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I needed a fair amount of work to get back to my normal grip strength. For that, I was given therapy putty in lower grade (yellow) followed by a higher one (green). It's basically silly putty formulated in a specific way to provide different levels of resistance.

Once I was back to a normal grip strength, I started using a Powerball (you should be able to get them cheaper than that, mind you). I was told by the therapist that exercise with any decent set of free weights should provide the necessary workout and resistance, but the Powerball is a lot smaller and easier to travel with and can be used at the office (the noise is annoying, but not more so than some peoples' desk fans).

I really do recommend the physical therapy as well, though, because that included massage and heat treatment that made a huge difference at the beginning, and especially because you can make sure you're doing the exercises properly under professional supervision. Once I was back to having functional hands without pain, the therapy was done and I've continued on my own, doing the stretches and using the Powerball, for two years now without any relapses.

I think everyone's getting carried away by the use of the words "insect" and "dragonfly". The article only says "larger than", not even how much larger. There's a picture here: http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2627196/. They're advertised on TV. They're significantly larger than an insect, but consider also the helicopters and other flying toys available in the back of Popular Science or through Think Geek, as shown here: http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/rc/. In a crowd and from many feet below, it might be hard to tell the difference between a palm-size RC helicopter and a palm-sized insectoid robot.

So the little flying doohickeys exist and are easy to get and it could've just been someone in the crowd horsing around with a toy.

Of course, this also means the government could easily have a form of the same thing with cameras and microphones, but, as has been pointed out, that's a long way to go to listen in on protestors.

The "field test" theory doesn't work either: the consequences of losing the item are too great if they're trying to keep it secret. But if the governement really uses these, no problem-o. Go buy a toy, take it to your next protest, and crash it into the teeny tiny "black helicopters". Fun for all!

robotic insectoid black micro helicopters!

/* puts on his tin-foil head */

/*screams*/ with frickin' laser beams ...aaaaah!

STICKER

Too late...

Or maybe not...

Too late...

Or maybe not...

Ah, the good old E6B. If you want a nice watch which has some - not nearly all - but some of its features check out this one at Think Geek.

Depends on the the work, but being behind a desk all day coding or maintaining a server could put the snooze on anyone. Coding is a bit more active but still your there doing not much physical activity and more brain work.

I know there were times I was studying for homework and/or exams when I was in college and reading text books would put me to sleep. IT work is no different I think, people need to get up and move around and process all they're doing before going back at it so to speak.

Even a little horse play doesn't hurt to take your mind off the work to relax and process things. You come back at it with a fresher perspective. For me, I'm in the middle of a rubber band war in my cubical between a web guy and a server admin. They're just lucky a rubber band hasn't landed in my food during lunch. I have no problems spending a little extra new found cash at the appropriate arms dealer. >:)

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/729d/

Depends on the the work, but being behind a desk all day coding or maintaining a server could put the snooze on anyone. Coding is a bit more active but still your there doing not much physical activity and more brain work.

I know there were times I was studying for homework and/or exams when I was in college and reading text books would put me to sleep. IT work is no different I think, people need to get up and move around and process all they're doing before going back at it so to speak.

Even a little horse play doesn't hurt to take your mind off the work to relax and process things. You come back at it with a fresher perspective. For me, I'm in the middle of a rubber band war in my cubical between a web guy and a server admin. They're just lucky a rubber band hasn't landed in my food during lunch. I have no problems spending a little extra new found cash at the appropriate arms dealer. >:)

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/8a0f/

http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/729d/

Kernel Panic in its intro.

Meh T-shirt in S2E2. ThinkGeek has the shirt.

EFF poster.

If they were trained to do that

Golly gee, can't imagine why we'd bother to train the security guards whose job it is to recognize things that might go kablooey in the art of figuring out whether something might go kablooey or not.

It was dumb of her not to explain her shirt, but at least now I know not to wear anything like http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/gaming/8e31/ to the airport.

I would rather side with the police and have the girl arrested (or shot if needed)...

As powerful as phones are getting, I should be able to run something like DSL on a phone soon. It would only require the phone to have 48M memory free for the OS.

And then I could get rid of my home machine and replace it with this - oh, and one of these.

I would finally buy a cell phone if I could have such a device... I'll wait to see if any "open" cell phone will give me that.

I think this shirt is more appropriate.

I can understand the kiddie stuff. But what's wrong with asian women? Last I checked, asian women were beautiful, and there is nothing illegal about viewing them.

Thinkgeek (which shares Slashdot's corporate overlord) would evidently agree with your assessment of their appeal, as do I.

The problem is that, on average, Asian females tend to be more petite and flatter-chested than the average western Busty Bimbo counterpart. There are statistical outliers (Rin Aoki, Melissa Ashley), but that's the trend. Ergo, they look superficially younger... and thus, more like kiddie porn. I recall one pervert in some article about sex tourists ghoulishly gloating about this "advantage" when visiting East Asian brothels.

It's not inherently creepy, any more than any other sex kink or fetish. (Gentlemen prefer blondes, I generally prefer brunettes; however, everyone smiles for a redhead.) But it can hint at a bigger problem.

People would start wearing this both out of necessity and for fashion ;-)

Here in the UK we use the tiny amount of light to power calculators but I think you would need a panel at least 3km square.

