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I built one almost like it. but I didn't use a kit. Just some Bass wood stock/dowels, glue, large paper clips (trigger, release), and hemp cord.

Shoots quarters/nickels 30 ft. w/1 lbs. counter weight. Needs more weight so I can shoot heavy split shots though.

-B

I think a good successor to the floppy would be one of the USB storage devices.

It's got greater capacity, can be used as a boot device and uses that one USB interface that can also be used for mouse, keyboard, etc.

I think the only thing holding this back is that there are so many older PCs and older OS versions out there that don't have good USB support built-in. But that will change in the next year or two.

Seems you're looking for this

It's Cooler Master's ATC-600, pretty expensive, but it looks neat, though I would prefer a black one (some paint will do I guess..). On the same page is a link to a similar case by Lian Li, which is cheaper.

NachtVorst

One thing: Lian Li PC-9300, perhaps? No idea about availability, I sure haven't seen it around these parts yet, but... Check out the other similar case mentioned in the review, too, perhaps. And start reading Dan's stuff, and give him plenty of donations so I don't have to. Thank you. ;^)

Try
http://dansdata.com/llpc9300.htm

or this http://dansdata.com/atc600.htm

Try
http://dansdata.com/llpc9300.htm

or this http://dansdata.com/atc600.htm

If you want a case that would go well with your stereo / VCR / TV, check out this one:

ATC600

RMN
~~~

Those of you who find this cool, and haven't already read my trebuchet kit review, probably should :-).

Check this out. I have a friend who's fired a number of them off, he says that they're every bit as impressive as the website claims.

Unfortunatly, I don't have enough money to buy ~600 sparklers, so no bomb this fourth. :(

My own review of the IBM 42H1292 and related 'boards is here, in case anybody cares.

I own two IBM 42H1292 keyboards, and they're huge, heavy, clumsy and noisy, but by God, they're TOUGH.

I love 'em.

I dread the day when motherboards all move to USB and I won't be able to use my beloved keyboards (hmmm... maybe I should start stocking up on PS2/USB adaptors...)

Sites like kuro5hin.org which, through careful donation drives, make 6 months of operating money in 3 days. Non-profits who are there for the people, who are lean and run well mainly out of the pockets of the people who're there?

Maybe a big business media site like Salon can't stay in business, but I'm sure that a leaner site could've. The Internet is all about the little guy, as Dan's Data's "Minnows 1, whales 0" argues. Until more people are online supporting a services model, you can't just base your entire revenue on a needing "just a few more" subscribers to break even.

Salon should've restructured about 74.5 million ago. They've lost a stupid amount of money.

Well, I usually buy Memorex because I get it terribly cheap from an importer. But I've used Princo, Mitsai (both CD-R and CD-RW), Mitsumi, Sony, Verbatim and a couple of weird brands and, except for one disc that was obvioulsy damaged (I noticed it before burning but decided to try it anyway), all have worked fine.

A couple of months ago there was a slight mix-up with the importer and they sent me 300 discs (I had asked for 30), so now I think I have enough Memorexes to last me for the next 5 or 6 years. :-)

Here's a nice article about different kinds of CD-R media.

RMN
~~~

Sorry, cameras do not 'take good pictures'.

Quite. I talked about this a bit in the cheap digital camera comparison I did a while ago.

You can get some quite startlingly good results out of cheap baby digitals. There are lots of things that they just can't do, of course, but the $100 toy-cam that you can keep in your pocket all the time has a lot going for it compared with the $3000 pro-cam that's sitting with its lenses in the camera bag at home.

The article author sorta makes me feel like I'm supposed to feel bad that my old harddrive ends up in China.

Don't throw out that old hard drive, strip it instead! Inside you'll find a couple of very strong rare earth magnets (scroll down to the section labled Drive Magnets once you get past the ferrofluid) that you can have all kinds of fun with or use to pick up all those screws you dropped when you were building that new computer.

And the platters make nice wind chimes.

The article author sorta makes me feel like I'm supposed to feel bad that my old harddrive ends up in China.

Don't throw out that old hard drive, strip it instead! Inside you'll find a couple of very strong rare earth magnets (scroll down to the section labled Drive Magnets once you get past the ferrofluid) that you can have all kinds of fun with or use to pick up all those screws you dropped when you were building that new computer.

And the platters make nice wind chimes.

Nor, by the way, do I intend to in order to "maintain the pack?s capacity", because I do not subscribe to the myth of "memory effect". If you think your camera, laptop, cellular phone or cordless drill battery suffers from memory effect, you are wrong. Check out http://www.repairfaq.org/ELE/ F_NiCd_Memory.html and the full NiCd Battery Frequently Asked Questions file at http://www.repairfaq.org/ELE/F_NiCd_Battery.html before you flame me about this.

