On Our Desk - 15

On Our Desk 15

Things have been a’changing at bit-tech lately. We’ve got a new owner, we’re going to be rolling out some new features on the site soon and we’re on the brink of moving to some newer, more cramped offices too.

One thing that’ll never change though is the sheer amount of kit that we find ourselves getting constantly buried in. The electronics keep coming at us in waves, with a flotsam of miscellaneous gear floating over the tide of graphics cards, motherboards and computer games. Every now and then we need to stop and have a purge.

Now, as we take a break in the process of packing up our desks and checking on the maps to see whereabouts London is, we’re having one of those purges. We can’t take everything with us to the nation’s capital apparently, though part of us is dying to take that as more of a challenge than a commandment from the men upstairs.

So, what’s been floating on top of the surf these last few weeks? What’ve we managed to accumulate on our desktops for review now?

Well, first up, we’ve got a new Black Ghost remote control helicopter from Bladerunner. Strictly for indoor use and great for hovering over your own head if you need cooling down, we have absolutely no idea why the Black Ghost turned up in our offices – only that it’s kept Tim entertained for an hour or two lately.


After that we move on to another of Tim’s recent loves – an cool little game for the iPhone and iPod Touch, called Fieldrunners. Cartoony and classical in presentation and gameplay respectively, this cute little Tower Defence clone has also been keeping our Editor entertained between benchmarks, so we thought we’d have a look.

The third bit of salvage we pulled from the sea of software is the Mass Effect original soundtrack, from BioWare. Joe actually picked this up a good few months ago, but he’s been hiding it in his growing collection of game soundtracks all this time. Now that Harry and Richard are finally plunging themselves into Mass Effect PC though, we thought we’d have a gander at it.

The penultimate item on our desk-bound round-up is a new all-in-one card reader and fan controller from Akasa, called the All in One 2. Equipped to read pretty much any type of card on the market and with a bunch of temperature probes to monitor how hot your hardware is, the All in One 2 should be handy for anyone who finds themselves moving data around a lot.

Speaking of shifting information around, the last item in our round-up is a new SATA hard drive enclosure from Icy Dock – the MB672, to be exact. It may have an awkward name and it may weigh more than the rest of your PC combined, but it’s a good looking and well built enclosure that’s got a feature or two above the norm.

We did have a bunch of other items to throw in this instalment of On Our Desk too – Joe’s new rubber band gun that he got for Christmas, a whole tower of fans from every manufacturer you can imagine and a few other bits and bobs, but we thought we’d save them for next time. There’s always next time.

In the meantime though if there’s something specific you’d like to see us have a look at then just let us know in the forums. There’s nothing we can’t handle, except for lobsters. And mimes. Or miming lobsters. Brr, we’re already getting creeped out at that though – best we move on quickly.