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I built this hack in like 1993, and it was hard to find a power glove even then. Now, it must be rather impossible.

Obviously you have never heard of eBay

My alternative will be stated in a moment, but first I want to give you a few things to think about.

1- Tradition is strongly rooted and if you search back far enough you will find 'True' time honored traditions of the heart.

2- Women love to feel unique. Currently most women accomplish this by getting the bigger diamond. Though there are other ways to separate them into a truely unique field of their own. Separating them entirely from everyone they know. And at an EXTREMELY low cost.

3- What is a time and time again statement from married women whose husbands go away with the boys. Or leave on business trips??? Will they take off their ring? What if you could absolutely prove to her you wouldn't?

4- Couple with #3, what if it was your true love that showed her you were true to her and would never stray?

Answer: A puzzle ring.

These rings consist of many bands, ranging from 4 bands, to as many as 8 (I've seen as many as 12, but they are rare.)

These bands come in gold, silver and many different designs. The makers of these rings can usually customize them and possible add diamond chips (for appeal) if you wish. The are inexpensive, in the area of $100 to $250 each for gold, and even cheaper if you choose silver. I'm sure they come in white gold also.

These rings have quite a history dating back (from what I found) to midevil times. The ring consisting of bands that interlock to form the ring. But remove the ring and the ring falls apart. The come with no instruction and are very difficult to reassemble. The more bands that you have, the more complicated it becomes.

When I suggested these to my girlfriend (prior proposal) she was overwhelmingly pleased that I would even suggest such a thing. That I would willingly want to put somethign on my hand that I couldn't take off in the heat of the moment or at a glance of a pretty woman coming my way., Though I reassure you, that I wouldn't anyway, I truely love her, but the extra notion of dedication was purifying to the occasion.

And as I said, ALL of her friend and co-workers are jealous, more over that their husbands wouldn't dare where that type of ring.

Wrong or right.. I made the correct choice.

Here is an example of the rings.. I simply seached E-bay, but I am sure there are other avenues to follow in order to purchase such rings. The sellers on e-bay often advertise that they custom make these ring.. and size and many styles.

Happy shopping and good luck with a life time of happiness to both of you!

Example at: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =949361336

IF she is willing, why not try something like this or this but in a women's style and size of course. Titanium seems fitting to me because it is so strong and tarnish/corrosion resistant, as one wants their love to be.

I have not purchased anything from these vendors, so I can't endorse them specifically. We were pretty "traditional" when we got married, in that I spent an irrational amount of money and bought her one big ring with a large center diamond and several smaller ones that served as both her wedding and engagement ring. To date, other than the house which the bank owns anyways, her ring is the most valuable thing that we own, at least in replacement cost. For an anniversarry present though, I think I will get us matching titanium rings.

IF she is willing, why not try something like this or this but in a women's style and size of course. Titanium seems fitting to me because it is so strong and tarnish/corrosion resistant, as one wants their love to be.

I have not purchased anything from these vendors, so I can't endorse them specifically. We were pretty "traditional" when we got married, in that I spent an irrational amount of money and bought her one big ring with a large center diamond and several smaller ones that served as both her wedding and engagement ring. To date, other than the house which the bank owns anyways, her ring is the most valuable thing that we own, at least in replacement cost. For an anniversarry present though, I think I will get us matching titanium rings.

Here's two places to buy real diamonds for less than the local jewelry store, eBay (of course!) and HardCarbon. If you buy on eBay, make sure the seller 1) has good feedback, and 2) takes returns if stone doesn't appraise right. Get it appraised right away, it should cost less than $50 to do so. Then your local jewelry store can set your new stone in a ring of your choosing.

Good alternatives for diamond should be hard, (so they don't scratch,) brilliant, and valuable. Real demantoid garnet and real alexanderite are both stunning. Never buy opal in a ring you plan wear a lot, even the triplets with quartz tops scratch too easily. Turquoise, coral, jade, and pearls are also much to soft for ring stones.

