Slashdot Mirror

That's OK, but for the man of the 50's on the go what do you do? You get a CURTA calculator. They were said to be popular with rally drivers for instance.

They are relatively valuable and pretty nifty calculator. You can try to get a feel for it with the simulator. Enjoy!

iPod was only the first at that formfactor.

Anyone remember Apple's first attempt at a Portable Music Player? harhar

They could also comprimise on the form factor a little. For example, one of these could be adapted into an "iPod-Killer" for less than $50.

Sounds like DDR is the DoubleRate enhancement of the old Nintendo World Class Track Meet game released years ago which included a PowerPad to record track times and longs jumps!

eBay's webservers are IIS/Windows, but their applications run on Websphere, under xSeries Hardware. Their is a little PR blurb on eBay, and another one on IBM's site

All right, first off, I would like to say that I have lost weight by playing DDR - not much, mind you, but some. Enough for me. (I do other things too, but primarily DDR.) As far as equipment goes, it sounds like what you are looking for is very similar to my own setup. I use an open-source DDR emulator called Stepmania that runs under Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. (Note, I run it under Windows, personally, and cannot vouch for how well the other versions work.) I use a pair of pads that I bought off eBay for about $40 (similar to these), which I like a lot better than the really thin ones that tend to be more common. Finally, I have an adapter to hook the Playstation gamepads to my PC through USB. As for songs, there are several places around the Net to find them...I'm sure someone else will mention them, but just know that it's illegal to have them unless you own a copy of them (which sometimes means having a machine). As such, I'll leave that as an exercise for you to find, if you so wish.

I've been told that the LJIII has rubber parts in the sheet feed mechanism. They eventually get hard and slippery, and won't feed any more.

Correct, but $10 and five minutes later, you're good for another 200,000 pages.

I've been trying to find out how to do this myself for ages!!! I used to archive handwritten documents and sketches using a Visioneer PaperPort Vx sheet-feed scanner on a Windows 95 laptop years ago. I could manage to save at least a file cabinet drawer worth of pages onto a single CD-R. The setup worked great, and was even portable so I could travel with it! It scanned pages pretty quickly.

The kind of medium I was scanning could cause problems. Sheets of pad paper, paper bound notebooks, and even hard-bound notebooks that I took apart would usually have remaining bits of binding glue that would cause a paper jam. I would have to pull the page from the other end of the scanner to help it avoid jamming. Since then I've switched to using spiral-bound unruled notebooks with covers solid enough to keep the corners of the pages from curling due to wear and tear. The spiral binding insured that I didn't have to deal with binding glue jams. Crisp flat pages also prevented jams due to curled corners.

I scanned them in at 300 dpi in black and white using the text enhanced mode so that the contrast was adjusted automatically for better compression. Without this, the blank areas of a scanned page would be percieved as having some shade, and the scanned image would have some pixel dithering to represent the shade. This would cause difficulty for the compression algorithm and result in a large file size. With the text enhanced mode, the blank areas were percieved as being absolutely white, which would maximise the efficiency of the compression algorithm. This would result in much smaller file sizes. At first, I used the PaperPort software's ".MAX" proprietary file format, but I ended up converting them to LZW-compressed TIFFs so that I could open the documents on computers not equipped with PaperPort software.

If the papers you need to scan are crisp uncurled pages without residual binding glue like that you find on pads, scanning will be a breeze. You can use a scanner with an automatic document feeder, because you won't have to worry about paper jams. Otherwise, you will have to scan each page manually. The Visioneer Strobe XP 450 PDF looks like a good one for this. If they do have curls or glue but are all of a uniform size, a flatbed would be your best bet, because you wouldn't have to worry about jams and would have to only manually set the cropping size just once. If the papers vary in size a great deal (say if you were scanning in a bunch of receipts of different lengths and widths) a sheet-feed scanner would be better because they crop the pages automatically, although you would have to worry about jams. At least the Visioneer ones do. There is another sheet-feed scanner for the Mac called the TravelScan 464M, but I don't have any experience with it, so I don't know if it automatically crops.

I eventually decided that I would like to try scanning in greyscale, because although black and white was fine for printed text, I felt that it wasn't clear enough for handwriting and sketches. I knew that the file sizes would be larger, so I decided I would need to burn them onto DVD. I bought the first laptop to burn DVDs immediately when it first came out, which was the PowerBook with SuperDrive. To my disappointment, I found that Visioneer dropped support for the Mac when OS X was introduced, so I couldn't use their scanners. I got a legacy Visioneer Strobe Pro scanner on eBay, ordered the Mac OS 9 installation disk from Visioneer, and I tried installing the PaperPort software for System 9, wit

I'm selling a lot of my old junk on ebay, you should buy it!

They no longer make it but they can be found on ebay for a few hundred bucks and no I am not selling this one or one at all.

• There are other formats, like DjVu, that have certain advantages over .PDF, but think carefully before using them. Will you be able to read your files 10, 20 years from now? In .PDF's case, the answer is an unequivocal 'yes' because of widespread government, military, and commercial standardization around it. I hate to see people spend hours scanning manuals in DjVu or another nonstandard format, because I'm 95% sure I won't be able to read them years down the road on a completely different platform.
  
