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Dan likes it, too.

Buy a couple of $5 keyboards, a really crap, silent one will probably be the best, no extra lights or anything like that.

Take them apart (there one IC and some plastic crap inside, with horrible contacts and a circuit board)

There's usually just flat strip with a few contact on one corner of the plastic crap that connect to the circuit board, you should be able to pull them apart.

A page with some good pics

Now you've got a smallish circuitboard, that you can probably tape up and house inside your pc.

Buy a couple of $5 keyboards, a really crap, silent one will probably be the best, no extra lights or anything like that.

Take them apart (there one IC and some plastic crap inside, with horrible contacts and a circuit board)

There's usually just flat strip with a few contact on one corner of the plastic crap that connect to the circuit board, you should be able to pull them apart.

A page with some good pics

Now you've got a smallish circuitboard, that you can probably tape up and house inside your pc.

How To Destroy Your Computer, a step by step guide.

Link is here.

Disc guns that actually shoot straight are a tricky engineering challenge, but the "Shot-Blade" pretty much solves it; I reviewed it a while ago. The Shot-Blade has a lot more spring power than it needs to shoot its little lightweight projectiles; I could see it being reworked into a CD launcher of some kind.

Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl

Tom Petty, along with other artists like King Crimson and Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, have been responsible for many hours of zoned out internet surfing to some of my favorite sites. You've been there - putting on some tunes, firing up your browser, zoning out and surfing away...
Two minutes later, an hour has passed, the album has ended, and you've been around the world and back and hopefully learned something new.

That's just how I started off the other night. I popped Tom Petty's Wildflowers cd into the drive, cranked up the volume, and fired up the browser. I was immediately sucked in by the sweet acoutic guitar sounds of the title track. Click... Click... Click... You Don't Know How It Feels comes up, I hear the sentimental lyrics, and I drift back to my younger days... Click... Click... Click... Another 30 seconds rolls by and half the album's over... Cabin Down Below just nails me with the big fat Telecasters running through tube amps turned up to 11 sound... Click... Click... Click... I finally make it to Wake Up Time ... "Time to open your eyes... And rise and shine..." and...

I'm accosted by the stench of burning pl

It might work pretty well, at least with textual pages. There's just a few small problems with filtering pr0n with bayesian methods. Specifically: Spam == text. Pr0n == mostly images. You are able to block stuff based on the text on the pages themselves, of course (and hopefully the text on the sites makes them easy to recognize, or something like that...), but pictures aren't going to be filtered accurately no matter what you do. There have been some... "attempts".

It worked for me. I bought one of these. It's a pretty good product for the price, too.

i guess that's why the packaging on this mp3 player changed.

This is a bit more descriptive. It's a New-Zealand made keylogger which can be disguised as an RF Supressor or it can come built into a keyboard. And it is OS independant, it can be downloaded on any OS, but the pro version can do it faster. You just enter the password in notepad or word or OpenOffice, enter the right menu choice, and the whole log is automatically typed in. And the Professional SE model has a 2 Million charecter menu, rather than the Keykatcher's 32K/64 Memory. Take a look at the link, it is an interesting read.

The Commodore brand also popped up on a cheap-and-nasty MP3 player a little while back, as shown on Dan's Data.

Apparently it's unlicenced, but certainlty a shock to the brain to see that logo on a recent product.

No... you need to paint it black... black computers go faster... just like red cars go faster...

Nephilium
I woke up in bed with a man and a cat. The man was a stranger; the cat was not. -- Maureen Johnson in To Sail Beyond The Sunset

Yes :-).

Have you read this?

I found it funny.. Kids spend big bucks on primo thermal compounds to make their computer go faster when toothpaste works just as well (yeah, it'll dry out and only work for a few days, but still)..

How are you suggesting we build the LED's? The best I've heard about is 5 watts for the high-power luxeons. They might have 10-15 watt lab models, though. For any wide-scale operation, you need hundreds of watts. Your 'bulb' would get very expensive with an array of LEDs.

White LED's are only marginally more efficient than incandescent for light generation. They're nice for flashlights because they are shockproof/long life and provide more useful light than incandescent at lower powers as they don't dim into the infrared. This makes them useful as flashlights, but not for building lighting.
Dan's Data has a lot of info on LED lighting. Just look around for his flashlight reviews.

