One Step Closer to the Jetsons

Sci fi worshippers and Jetsons fans the world over have long been dreaming about the reality of the jet pack. In fact, for years many of us have been left feeling bitter and disenchanted, due to the fact that the Jetsons clearly lied to us. Not only do we not have any jet packs, we don't have any flying cars, either. Quite the contrary, you can't even take the frigging train now without being crammed in beside the other passengers like sardines and suffering through a nine hour trip with someone breathing questionable breath into your face as they attempt to sleep on your shoulder. Unless of course you have the riches required to get a sleeper car or bedroom.

Of course, if you have an extra hundred grand lying around, now you actually can buy a jet pack. Yes! They are coming into existence! The Martin Aircraft Company of Christchurch, out of New Zealand, is one of many companies perfecting the art of jet pack travel. Currently, their version -- which runs on two turbojet engines instead of a rocket engine -- is at the head of the pack. The way things are going, it might be affordable for the rest of us somewhere around 2030, so hey! Start saving!

Making your computer faster

I've recently done a few things to my laptop that has SIGNIFICANTLY improved my performance, so I thought I'd share those really quick.

Obviously, a memory upgrade is easy, quick, and very inexpensive. That's a no brainer. Do it now and max it out.

I've also purchased a solid-state internal hard drive. Booting up and shutting down in Windows is agonizingly slow - as most of you know. With the solid-state drive, it's extremely fast. Just a couple seconds. I never thought Windows could run like this. The solid-state drive is pretty expensive though, and you may not get one as large as you want due to the cost constraints, so I would recommend using it for your more active files and programs, and system directories.

Finally, I've noticed that occasionally my machine will start running at 100% CPU utilization when I'm browsing the internet. I've found that this is due to flash. Flash ads, etc. end up going haywire for some reason and take my machine. I've installed flash ad blockers for both firefox and IE to prevent this from happening. And now it doesn't!! Just do a search in Google for flash ad blocker and you'll get plenty of free solutions.

Hope that helps!