• To make the document searchable, use an OCR package like FineReader if possible... but expect to spend even more time babysitting the process.
  
• Experiment with your scanner resolution settings to minimize the resulting .PDF file size. There's a big difference in size between 200 dpi and 300 dpi, and between a B&W and color scan.
  
• For some mysterious, forehead-slapping reason, flatbed scanners often use glossy-white backing material in the lid. This encourages bleedthrough of text on the reverse side of double-sided material, making your scanned documents look sloppy and compress poorly. Placing a sheet of black paper, plastic, or cardboard material between your document and the scanner lid will make a big difference.

I thought there was something fishy about this... Look what else they're selling on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =4215498621

You just missed it on ebay

Here.

And here.

Here.

And here.

Well, yes, I'm sure that ebay wouldn't want to have anything to do with a topic so controversial as pornography or sex. Certainly they would be very careful about products that were probably not legit in such areas. And certainly, they wouldn't want anything to do with dubious internet privacy software.

I think that if ebay is concerned about such issues, it's in a direct relation to profit/controversy... guess that freenet just isn't profitable enough for them.

Well, yes, I'm sure that ebay wouldn't want to have anything to do with a topic so controversial as pornography or sex. Certainly they would be very careful about products that were probably not legit in such areas. And certainly, they wouldn't want anything to do with dubious internet privacy software.

I think that if ebay is concerned about such issues, it's in a direct relation to profit/controversy... guess that freenet just isn't profitable enough for them.

Well, yes, I'm sure that ebay wouldn't want to have anything to do with a topic so controversial as pornography or sex. Certainly they would be very careful about products that were probably not legit in such areas. And certainly, they wouldn't want anything to do with dubious internet privacy software.

I think that if ebay is concerned about such issues, it's in a direct relation to profit/controversy... guess that freenet just isn't profitable enough for them.

Well, yes, I'm sure that ebay wouldn't want to have anything to do with a topic so controversial as pornography or sex. Certainly they would be very careful about products that were probably not legit in such areas. And certainly, they wouldn't want anything to do with dubious internet privacy software.

I think that if ebay is concerned about such issues, it's in a direct relation to profit/controversy... guess that freenet just isn't profitable enough for them.

I really like my Motorola Accompli 009. It's over 2 years old now (which is ancient in cell phone terms), but has basic PDA functions, a few games, color screen, is tri-band GSM, and has an IR port for beaming stuff to a Palm or printer and a QWERTY keyboard.

They're going for ~$100 now.

Nice and cheap ... only a buck.

On a more serious note ... If you've got money for a vacation, you've got money for a used PDA.

See if you can find an old Cross Pad. I have had good luck with these pads in the past while taking notes in meetings. It is nice to have a digital and a paper copy. The handwriting recog. actually works too. They were discontinued in April 2001, so check ebay.

Sorry, should have posted this with it... found one on ebay, this is exactly the one I have: Dragon Naturally Speaking Mobile Edition. There's also a used one for $15. It's a bit chunky, but with some patience it might work for you. The concept is certainly a perfect solution, although this particular implementation might not work so well... I seem to remember it didn't have too much capacity. But maybe you could use an mp3 recorder with this type of software, and have a sweet solution, without having a PC or PDA while on the road.

Sorry, should have posted this with it... found one on ebay, this is exactly the one I have: Dragon Naturally Speaking Mobile Edition. There's also a used one for $15. It's a bit chunky, but with some patience it might work for you. The concept is certainly a perfect solution, although this particular implementation might not work so well... I seem to remember it didn't have too much capacity. But maybe you could use an mp3 recorder with this type of software, and have a sweet solution, without having a PC or PDA while on the road.

I have the Visor with the collapsible keyboard and I used to take that with me for my travel writing and although it worked ok it kept crashing like crazy. I bought a Psion 5 on eBay and it ROCKS! Comes with a keyboard ( a little small but usable ) built in voice recorder. Notably it takes a standard CF card and I shoved a 40 something meg card into it. It comes with reasonable versions of Word, thesaurus, spell checker, etc and it works great. I even have an Ethernet adaptor for it.

You can see see the eBay Psion 5 stuff here. Runs on two AA batteries. I wouldn't have thought to get one but I got the recommendation from Robert Young Pelton author of the World's Most Dangerous Places. If it's good enough for him....

this works well with one of theese

this works well with one of theese

Travel Clock + KeyBoard + Memory + USB = PDA If you're worried about cost, a Zaurus SL-5000D or SL-5500 can be gotten on eBay for a reasonable price. Of course, if you're not concerned about price, then the Treo 600 would do what you need, and comes with a (albeit poor) camera.

Yes, there most definately was an eBay auction.

This guy already has a flying car

Click the link under my user id for my current ebay auctions. D&D, Hardware & Misc

Sorry, but your sig bugs me everytime I see one of your posts. Do you think you could clean it up and instead of having a horrid URL displayed for "your" URL just change your sig to include a link the way God intended it? Here, try this on for size:

"Click here for my current ebay auctions. D&D, Hardware & Misc."