Here's two places to buy real diamonds for less than the local jewelry store, eBay (of course!) and HardCarbon. If you buy on eBay, make sure the seller 1) has good feedback, and 2) takes returns if stone doesn't appraise right. Get it appraised right away, it should cost less than $50 to do so. Then your local jewelry store can set your new stone in a ring of your choosing.

Good alternatives for diamond should be hard, (so they don't scratch,) brilliant, and valuable. Real demantoid garnet and real alexanderite are both stunning. Never buy opal in a ring you plan wear a lot, even the triplets with quartz tops scratch too easily. Turquoise, coral, jade, and pearls are also much to soft for ring stones.

Want a palladium ring? Here is a really neat looking palladium ring. Only $30.95 on ebay. It's vintage from WW2.

This guy built some robots for this company. And he told me, that he bought most parts, even the engines for arms etc. from eBay.

i just thought this might interest someone. do you know who the segway inventor's father is?

Where were you located? My mom still has a rotary phone outside Washington, DC, and it still works fine. I've also used rotaries in Charlottesville, VA, with no problems. I've never heard of anywhere just not supporting rotary anymore. In fact, this article had me looking at some cool antique rotary phones on eBay. Some of the old french-style ones are hella sexy. I'd suck if they don't work in Silicon Valley anymore.

How about 25 bux?

Check out this rare yellow beauty, complete with call AT&T for service sticker, 1-800-222-3111. I wonder, This looks to be a leased phone, if you lease a home you can't sell it, so it stands to reason that you can't legally sell a leased phone, No?

That you can buy your fill of rotary phones for 5 to 10 dollars US, that means that they were able to actually charge MANY times more per month than the damn things were actually worth.

My iPAQ does much the same with it's CF sleeve, and Linux installed on it, except with a MUCH shorter battery life (45 minutes with an Ambicom 802.11b card... ! ) and no keyboard. I'm thinking of selling my iPAQ and seeing what I can get off of eBay....

--j

I guess you haven't heard of a little Internet site called Ebay? They have lot's of CD's and you can set your own prices. If no one is willing to pay more, you win!

It's interesting to note that some of the auctions close at or above the retail price, indicating the cost is not the limiting factor, but the availability elsewhere.

I guess you haven't heard of a little Internet site called Ebay? They have lot's of CD's and you can set your own prices. If no one is willing to pay more, you win!

It's interesting to note that some of the auctions close at or above the retail price, indicating the cost is not the limiting factor, but the availability elsewhere.

Professional Audio On Linux?

Many comments, mostly about software and Macs.
There are some Linux Sound Hardware comments.

The "Linux Music and Sound" book is recommended.

• Half.Com entry
• Barnes & Noble

A Cisco 2512 has an ethernet port and 16 serial ports, and they are available used for less than $400. To access a system, you telnet to port 200x, where x = the serial port you want to connect to. Here's one on eBay

How about buing some old games on eBay? At least Sierra has some collections. And then installing some really cool opensource interpreters, line ScummVM, Sarien, FreeSCI. The downside is, that some have become collectible and people are willing to spend nearly $200 on Space Quest Collection. But such is a price for greatness. --Harri

How about buing some old games on eBay? At least Sierra has some collections. And then installing some really cool opensource interpreters, line ScummVM, Sarien, FreeSCI. The downside is, that some have become collectible and people are willing to spend nearly $200 on Space Quest Collection. But such is a price for greatness. --Harri

That said, I'd offer you $700 for your G4 right now. ;-) It's nowhere near the purchase price, I'm sure, but after all your machine is nearly two years old. Getting 1/3 of the price you paid for it after two years would be pretty good, I think.

That's all well and good, but I don't have the $2000 to add to it to buy the system I'd want to replace it with. :-) Since I'm still not yet in the market to sell, I'd suggest you check out the Dual G4 listings on eBay. Several of them are currently at about that price point. All told, I'd say that a fair offer for my system, sans monitor, of course.