Whenever I read a hardware review, I hit ctrl+f, type in "linux" and then hit enter -- first thing. If I see it jump down the page, I read the whole thing. If not, I hit spacebar to make the "not found" dialog go away and carry on with what I was doing. I can't buy hardware that doesn't support Linux, and so I have no time to read about hardware rewviews which only mention Windows. Would a hardcore Windows user care about a review of an iPod? Unless it mentioned something about the Win32 hacks, I doubt it. In fact, I could see some people actually feeling challenged if the review said "the iPod is Apple-only, but there are ways to get it running under Windows, although not for the faint of heart". Or whatever. I haven't read any iPod reviews, so I'm just guessing.

The thing might make tea and toast for me before I get up in the morning, but unless it can run under Linux, it's of zero use to me (as well as quite a few others here, I'd suspect). Normally, I'd have just gone about my business, and chalked the review up to yet another that doesn't mention Linux, which is no big deal at all. But since Dan was pimping his site on /., Linux (and *BSD, come to think of it) should have been mentioned. Lots of people here (40%?) run Windows, sure, but there ought to be a rule that when you self-submit a review you've done to Slashdot, you have to throw the other 60% of us a bone and at least see if you can dual boot or something. Win32 users can get information in hundreds of places. Users of alternative operating systems come here.

-B

Just use that spray on vinyl dye that car detailers use to change the colour of car interiors.

Afterall the vast majority of computers have plastic bevels, while the metal sides are painted with acrylic paint.

You can buy a PC Chips S370 'bare bones' book PC (its even avaliable in black as the 'Delux' model with IR keyboard & mouse/remote .

Or you can buy Book PC cases in LPX, NLX, MicroATX or FlexATX format, & build the bugger yourself. Many companies make them, including Enlight ( 7180-mATX , EN-7396 ) & Asus/ElanVital

Just use that spray on vinyl dye that car detailers use to change the colour of car interiors.

Afterall the vast majority of computers have plastic bevels, while the metal sides are painted with acrylic paint.

You can buy a PC Chips S370 'bare bones' book PC (its even avaliable in black as the 'Delux' model with IR keyboard & mouse/remote .

Or you can buy Book PC cases in LPX, NLX, MicroATX or FlexATX format, & build the bugger yourself. Many companies make them, including Enlight ( 7180-mATX , EN-7396 ) & Asus/ElanVital

A couple of links:

Codegen ATX-9001 server case (rather inexpensive for what you get)

Lian Li PC-6 and PC-5 (fairly cheap Lian Lis - whoever woulda thunk it? This review links to various other Lian Li reviews of mine)

A couple of links:

Codegen ATX-9001 server case (rather inexpensive for what you get)

Lian Li PC-6 and PC-5 (fairly cheap Lian Lis - whoever woulda thunk it? This review links to various other Lian Li reviews of mine)

A couple of links:

Codegen ATX-9001 server case (rather inexpensive for what you get)

Lian Li PC-6 and PC-5 (fairly cheap Lian Lis - whoever woulda thunk it? This review links to various other Lian Li reviews of mine)

But it is ingenius. You can sell more games that way!

The other drawback is that you can't have funny shaped media, but since microsoft isn't focused on the portable market (yet), this isn't much of a problem. Does that mean that the gamecube, with its small DVD media, have plans for a portable player sometime?

On a modern CPU.

It clicks just fine, though apparently the review does NOT make this clear.

Dan of Dansdata.com did a review of this product quite some time ago, and HIS review kicks ass Thank You So Very Much, and mentions exactly how Dwell clicking works.

Dwell clicking is only available on the deluxe model of the TrackIR system, this guy got the cheap ass model. Next time the reviewer should do some more RESEARCH before asking for a product to review.

....

Ignoring that though, I have this strange desire to wire a few of these buggers up together and get a full 3d wireless head tracking system, only problem so far is figuring out tilt, but I figure that two dots put together at different heights should be able to accomplish that, albeit with some difficulty.

But yah, the TRUE potential of this thing has not yet even began to be explored.

Think wireless LCD display glasses and with some of the Track IR dots, well heck, talk about a great time!

Hey, I do not think that anybody has mentioned that these dots can be stuck onto ANYTHING and still work just as well. For the ultimate in simulation, some sort of faux-metal gun could be included with a trigger, reload, and all. Stick a few of these dots on to it in various strategically placed locations and you would have yourself a full 3d range of movement, combine it with the head display and you could EASILY have your gun in a game point in a different direction then from your viewpoint.

Currently that feature is a major pain in the arse to implement in most games, heh.

Hey any developers / funders want to get together with me on this one? ]:D

http://www.dansdata.com/trackir.htm

Check it out
As always, humor included :)

http://dansdata.com/black.htm

For what it's worth, you can still buy those old IBM clicky-keyboards (but I'll take my Kinesis instead any day).