As for your dad's car, I don't know. I did a little research, and the quotes I saw were 25-30 mpg. But then, I don't know the model or anything else.

I own a TMD fan. Bought it at Fry's: forget the brand. Still uses conventional bearings, though. Check out this page for more info.

THERE IS NO MEMORY EFFECT! Not even Nicads have memory effect. The only memory effect ever documented is in sattelites where the state of discharge and recharge is always the same- the batteries are always charged up to the exact same point and discharged to the exact same point. Duplicate that effect, and maybe you can get memory effect. The complete guide to memory effect. Its #1 for the google search "Memory effect".

Shut up.

If you need the cooling and are overclocking or whatever you should lap your heatsink to a mirror ffinish, and if possible the proceessor too. Your correct, thermal compound is only there to fill in microscopic imperfections. Check out this for an interesting comparison of thermal compund effectivness.

Yes, that's fine and all, but the bit that I have trouble with is, these people know they're being offensive, they've gotta know that they're pissing off their customer base.

Maybe I'm crediting them with way too much intelligence, but as I see it, you'd have to be pretty dumb not to see that what you're doing is...
1. Irritate potential customers
2. Irritate potential customers more

The bit that I just don't understand is, given that step 1 and step 2, how the hell do these morons end up with
3. Profit!!!

The second is that by refusing to do business with a company because they called you is a little silly.

Now I'm gonna disagree with you there. See, I don't like people who cold call me. If I'm at my desk, I'm usually trying very hard to concentrate on something. If you break my concentration, I'm probably not going to be feeling all that neigbourly. this may come as something of a surprise to you, but I'm actually not nearly as enthusiastic about whatever widget it is that you want to sell me as you are.

A lot of companies cold call for new leads.

... with the misguided impression that cold calls generate actual sales. Maybe it worked, way back when. I'm telling you, it has become such a problem, that it doesn't ever work on me, even if I'm shopping right now for whatever it is you're selling.

It is widely accepted that the only way to stop spammers is for them to realise that spamming is unprofitable. The only way they're gonna figure that out is if no-one, ever, buys from them.

If I'm shopping for widgets, I'll google for widgets, I'll look in the yellow pages, the white pages and the classifieds. I'll ask colleagues and friends "Do you know anyone who sells good widgets?". I will not, ever, buy from a cold calling widget salesdroid.

if you have better suggestions on how to get new clients, I'd love to hear them, though!

Depends on the product I s'pose. If it's something IT, buy google ads, attend trade shows, give good demos at the trade shows, and try to hide that air of desperation that seems to cloud the presentation of many first timers. Submit your product for review at reputable review sites, ones that tell it how it is, like Dan's Data, and not those dodgy reviews for hire places that make it all stardust and rainbows.

I block banner ads, pretty much the only thing I actively look at are google ads, and other plain text ads. I pretty much always google for "widget reviews". I do two passes at trade shows, one in t-shirt and jeans - being invisible makes it easier to check everything out, then I go back in some sort of corporate wear and talk to the folks whose products I spotted yesterday. (maybe that means you shouldn't write off the folks in t-shirts and torn jeans, I dunno). Don't *ever* spam. Don't ever do anything that looks like spam. If you're on slashdot or usenet giving advice on a similar subject to what you're selling, say "Caveat: I work for company X, and I sell these things" along with your advice. There's a company in Australia called "Underdog Leathers" - they make pretty decent leathers for motorcyclists, but they have issues making sales with usenet folks, 'cos one of their guys spent a lot of time on usenet saying "Check out underdog leathers, I heard they're great" without ever divulging his interest. He got caught out, he lost a lot of sales. No-one minds you combining advice and a feww plug, so long as you're honest about it. All in all, I think it's probably a lot cheaper to market in a customer friendly way than it is to be a spamming cold calling bastard!

Finally, know this: If you fax me, or call me, or put glossy brochures in my snailmail box, and I didn't ask you to do that, I'm not gonna buy your product from you, ever. In fact, I'm such a spitefull prick that if I like your product, I'll go and source the same thing from someone else.

I hope that lot helps!

But the classily-named sextium processors have been in the works since april '99... What's the delay? ;)

I talk about this in one of my letters columns.

