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Battery-free toothbrush is powered with a twist
Battery-powered toothbrushes are convenient if you don't like brushing your teeth the old-fashioned way, but they have a catch: batteries. Typically, you either need to dock your brush (and remember to carry a charger with you on long trips) or toss disposables when they're done. There might be a better way soon, though: Goodwell Co. is crowdfunding Be, which it bills as the first battery-free powered toothbrush. Twist the base twice and a kinetic energy storage mechanism will vibrate the brush head for up to 2 minutes, or just long enough for that dentist-recommended cleaning. You don't have to connect to a charger, and you won't contribute to landfills by chucking out batteries (the bristles are even biodegradable).
Sky to buy Telefonica UK's fixed phone line and broadband business for up to £200 million
Sky already supplies fixed phone line and broadband on top of its TV services in the UK, but it's just announced it'll be gaining a few more customers. The company has shaken hands with Telefonica UK to purchase the latter's broadband and phone line business provided by the consumer-facing O2 and BE brands. As you would imagine, big bucks will change hands: Sky plans to fork over £180 million (around $273 million) right off the bat, and will write a check for up to a further £20 million (circa $30 million) "dependent upon the successful delivery and completion of the customer migration process by Telefonica UK." Regulators will need to give the deal the thumbs up before it's official, but if and when that happens, Sky will become the second biggest ISP in the UK after adding over 500,000 new customers to its books. Should everything progress as planned, the buyout will be completed by the end of April, which gives Rupert Murdoch just enough time to carry out the vault extension he'll need. Update: If you're worried this transaction will impact anything you're currently signed up to, you can probably rest easy. O2 has tweeted one of our editors to report "there will be no material change to a customer's broadband service and no fundamental contract change."
AMD's Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition wears the gigahertz crown
At only $195, it's hard to deny that AMD's new Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition desktop chip is a bargain. Its four cores hum along at 3.7GHz, the fastest base clock speed of any consumer CPU, and the unlocked multiplier should make it trivial for overclockers to push this beast to 4GHz and beyond. The 980 slides right into the same price point as the previous champ, the Phenom II X4 975, and knocks a few bucks off the former clock-frequency king. All of this seems like great news for AMD fans. Of course, if you're starting from scratch and not just looking to upgrade an aging AM3 rig, keep in mind that only $30 more scores you the mid-range Core i5-2500K that consistently outperforms the 980, consumes less power, and also has an unlocked multiplier. Guess there's always the graphics market if you care to see AMD being competitive. For the nitty-gritty on how its latest central processing unit stacks up, see the source links.
Spiritual Guidance: The shadow diaries
As you might expect for someone who writes a Priest column, my main is a priest. I've been Holy for quite some time (enough that it's starting to make me feel old), and I feel like I know the Holy game play style pretty well. I even leveled Holy from 60 to 70, shortly after Burning Crusade came out, and it was a blast. And I love healing. But lately I've been hearing the call of the dark side: I want to play Shadow.But this leaves me with a conundrum. I can't really get my Shadow on without abandoning (albeit temporarily) my Holy nature. Or can I? After all, we get up to 50 characters per account; there's no reason I can't delete one of those level one alts I made to talk to somebody for a story and make a brand-new priest, destined for Shadow, instead!So that's just what I did. I had other motivations, of course; just wanting to play Shadow probably wouldn't be enough to get me to trudge through the 1–60 levels yet again. I've never played much Horde, so I'd like to see how the other half lives a bit. I've never played a Blood Elf at all, and I'd always heard those zones were well designed. And I wanted to hang out with some people on their server, which would mean rolling a new character anyway. Several factors conspired, and Hieronymus of Draenor was born (that link is giving me an error right now, but I assume it'll go away).
Blue Notes: Aran's Flame Wreath and Blade's Edge graveyards
I have two quickies for you all in the wake of the Alchemy issues. One bug with the Shade of Aran has been fixed:Beneficial immunity effects from abilities such as Ice Block and Divine Shield will no longer cause the Shade of Aran's explosion effect from Flame Wreath to proc when the duration has faded.I'm sure he'll still wipe my guild without breaking a sweat -- he's what we're currently stuck on in Karazhan. Aran is the sixth boss in Karazhan (or so). Flame Wreath is an effect that puts a ring of fire around you; if you move, thus placing your character in the flames, it pretty much wipes the raid.And another piece of bug-fixing goodness, they've fixed that ridiculously obnoxious graveyard bug in Blade's Edge Mountains. I'm sure I'll still hate the zone when I take my third Outlander through there (Mage perhaps?), but a little less, now:All characters that die on the Northwest plateau of Blade's Edge Mountains will now be sent to the Evergrove graveyard.Previously, if you died up in the northwest of BEM, your ghost appeared at the Sylvannar graveyard (for Alliance; I'm not sure what the Horde equivalent is). While this is geographically closer to the northwest part of the zone than Evergrove is, due to BEM's labyrinthine layout, it takes a good ten minutes to run back to your corpse from there.