Surplus sites and auction sites like Ebay are good for this sort of thing. Myself, I have a Computone Executech II key system with nice lcd speakerphones and programmable button consoles. I got the PBX and 15 phones on ebay for $65+s/h. While it is true you can't plug in a plain old telepohone (POTs), Even these old proprietary phone systems have some "auxilary" jacks on them for regular analog devices (fax machines, etc) you may want to use at an extension. I was able to use google groups to find all the pertinent wiring information before I even bid on it.

I use this phone system in conunction with vgetty and this. If someone calls in and the VOCP system answers, you can do all the standard voicemail stuff, you can issue a page to my email pager, send a fax(which can be forwarded to email) or I can even dial into the system and get a PPP dial-up connection if I'm on the road and otherwise don't have internet.

I did a search on ebay and found ~140 items, the first page probably having the most relavant results. I for one wouldn't mind owning one.

Check out the ebay results here

You can probably find it fairly cheap in used book stores, there was a reprinting of it in paperback, after Schwarzkopf had it on his desk during a major interview. If you're really interested here's a cheap copy on ebay, not mine, as I still haven't finished it.

If you don't want to wait for the US model, "kenwinning" is selling them on ebay (now that I can read!).

I've successully played video clips (I showed everyone at my way-too-long-running project South Park's Orientation to Hell. 'That would be "The Mormons." The correct answer is "The Mormons".) but battery life is horrendous. (You could hack some together an external battery pack out of a Walmart flashlight, a USB extension cable, and a USB power adapter like I did, I suppose.)

Well, I guess the encoder really is a TiVo-like black box, but the media is portable and encoded into a form that would work on a Linux laptop or desktop just as well as a Z. That's the cool part, me thinks.

If any of you buy one, let me know how it works out ;)

The expensive part of this is the Dreamcast Broadband Adapter. While a complete Dreamcast system costs under $40 on ebay, the broadband adapter sells for up to $200.

This also requires modifying the Dreamcast to accept an IDE hard drive, which likely brings the total cost to over $200. There are many Pentium-class laptops on ebay for less than that.

The expensive part of this is the Dreamcast Broadband Adapter. While a complete Dreamcast system costs under $40 on ebay, the broadband adapter sells for up to $200.

This also requires modifying the Dreamcast to accept an IDE hard drive, which likely brings the total cost to over $200. There are many Pentium-class laptops on ebay for less than that.

The expensive part of this is the Dreamcast Broadband Adapter. While a complete Dreamcast system costs under $40 on ebay, the broadband adapter sells for up to $200.

This also requires modifying the Dreamcast to accept an IDE hard drive, which likely brings the total cost to over $200. There are many Pentium-class laptops on ebay for less than that.

I'd be happy enough it they just dropped off the broadband adapter.

From the article: Cyberpunks will be toting cheap game consoles on their utility belts this fall

Yeah, the Dreamcast is dirt cheap. The "broadband adapter" needed to hook it up to an ethernet network? Quite pricey.

Here's what you need: a WiFi device; a public node; a CueCat or any other barcode scanner. If you're all geared up, then you can jump the gun on ubiquitous computing. You might use sem@code, a barcode that encodes a URL. With a wireless or mobile internet device, you just scan the barcode into your URL field, and voila! you load the website it links to.

Sem@codes are public tags for URLs. This is not pie-in-the-sky stuff: for example, over three million CueCat scanners were distributed (you can get one on eBay). With that or any other barcode scanner attached to your laptop, you can read semacodes. In addition, your or anyone else can generate sem@codes with open-source software online.

Simon

Actually, the 325iX cost $30k when new. That's still only ~26% of the original price. I think the Porsche example is an exception ... they've always held their value pretty well.