In brief: They will work, but only for suitably small values of "work", because they'll only accept DVI-HDTV input. That's a subset of regular DVI that only supports a few scan rates. If you can't goose your video card into outputting the resolution and frequency combinations the screen wants, you're out of luck.

With coal all that radiation is dumped into the air slowly.

Of course, what power costs you, the consumer, isn't what it costs, full stop. There's greenhouse gas emissions and other power plant exhaust pollution, depletion of resources, destruction of wilderness by mines and their associated infrastructure, and more.

Most of Australia's electricity is generated by coal-fired power plants, which emit an awful lot of carbon dioxide. And coal plant fly ash contains radioactive uranium and thorium in surprising amounts. Even if the ash is effectively caught by filters, something still has to be done with it.

Not that fly ash scraped out of a filter and dropped into a bucket is actually amazingly dangerous stuff, but waste of similar levels of activity that happens to come from nuclear power plants is treated like pure megadeathium. You certainly can't get away with burying it in dams .

Before I got the amp, I'd grown used to hearing clear buzzy distortion on low bass when I wound the volume up. I assumed it was the poor Sennheiser headphone transducers being pushed past their limits.

Nope, it was the wimpy motherboard sound hardware running out of juice, and clipping

Before I got the amp, I'd grown used to hearing clear buzzy distortion on low bass when I wound the volume up. I assumed it was the poor Sennheiser headphone transducers being pushed past their limits.

Nope, it was the wimpy motherboard sound hardware running out of juice, and clipping

It's been done before as evident by this review at DansData. That package does come with an addon card but it's just a crap PCI video card and nothing special. It's all software driven.

Chances are that there isn't any special hardware component on the Jetway motherboards but just that the drivers check for a BIOS signature.

Actually I find it odd that this is the first application that occurred to the poster.

What's really funny is that, bad math aside, the idea simply seems to be putting the magnets around the edge of a case fan rather than in the middle. It's funny because, if I'm not mistaken, this has already been done.

Evidence:

• CF 2GB cartridge for $180
• USB CF readers for $7
• ATA CF reader (caveat: most desktop ATA chipsets don't hot-swap well)

Dan's Data has a new review of some enclosures. There are lots of other manufacturers of these things out there as well. Why is Iomega bothering?

I got a decent price for a 4 port gigabit hub. It was around $250, which was much cheaper than any other alternatives at the time. About a month after I spent the money, I found out that in the real world, gigabit ethernet is only about twice as fast as 100 megabit. I think this is the original article I read is here. Make sure to look all the way to the end at the "Using the speed" section. Basically, it says that if all you are doing is copying from hard drive to hard drive, gigabit is only about twice as fast.

a certain number of charging cycles

Wonder if the internet usage policy will classify Dubya with his silly grin as "distasteful, objectionable content" :-)

According to some porn filters, yes, pictures of GWB are vile pornography. =)

While its not exactly reviewing all the latest and greatest, www.dansdata.com is my favorite "independent" web review site. He usually sticks to cameras, small computer parts, and other neat electronics, but he's a no BS kinda guy who will say something sucks when it does.

I'm waiting for the virus that, in addition to spreading itself, will email out random Word docs found on the hard drive. This is more than a nuisance, it could potentially damage 1000s of companies. Imagine a Word doc getting out that contained corporate secrets.

I believe either the Melissa virus or Sircam already did that.

See Dan's Data for more info.

Seconded. Dan rules. He reviews everything from small computer cases and bisarre amount of heatsinks, over LED flashlights and soap bubble pistols, to radio controlled tanks. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.

Seconded. Dan rules. He reviews everything from small computer cases and bisarre amount of heatsinks, over LED flashlights and soap bubble pistols, to radio controlled tanks. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.

Seconded. Dan rules. He reviews everything from small computer cases and bisarre amount of heatsinks, over LED flashlights and soap bubble pistols, to radio controlled tanks. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.

Seconded. Dan rules. He reviews everything from small computer cases and bisarre amount of heatsinks, over LED flashlights and soap bubble pistols, to radio controlled tanks. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.

