USB Gadget Of The Week: The Human Skull Drive

This is the first edition of 'USB Gadget Of The Week'. Every week I want to introduce a new USB device. The Universal Serial Bus is the source of a lot of useful, funny and wacky inventions and I will show my favorites.

This week's item is the USB Human Skull Drive from USBGeek.com. Halloween is already over, but the skull design is timeless. What's inside the skull? This is an ordinary USB thumb drive with 2GB storage. As a matter of course the USB Human Skull Drive features USB 2.0 and supports Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and Mac OS. And it costs $19.

Why did I choose the USB Human Skull Drive?
I really like the special designed memory sticks. And in this case I favor the little details of the Skull Drive: the detachable jaw, the teeth and the cheek bones. And as I said before, the skull design is timeless and definitively attracts attention. Two thumb drives up!

Neo Shifters - A browser-based MMORPG

Once upon a time there was a little planet. A planet torn apart by an ancient war. The evil Templars and the magnanimous Paladins fought each other to rule this world. And now it's your time to choose a side and enter the battle.

Welcome to NEO Shifters. A nice browser-based MMORPG for the younger ones. You don't have to download any client software; the whole game is played over the internet using only your web browser. Just visit the website and register for a free account and start playing.
The game is set in a Sci-Fi-space-world, so your char is a robot. First of all you customize your character. You pick a certain class such as 'Bomber', 'Warrior', 'Fighter' or 'Sniper', each class has pros and cons. Then you design your appearance by picking a mask (the face) and two colors. Finally you name your robot and get ready to enter the world of Neo Shifters.

Once you've entered the world you can earn experience points and hydrocells through mini-games, which are scattered all over the map. Boost your abilities and buy new weapons, improved armor and useful gadgets. You can also find webcodes to gain greater skills and arming. The game allows you to play in groups or alone and with the in-game-chat you can talk to all the other gamers.

Go ahead! Register now for a free game and try Neo Shifters yourself. Maybe we'll meet inside game, look for for my character: Rexel187!

My latest blog - 'Excuse My German'

I have to advertise my latest blog: 'Excuse My German'. Besides technology and sports, I have another topic to write about: 'everything'. From time to time I feel the need to rant. My friends often suffer from my lengthy monologue, but with the internet I can be boring interesting in a whole new dimension.

I built the template for Excuse My German out of this template. This was the first time I created an own template. Normally I took a default Blogger template and add third column.


I plan to change the logo every two months. I'm going to show you all the best of my good ol' Germany in 200x200 pixels. Check out the latest blog of Bald Guy's universe!

The XML Challenge - IDUG sponsors a big contest

The International DB2 Users Group (IDUG) is sponsoring a big contest - the XML Challenge! The IDUG contest is looking for the XML superstar.

If you're already a master of XML, XQuery or DB2, then this contest will be the perfect platform to present your XML-knowledge to the world. The XML Challenge addresses students and hobbyists as well as professionals. No matter if you have great XML experience or if you are just a novice, you can participate in the contest. The contest offers five different parts of varying difficulty. The 'Video Contest' and the 'Query Contest' is for beginners, because you don't have to be very skilled in XML and developing. 'Gadget Contest', 'Ported App Contest' and 'XML Contest' is for experts in software development. I think the XML Contest is the heart of the XML Challenge, since you have to develop useful, user-friendly XML apps from scratch. You can participate in all five contests and collect participation points. The contestant with the most participation points will be given a special prize and the title 'XML Grand Master'.

Beside the fame you can win a lot of nice prizes like a iPod Nano, a 80GB Zune or a new notebook. Maybe there are some job offers and internship from IBM in it for the contestants. After all this is more than just a contest, this is a chance to achieve popularity among the developers all over the world.