If you bought a 1990 Honda Accord at the same time, you'd see about the same sort of depreciation in price. An Accord EX goes for maybe $4k these days (Edmunds reports $3,673 for private sale and $5,264 while eBay completed auctions suggest something lower than that). It cost about $17k new. Even at the $4k mark, it depreciated faster than the 325iX example. There are lots of examples, so it's hard to say for sure, but the Honda CRX Si depreciated more slowly and is still worth about a third of the original price.

Ultra SPARC IIe 64 bit in Sun Blade 100,
or if you're real cheap get a 333-440
Ultra IIi off of eBay
You'll pay 500-1000 for a decent system.

I recently took on this pc-to-tv project, thought I'd share my experience.

I purchased a 42" mitsubishi hdtv.. after adding all the usual suspect components (progressive scan dvd/dts receiver/surround speakers) I looked at hooking up an existing pc to the system for listening to mp3's/having a cool winamp visual screen on the tv, as well as having icq and aim from the living room. I purchased a wireless keyboard/mouse combo off ebay for about $30 which works very nice from up to a 15-20 foot range. overall, it worked wonderfully with the exception of resolution (for hdtv standards). my goal was to get 1024 res on the 42". I found a cool VGA to component (Y-Pb-Pr) converter for $119. This is where I'm at now.. my next project will be a wireless video transmitter from the computer to the tv, since the fans do get kind of noisy, not to mention the issue of heat.

Pricey indeed. The complete specs for the A1000 they put together is on their site. I'm sure if you badger them for the complete specs on the NES or A2600 they'll tell you. There's no custom-manufactured hardware in there; this is just a pricewatch or ebay affair here, folks. Even the "adapted" NES controllers they're selling for $40 (!!!!) are available on the net, or you could even make them yourself. But, whatever, the 40-50% profit they're making is alright with me, if I find the urge to have a PC in an NES case, I'll do the research and build it myself...

If you're interested in Small Form Factor (SFF) stuff, I'd suggest this forum.

Hmm... Wonder if there are any congressmen listed on ebay. I don't exactly have $187k lying around, but maybe there are some budget congressmen available... They could certainly come in handy.

Sorry, a custom-built, stretched ambulance doesn't count... If you are going to appeal to special cases, why not go for the best? (I'm not sure how long it is, but I think it's close enough to 22', if not 25')

Yeah, theres one on this page I found...

Sure it does

Ebay already has a category for this stuff!

Apple has always been a leader in personal computing. They've usually (if not always) predicted the trend WAY ahead of everyone else and they take the risks that no one else really wants to (like the Newton, USB, and colored cases, and now .mac). There's no reason to be mad with Apple for this move of theirs. If anything, it's just an indicator of what's going to happen to the rest of the PC world in a few months, maybe a year. We live in a free market economy in case you guys forgot! The whole "free Internet" thing was a scam from the beginning. Going forward, paying for content and services is going to make things better for everyone in the long run and not just better for the big guys. If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that the technology helps level the playing field for the smaller competitors. When the Internet was all "free", only the big guys could play in that ballgame. But if they're forced to play by the same rules as everyone else, Internet technologies will help the smaller service provider play on a more level field. The result will be greater variety of content and services that serve everyone's individual tastes better. (That's what ebay is all about.) There are even places now where mere individuals can get in on these new trends by making it easier to sell your own content and services (vtechmedia and keen come immediately to mind). No one likes to pay for something they've been getting for free, but c'mon, didn't we know deep down that this just wasn't going to be able to keep going like this forever? Apple is leading the way again and they're probably right (again).

G4 Case PC mod guide

G4 Case Auction

You can bid on the lost russian inflatable spacecraft by clicking here.

