NextGenWars.com provides an in-depth count of the number of each next-gen console sold. The PS3, (at the time of writing), had just broken the 306,000 consoles barrier. The Wii, sat comfortably above the 534,000 threshold, and leading the pack, the Xbox 360, with an astounding 7,530,570 sales.

It’s going to be a tight one. Current, updated sales below. The tallies should auto-update. If they don’t, refresh to see what the current standings are. It’s nifty. A highly recommended tool to stick in your forum signature, if only to show off your console’s impressive number of sales!

I have had a busy week! Also at Profy, is Rezzible! An Ajax powered website creator!

The website creator created by the creators of SecondLife is Ajaxified! Rezzible, the spiffy, easy website creator that is sweeping the nation, is without a shadow of a doubt, the best Web 2.0 startup I’ve seen this year. We’ve seen some pretty darn impressive stuff, but this is great! Read more…

This Wii Glove looks cool. But is there really a point? Okay… Well I suppose it might save your palm from becoming uber sweaty from time to time, but it is rather weird. I’m sure you’ll agree. Then again, anything that can make it onto the Digg front page is evidently weird enough to be mentioned here. We’re all weird.

But back to the point. I heard that the Wii Smash video was released the other day. Hopefully I’ll get a blog post out soon with it in.

If the New York Times can say that the PS3 sucks, then that means I can finally let it go at last. This article is by The New York Times and I take absolutely no claim in writing it.

Howard Stringer, you have a problem. Your company’s new video game system just isn’t that great.

Ever since Mr. Stringer took the helm last year at Sony, the struggling if still formidable electronics giant, the world has been hearing about how the coming PlayStation 3 would save the company, or at least revitalize it. Even after Microsoft took the lead in the video-game wars a year ago with its innovative and powerful Xbox 360, Sony blithely insisted that the PS3 would leapfrog all competition to deliver an unsurpassed level of fun.

Put bluntly, Sony has failed to deliver on that promise.

Measured in megaflops, gigabytes and other technical benchmarks, the PlayStation 3 is certainly the world’s most powerful game console. It falls far short, however, of providing the world’s most engaging overall entertainment experience. There is a big difference, and Sony seems to have confused one for the other.

The PS3, which was introduced in North America on Friday with a hefty $599 price tag for the top version, certainly delivers gorgeous graphics. But they are not discernibly prettier than the Xbox 360’s. More important, the whole PlayStation 3 system is surprisingly clunky to use and simply does not provide many basic functions that users have come to expect, especially online.

I have spent more than 30 hours using the PlayStation 3 over the last week or so and may have played more different games on the system — 13 — than probably anyone outside of Sony itself. Sony did not activate the PS3’s online service until just before the Friday debut. Over the weekend a clear sense of disappointment with the PlayStation 3 emerged from many gamers.

“What’s weird is that the PS3 was originally supposed to come out in the spring, and here it came out in the fall, and it still doesn’t feel finished,” Christopher Grant, managing editor of Joystiq, one of the world’s biggest video-game blogs, said on the telephone Saturday night. “It’s really not the all-star showing they should have had at launch. Sony is playing catch-up in a lot of ways now, not just in terms of sales but in terms of the basic functionality and usability of the system.”

Sadly for Sony, the best way to explain how the PlayStation 3 falls short is to explain how different it is to use than its main competition, Xbox 360. When I reviewed the 360 last year, I wrote: “Twelve minutes after opening the box, I had created my nickname, was in a game of Quake 4 and thought, ‘This can’t be this easy.’ ”

I never felt that way using the PlayStation 3. With the PS3, 12 minutes after opening the box I realized that Sony inexplicably does not include cables to connect the machine to a high-definition television. Keep in mind that one of Sony’s main selling points has been that the PS3 plays Blu-Ray high-definition movie discs. But high-definiton cables? Sold separately. The Xbox 360, by contrast, ships with one cable that can connect to either a standard or high-definition set.

Then, before you are even using the PS3, you have to connect the “wireless” controller to the base unit with a USB cable so they can recognize each other. If you bring your PS3 controller to a friend’s house, you’ll have to plug back in again. The 360’s wireless controllers are always just that, wireless.

If there is one thing one would expect Sony to get perfect, though, it would be music. Wrong. Sure, you can plug in your digital music player and the PS3 will play the tunes. But as soon as you go into a game, the music stops. By contrast, one of the things I’ve always enjoyed most on the Xbox 360 is being able to listen to my own music while playing Pebble Beach or driving my virtual Ferrari. Doesn’t seem too complicated, but the PS3 can’t do it.

In that sense it often feels as if the PlayStation 3 can’t walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. In the PS3’s online store (which feels like a slow Web page) you can access movie trailers and trial versions of new games, but when you actually download the 600-megabyte files, you’ll be stuck watching a progress bar crawl across the screen for 20 or 40 minutes. Astonishingly, you can’t download in the background while you go do something that’s more fun (like play a game). On the Xbox 360, not only are files downloaded seamlessly in the background, but you can also shut off the machine, turn it on later, and the download will resume automatically.

The PS3’s whole online experience feels tacked-on and unpolished. On the Xbox 360 each user has a single unified friends list, so you can track your friends and communicate with them easily, no matter what game you are in. On the PlayStation 3 most games have their own separate friends list and some have no friends function at all. There is a master list as well, but in order to communicate with anyone on it, you have to quit the game you are playing.

There are some high points. The multi-player battles in Resistance: Fall of Man are excellent. The arcade-style action in the downloadable Blast Factor is suitably frantic.

But the list of the PS3’s disappointments remains, from its undersupported voice chat to its maddening cellphone-like text messaging system. (In frustration I ended up plugging in a USB keyboard.) Overall, Sony seems to have put a lot of effort into cramming as much silicon horsepower under the hood as possible but to have forgotten that all the transistors in the world can’t make someone smile.

And so it is a bit of a shock to realize that on the video game front Microsoft and Sony are moving in exactly the opposite directions one might expect given their roots. Microsoft, the prototypical PC company, has made the Xbox 360 into a powerful but intuitive, welcoming, people-friendly system. Sony’s PlayStation 3, on the other hand, often feels like a brawny but somewhat recalcitrant specialized computer. (Sony is even telling users to wait for future software patches to fix some of the PS3’s deficiencies.) The thing is, if people want to use a computer, they’ll use a computer.

Through the decades of the Walkman and the Trinitron television, Sony was renowned as the global master of easy-to-use, seamlessly powerful consumer electronics. But recently Sony seems to have lost its way, first in digital music players, in which it ceded the ergonomic high ground to Apple’s iPod, and now in home-game consoles. For now Sony’s technologists seem to have won out over the people who study fun.

As a practical matter, given the limited quantities Sony has been able to manufacture, the PlayStation 3 will surely remain sold out throughout the holiday season. If you can’t find one, don’t fret. Sony still has a lot of work to do. As Mr. Grant of Joystiq put it: “Maybe in six months it’ll be finished. Maybe by next fall I’ll be able to do all the cool stuff. I’m still kind of waiting.”