Irony is of course that ALL data that we recieve and send for human consumption is INDEED structured.

It is just not structured according to how the COMPUTER sees it.

Hell this posting of mine right here is structured, and beyond the obvious sentances/paragraphs explanation that is most often given.

Almost all written work is designed as so to allow for the reader to follow along the author's thought process.

Indeed writting could be looked at as some sort of bare level one shot emulation code for the human brain.

Now for computers this makes NO sense at all.

Uh duh, they don't think.

Now with a lot of work native languages can indeed be PARTIALY understood by computers, and there is an artificial language out there (I forget the name) that was designed from the ground up for both comptuer and human understanding on a quasi-equal level. But even so it cannot match the same. . . . underlying meanings between both parties.

Humans are capible of understanding all of the complexities of modern day computers, it may require a lot of work and some darn good wizardy, but it IS possible.

The issue is that the way that computers 'think' is not but a subset of our own thought methods that we have expanded upon and made more complex but ultimatly added nothing new too.

And yet it is by the very nature of being a subset that computer 'thinking' (ugh I hate using that term in this context) can only contain a partial set of the abilities of Human thinking.

Ah, to take a related explanation from Dansdata

"But a clever enough algorithmic composition system can get around this, by using a human to direct it through infinite musical space. With any luck, the human will have some idea of what sounds good; that's a really difficult thing to teach a computer."

(speaking about the Kong Karma's composition functions)

Humans have to GUIDE the computer.

For instance the file finder feature on many OSs.

If I tell my Windows box to search for mIRC* it will search my entire computer's hard drive including my Cygwin folder and my C:\corel folder.

Which is obviously highly friggin stupid since mIRC is NOT going to be in either one of those. (well not today at least. :) )

But the COMPUTER does not know that. Despite having a highly refined layout system for my files that has everything compacted into nice small little subsets of subsets as to what types of file it is, the damn computer has;

No idea WTF mIRC is, what IRC is (outside of some sort of program that tells the computer to interpet network packet X with Y evaluation system and display Z depending on X's contents, and oh yah shove the word IRC on the window while your at it. That is ALL computers know of IRC), what the hell a 'program file' is or why in the world (no concept of 'why' either) mIRC would be in C:\program files\

Now if I use a bit of human judgement and direct the computer to search only C:\program files\ it can find the requested files just fine.

But it is STUPID. Period.

What is the BEST possible outcome we can hope for in this situation? Hmm?

Hah. All files in some sort of a database system? Make it 'object based'? Or just add assloads of data to the 'file fork'.

Bah it would STILL come down to the computer going over each friggin entry in a database until it gets a match with the search string. Hell even if some more efficent searching algorithm is used besides just going through every item in the database, the fact is that the computer

(pay attention here folks)

STILL HAS NO FRIGGIN IDEA AS TO WHAT IN THE HELL mIRC is.

I can add descriptors to heck to all files associated with the program. And the computer will STILL NOT KNOW WHAT mIRC IS!

Once again.

THE COMPUTER HAS NO IDEA AS TO WHAT THE HELL ANYTHING IS.

For instance.

I know off hand that my copy of virtual dub is in F:\video editing tools\virtual dub\ (actualy the version number follows it, but close enough. :) )

Now the computer has no idea as to what 'video editing tools' is (I am using is here folks, plural? Huh, whats that? what is 'what'. The computer does not have an understanding of ANY of these topics.)

In fact, one thing that SO many people seem to forget, is that COMPUTERS UNDERSTAND NOTHING.

Nothing AT ALL.

PERIOD.

So please.

Please.

PLEASE

Understand that the computer will NEVER be able to truly organize or structure your data, because the computer does not even know what the hell a structure is. Sure you can tell it to shove such and such bits into such and such places, but it knows not what those bits are or what those bits mean or what those places mean or what the hell a place is or ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL.

I can make my computer feel happy.

I have it show "I am happy" on the screen.

That is as close as you are ever going to get the current breeds of computers to being able to understand or think about anything at all.

Because everything eventualy comes down to that same basic fact.

The computer does what you tell it too and nothing else.

Namely - aren't most modders and overclockers running the distributed.net client, or some similar background task, which keeps our CPU utilisation at 100% all the time?

I could draw a tachometer on the front of this PC, and it'd be 100% accurate :-).

Namely - aren't most modders and overclockers running the distributed.net client, or some similar background task, which keeps our CPU utilisation at 100% all the time?

I could draw a tachometer on the front of this PC, and it'd be 100% accurate :-).

I've used some BookPC's for second computers and the such. They are awesome for that little size. Looks like mobo's like this will help push the little stuff forward. Once you get past the old "little piece of junk that doesn't compare to my full blown rig", they're capable machines. Having your linux distro recognize all that built-in stuff would be a plus.