One item I'd like to add is that there are many Mac "hobbyists out there that like to tinker and experiment with their systems, and an array of web sites supporting them. I put myself in that category, as in addition to knowing I have reliable Mac system that'll last 3 years or more, I also like to keep them up-to-date without buying a new system. My G3s occurred by purchasing and installing (1 minute) G3 upgrades to surplus 8600 systems I bought for $150 long ago. The upgrade was $200 and I overclocked it to 333 MHz. and if had 1MB cache so the slower disk and bus speeds were hidden. Photoshop on my G3s and G4 runs better than on any of my PCs, and exploiting ALTIVEC for scientific floating point calculations, as per NASA Engineer, Craig Hunter can reach 681 MFLOPS

My 1.6GB G4 cost $700 (eBay helped). I plan to update my Linux/Windows laptop next week to a G4 Powerbook for many of the same reasons you cite. Thus, although I don't consider myself a "guru", I feel confident that anyone with a Mac and the plethora of web info can experiment and "tinker" to upgrade CPUs, CDRW, video, SDRAM, and even run OS/X on 8600s upgraded to G3s, just as I have done.

Thus, even in the 5%, there's a large community of MAC "tinkerers" who can probably hold their own (and find much in common) with their PC comrades who like to "mess with their system" and not just fix power supplies.

better yet, sell it on ebay

Genuine Space Debris (lug nut). No reserve. Includes NASA certificate of authenticity.

Admit it, what geek wouldn't want a piece of the soyuz or the Mir, or what have you?

gene sequences from a mail-order supplier. I wonder if I can find one on Ebay

On a related note, how much do you think information-technology.com's worth?

They should be very, very careful. You never know what might happen with mail-order gene sequences, or genetic material from eBay or such places.

Maybe we should let the BBC in on a little secret on where to get all of their media playing needs?

And i think google's caching should take care of the remote, off-site backups anyone would worry about.

...and no one has brought up modding one? Get an old one from E-bay and make it suit your needs! Hell, you could even cut a window in it and put neon lights inside. Maybe even a biohazard logo. Or something.

"And what's popular among the geeks today, as I want it to appeal to the vast majority of our staff?"

Including Jolt is a good idea. Other than that, I would say wouldn't it be a better idea to ask your staff what they like to drink instead of us?

Toyota RA4 EV - yes it's an SUV but the NiMH batteries are supposed to last 100,000 miles, maintenance free; and it gets 126 miles to the charge; and it has all the creature comforts. I think it's kindof ironic all this high-tech stuff is being put in an SUV. Just think how much better the range would be if they'd put the same powertrain in a sports car with good drag coefficient and low frontal area. But, as far as I can tell this is the best new EV that you can actually buy right now. Only in California, unfortunately. I presume for charging it uses the GM paddle system like your EV1 but haven't confirmed that.

You could just get a used one on ebay; I was very tempted to bid on this but decided to wait on an electric for now. Here's an electric S10 pickup. I test drove one of these once; it's a lot like an EV1, same technology in a pickup. Supposedly you can buy these in California too, but I'm not sure whether new or used. Otherwise they tend to show up as surplus from electric-company fleet programs now and then.

How has your service from GM been? I was tempted to buy one of these S10s but I figured GM has been acting like they want to forget that they ever had electric cars, so what are the chances of getting good service 5 or 10 years from now? And these things are too complicated to fix yourself, probably. Whatcha gonna do if the inverter fails? AC drives are not common in conversion EVs, and tend to be rather pricey.

Finally, if you're not on the EV mailing list, you should be. You will get a ton of good advice there; most of the subscribers are hard-core electric vehicle hobbyists who build their own conversions at home.

And congratulations on having a brain and being willing to put up with all the stupid naysayers out there, or the ones who keep repeating the same tired old objections about powerplants using fossil fuels (nevermind that they do it so much more efficiently than even the best IC engine) or "why don't you connect a generator to the wheels and make your own electricity." I'm always surprised how otherwise seemingly-smart people will laugh at you when you mention something about electric vehicles. Every new technology has to have its pioneers. And in the long term the earth isn't giving us much choice about switching away from fossil fuels anyway. This is why I do not advocate hybrid vehicles. You can conserve gas with those, but I think in any conceivable future there will always be some alternative way to generate electricity, so maybe electric cars are here to stay in one form or another.