Seconded. Dan rules. He reviews everything from small computer cases and bisarre amount of heatsinks, over LED flashlights and soap bubble pistols, to radio controlled tanks. His writing is excellent, and he's also very knowledgeable, which at least keeps me checking back every day for new articles. And no, I have no relation whatsoever to Dan, I'm across the planet from him. I'm just an appreciative reader, who really should get a PayPal account and plonk some $AU his way some day.

While its not exactly reviewing all the latest and greatest, www.dansdata.com is my favorite "independent" web review site. He usually sticks to cameras, small computer parts, and other neat electronics, but he's a no BS kinda guy who will say something sucks when it does.

the ThinkGeek Cappucino

Isn't the cappucino from the early generation of "mini-PCs" which were loud due to cooling requirements (fan-noise!)?

I want it silent so I'd rather consider a Shuttle XPC Zen or something like that.

I bought 50 sticks of 128meg PC-133 for about $16.00 a stick in '02. Can't buy it for that now.

Could be worse, you could have got 67 x 256Mb PC133 RAM chips for $95 australian

Oh yeah, there's a good article on doing just this here.

"I for one, continue to welcome our curvaceous, female overlords..."

Where is the 3D porn?

"I don't think so. At that resolution you're capturing every grain in the film, at least if it's 35 mm film. That grain is not really part of the image, it's an artifact. Kodak states "(2048 x 3072 pixels) captures all the image data 35 mm film has to offer." There, we reduced file size by a factor of 12. Now, I hope you're not storing uncompressed tiffs? They'd be around half the size (depending on image) as compressed .png. That brings us to a 96% reduction from your figure. And that's without touching lossy compression - which I doubt you would touch, even though you don't mind scanning and storing away all the grain of film."

Even without going back to more research on the quality of film, a few things to note

My estimate of the equivalent pixel size of film might be a little high. But then, that quoted estimate comes from the marketing department of a digital camera manufacturer who're trying to compare their product against film, so maybe that's slightly low?

Uncompressed TIFF? No of course not. I'm going by the numbers on canon's site actually, 14 mega-pixel images (whatever that means) being available at 14MB download (whatever that means). So we can ignore that hand-waving "just divide by twelve" factor.

Does your camera save as compressed PNG files then? Or do you have to store pictures as this TIFF format until it gets transferred to a computer?

96% reduction? Fair enough. You can probably print a poster from that 2k/3k image.

So I suppose I'd better resort to some research to validate the original question. Dans data has a lot of resources on digital photography, and there's lots of useful information there. But I did a search for film resolution and came up with a letters page. 6000dpi for film, apparently. And at 35mm, that comes out to 6800 x 4500 pixels (the 35mm measurement is the diagonal of a 6:4 ratio film?), so about 31 megapixels (real megapixels I mean, not "multiplied-by-three for no good reason" megapixels)

Granted, that's for reasonable quality film, at a low ISO number, and a good lens, so some of those factors may not be applicable for various people. I don't think it's such a problem assuming a good camera though, because the quality of lens you can get for the price of that digital camera is going to be fairly good. You could preserve the "but film is lower cost" argument, and reduce the resolution by half again for a $300 camera and by more for ISO200 film.

So the 10000 x 8000 estimate is more suited to medium-format film (50mm film at 6000dpi would be 10000 pixels wide?), while Kodak's numbers are still looking optomistic.

The cynical person might suggest that manufacturer sites will say "6 megapixels is the same as film" because 6 megapixel cameras are what they're trying to sell. The real test is whether their pages get updated in the future to say that $x megapixels is enough to reproduce film, where $x is their latest model of consumer digital camera...

I dunno what to do about your wife, but as for the other..

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/08/1657243.shtm l

Also reviewed here

It's not IR, but it is RCA. And has a number of old atari games on it.

Dan answers the question on medical magnets right here, scroll down a bit.

For the price of a generic EPROM, you could easily get mechanical upgrades that enhances your car even more than the EPROM. If you're going for extreme performance, after all the mechanical upgrades, get a special chip made specifically for you.

Dan from DansData has written on it in a much better fashion than I ever could though...
His main "hotchip" article
Scroll down to the EPROM stuff, he addresses his experiences with "Powerchip"

*Sigh* now the NYT is going to cause a bunch of people to waste money. People that don't know enough about cars are going to get preyed on by companies like "powerchip". Just like people in electronics stores that don't know enough about computers.