Much better, don't you think? I respect the fact that you're an old-timer, but sheesh. It'll take you 1 minute and you'll look 10 years more intelligent. And no, I don't believe in God. I just think the saying is funny. Who knows, maybe you wrote that at a time when you couldn't put HTML in sigs. But now you can. So get with it!! :)

eBay right now has around 30 One Ring, 100% authentic. Nah, I'm not going to be the one that actually believes that all of these are the unique One Ring that turns you invisible. They'll make $5.95 ($11.95 "buy it now") vanish, however! I've even seen eBay entries for "One Ring" that "really works".

There are plenty of them on ebay if you really want one. I got an invite, but I'm selling it on ebay because there will be plenty of time to get one later and people apparently want them worse than I do.

In case you're really interested:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=193&item=4130782432&ssPageName=STRK:MESSE :IT

Talk about innovative design on behalf of Nintendo....NOT!

I used to own this hardware...17 years ago...sure it only played Donkey Kong, but there's no denying that the layout/design is identical to the old Nintendo Game & Watch:

Nintendo Game & Watch on Ebay

The above was searching on "weight" - I thought ebay would also ID plural matches, but it doesn't, so here is the search on weights. The trick is to add it to your favorite searches and ebay can automatically e-mail you if something shows up - and you can narrow the search. It's pretty user-friendly if you ask me. Tha above search also is just NY,NY - you can probably expand the search in the area, add more keywords, etc.

weight/exercise equipment in New York

Well, for starters they could offer an escrow service.

www.escrow.com is the preferred escrow provider for ebay. Yes, it costs extra, which is why it isn't done all the time. It's also a bit more work for the buyer and seller; for example when I used it last year it involved doing a wire transfer.

As there is no ebay member "bearsuits", there is a member "bearsuit". Although he/she has had no action on the account since August of 2001.

This person is clearly misinformed, so I'll address these one by one.

but with no buyer protection,

Wrong On many listings, Paypal (an eBay company) offers up to $500 of buyer protection. They even display a protection logo on the search results page so the listings with coverage are easily identifiable. More info here.

no seller authentication,

Wrong eBay does have a voluntary seller authentication program. It is up to the buyer to decide if they want to purchase from a non-verified seller. More info here.

and no desire to participate in seller-buyer conflicts,

Wrong eBay does work with dispute mediation providers. Their preferred provider is Square Trade.

no return policy,

Wrong Although eBay doesn't have a specific policy relating to returns, they do provide a space for sellers to state their return policy. Also, returns may be covered by the buyer protection policy, depending on the reason.

This person is clearly misinformed, so I'll address these one by one.

but with no buyer protection,

Wrong On many listings, Paypal (an eBay company) offers up to $500 of buyer protection. They even display a protection logo on the search results page so the listings with coverage are easily identifiable. More info here.

no seller authentication,

Wrong eBay does have a voluntary seller authentication program. It is up to the buyer to decide if they want to purchase from a non-verified seller. More info here.

and no desire to participate in seller-buyer conflicts,

Wrong eBay does work with dispute mediation providers. Their preferred provider is Square Trade.

no return policy,

Wrong Although eBay doesn't have a specific policy relating to returns, they do provide a space for sellers to state their return policy. Also, returns may be covered by the buyer protection policy, depending on the reason.

eBay's help file about shill bidding

It's strongly against their policies. eBay does not police itself. It relies solely on customers to report questionable activity. They almost always act on these reports.

The best deals I've come across lately on eBay are "Buy it Now!" items. It's much more convenient than bidding on traditional auctions and worrying about being sniped or shilled. Of course, if you only bid the max you're willing to pay, you won't have to worry about it.

> That said, what i don't like is novices that "cheapskates" that buy these things, use them, screw up their computer while they are still under warranty, then take them to a service provider (me, others) and then have the units fixed for free.

Likely much worse when they sell them on Ebay after messing with them. Obviously not all powerbooks on Ebay have been modded, but some of them might have been. Caveat Emptor.

In fact, eBay does work with a third party mediation company, SquareTrade to help buyers and sellers resolve conflicts. It's one of the services listed on eBay's services page.

Granted, like in most mediations this does not guarantee a favourable outcome. But if you feel you have been defrauded of something, most credit card companies protect the buyer anyway.

... is the jerk-worthy quality of the lingerie section.

That's simply a false statement:
see here.

I't maybe not all you could have hoped for, but it's something.

PayPal does a reasonable seller authentication, arguably the safest method to pay for your auction.

Why do article submitters find it necessary to include false statements??

If some enterprising PC user wants to give something like this a go, maybe they can start with this antique vintage underwood noiseless portable typewriter of their own. Noiseless! Even better, it's advertised as "ALL KEY DO WORK AND NO STICKING."

If anyone hasn't seen Brazil, you should rush out and rent a copy tonight. Definitely one of the most brilliant movies ever made.

Lots of ones available on eBay

couldn't find any thinkpad t600 models...any references?

* when fully configured

Weird Shit