I wish that other manufacturers would jump into this boat and push this market further, I'm not buying anything by VIA anytime soon.

Surefire Products are the makers of the Gatling rubber-band gun; it's their flagship product, and they (and their resellers) don't actually expect to sell many (or any) of them.

Surefire's far cheaper rubber-band handguns, on the other hand, are excellent :-).

Surefire Products are the makers of the Gatling rubber-band gun; it's their flagship product, and they (and their resellers) don't actually expect to sell many (or any) of them.

Surefire's far cheaper rubber-band handguns, on the other hand, are excellent :-).

I like to dig into old dead drives. Collect screws and parts, make clock faces out of the drive platters, and particularly collect the NIB magnets.

On some drives, the ribbon that connects the controller board to the electronics inside of the drive housing is attached to the controller board with a press-fit-type connector.
You may be able to buy a new drive of the same make and model and just swap controller boards.

As far as PCs-that-look-like-CRT-iMacs go, there are lots of machines being sold under different labels that're all based on the bare-bones Palladine LCDpc, which I review here. It's a pretty nifty piece of gear, actually, provided you can get a bare-bones one for a decent price and don't mind lacerating yourself when you install hardware in it.

http://www.dansdata.com/mimio.htm

Ze review, she is here: http://www.dansdata.com/mimio.htm.

Ze review, she is here: http://www.dansdata.com/mimio.htm.

• Why don't we see more standardisation for things like digital camera batteries, laptop batteries and so forth?

I think you sum it up nicely. It's the revenue from spares and replacements. I bought a used laptop with a dead NiMh from eBay for about $270. The battery manufacturer (Solomon) isn't even selling these batteries any more, but there's a generic Duracell equivelant, ranging from $105 for the dumb battery to $150 for the smart version.

Consider that this pack is pretty much equivelant to 10 x 1.5 (actually 1.2)V MiMh AA's, costing $50 or less for ten good cells. The dumb pack is charging a 100% markup for the form factor and contacts, and (no doubt) a very cheap recharger. The NiMh in my other laptop gets very hot while charging, which is about the last thing you want to happen.

An interesting how-to on making up an external power pack for a digital camera using 5 x 7Ah F cell NiCd's (totalling about ten times a typical laptop battery's capacity) can be found here.

To power a 12V laptop, you need 10 x 1.5v cells (which actually deliver about 1.2V each). Using various types of (e.g.) Sanyo NiCd's (although I'd prefer NiMh's, as cadmium is nasty-nasty), you could use:

• KR-1100AAU : 12 Ah, 240g
• KR-5000DEL : 54 Ah, 1.5kg
• KR-7000F : 75 Ah, 2.3 kg
• KR-20000M : 240 Ah, 6.4 kg

Compare and contrast with my 3.5Ah pack at about 250g. Even with stock AA's, I'd get over three times the capacity and life. If I wanted to lug a lump of battery around, I could run the thing for days off of battery power. Actually, my laptop expects 19v DC in through the power jack (to recharge the 12v internal battery), so you could multiply all these figures by up to 1.5, if you felt like (realistically) powering a laptop for a working week off of a 7 lbs F cell pack.

I remeber reading a review of those cool rare earth magnets on Dan's Data.

The link to the article is here The link for where to cool magnets on his page is here

Now we just have to wait for a slashdotter to build a large version of this and use it to smash some watermelons :)

I remeber reading a review of those cool rare earth magnets on Dan's Data.

The link to the article is here The link for where to cool magnets on his page is here

Now we just have to wait for a slashdotter to build a large version of this and use it to smash some watermelons :)

I review the Mini-Z here, by the way. Lots of pretty pictures of stock and hopped-up cars.

At normal living-room TV-watching distance, sure.

If you're sitting not more than a couple of feet away from the screen, though - as I'll warrant you are, at this moment - the difference is very obvious, and very worthwhile.

My HDTV is, at the moment, an old 15 inch monitor, sitting next to my bed. I'll probably swap in a second hand 17 incher, or something, when I get around to it.

The 15 inch screen doesn't have enough resolution to display all the detail in a 1080i letterboxed image, but even so, HD is very clearly superior to SD.

As, ahem, you'd know, if you'd read my article.

If you use a computer monitor as your display, HDTV isn't terrifyingly expensive. That's no good if you want a 45 inch screen, of course, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing.

I bought an HDTV box a little while ago and wrote an article on the subject of getting all this stuff happening for cheap. You can read the article here.

catapult watch !!

Looks like these guys in taiwan have been doing water cooling for amd processors for quite a while.

Dont know how good it is, but this article has a huge peice (fnar)on how it all works if you're interested (its a bit old tho', May 2000 sometime according to google)...