Not at all- ThinkGeek has a $99, 216 cm^2 panel that can be used to recharge your cell phone while using it; your average Wifi router doesn't use more than that. The next thing we need is for Cisco to come out with a mesh router- A Wifi Router that takes a standard 5v or 12v input, but has two radios- a Mesh Mode radio and an Infrastructure Mode radio, so that you can put a forest of Wifi routers and poles in a public place, providing a cloud of coverage with no other wiring.

Uhhhh ... you mean like this? http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/warfare/69de/

OK, OK, the broken email client, camera, and music player were obviously funny, but I'd love to have the rotary interface. I actually thought that one would be fun. In fact, I'd love to have a phone like that again just to bring back the good 'ol days...

While not the rotary interface you are looking for, ThinkGeek has a pretty cool retro headset for your cell phone.

Gives this shirt a whole new meaning.

Not only that, but when you're camping, the sanitizer gel makes for a good fire starting paste.

Feh. Alkaloids are dissolved by alcohol. You can add caffeine to your hand sanitizer, and now you have a transdermal caffeine delivery mechanism. Or you could just buy it from a SourceForge company.

Sounds like something for

His new patent seems to be quite similar to what Katherine Albrecht had warned against back in October 2005 in the book "SPYCHIPS: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move." She not only warns us about business tracking us with RFID tags but also mentions to other related technologies such as shopper's ID cards. I can't recall if she specifically mentioned cell phones and GPS devices or not, but she definitely discusses the idea of "targeted advertising" and various related technologies. She had also founded Spychips.com and NoCards.org as opposition to that general type of thing.

Perhaps the inventor might have also seen a couple of the examples of tracking and "targeted advertising" that were in the movie "Minority Report."

Back before he supposedly invented the idea, I had already purchased an RFID blocking wallet and started leaving my cell phone behind in my truck, before entering shopping malls. That was to protect my privacy against his not yet invented new idea.

• RFID Blocking Wallet
• RFID Blocking Passport Billfold

His new patent seems to be quite similar to what Katherine Albrecht had warned against back in October 2005 in the book "SPYCHIPS: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move." She not only warns us about business tracking us with RFID tags but also mentions to other related technologies such as shopper's ID cards. I can't recall if she specifically mentioned cell phones and GPS devices or not, but she definitely discusses the idea of "targeted advertising" and various related technologies. She had also founded Spychips.com and NoCards.org as opposition to that general type of thing.

Perhaps the inventor might have also seen a couple of the examples of tracking and "targeted advertising" that were in the movie "Minority Report."

Back before he supposedly invented the idea, I had already purchased an RFID blocking wallet and started leaving my cell phone behind in my truck, before entering shopping malls. That was to protect my privacy against his not yet invented new idea.

• RFID Blocking Wallet
• RFID Blocking Passport Billfold

there isn't anything that uses a green laser that's readily obtainable, is there?

Only if you don't count these...

Have fun. 10 mW! http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/8a39/

Where I live we've had our share of "be wary of lockpicks" type campaigns. I've had my eyes on the "RFID Digital Door Lock"* from ThinkGeek for some time, and thought that maybe this would be the thing (except I rent my home, so it's not really my door to drill holes in). At least, it ought to be difficult to pick; it would be just as easy as ever to just bust in the entire door.

Are there any slashdotters out there who have actually bought and tried this lock? Any good/bad reviews to be had?

* http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/77af/

On my 19" Sony Trinitron: (measured by my Kill-A-Watt)

Blackle: 106 watts

Of course, I don't spend hours looking at Google. I look at Google's page for about 30 seconds and then go on to the page I'm searching for. So I'd say the energy savings by changing just Google are still overstated. And no, I'm not getting an LCD. I got this at work for free. LCD's suck. When OLED is out I might change my mind...

And BTW, please stop saying LCD display!

I can see tons of uses for such a thing:

- kid's laptop. If it gets trashed, so what?
- LTSP terminal.
- heck, MY laptop. I wouldn't choose to do kernel compilations on any laptop in my price range to begin with, so as long as the OLPC has a browser, an email client, ssh, and WiFi, I'm pretty much done (although I wouldn't turn down an mp3 player). All I really want is that it be light, have a (preferably decent) keyboard, and legible in coffee shops for a couple of hours at a go.
- if it has usb, low power consumption file server. See things like the kurobox, or the guys who are hacking the BuffaloTech stuff. You don't NEED tons of power to torrent or serve files.
- disposable redundant server. Take ten of them, hook them to a load balancer and an NFS, and you've got a (functionally) infinite capacity web server for (basically) the cost of the load balancer and NFS, for which you can make a case anyway. I'm a little surprised somebody hasn't done this already with old Xboxes. In any event, that group that put together that Apple supercomputer proved that you can do things with multiply redundant hardware, and these would be perfect for low level apps.
- Disposable emergency server. Say a hurricane is coming. It would be trivial to set up a databased refugee tracking system for 25 clients on one of these. GPL/BSD/whatever the software, and your app is completely portable for $100 in HW costs.
- Heck, firewalls. Something like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/90c6/
- I'm sure people smarter than I can append to this list in a big hurry.

Is it for everyone? No. Would I want to make it my primary computer? No. Would I make it a companion piece to my 4000x1280/1GHz C7/1GB workstation? You betcha.

Surprising that nobody has mentioned the Frog Pad yet. I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like it would be quite good for a pda or other such portable device.

i know exactly that are you looking for..
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7830/z oom/

look how she would look:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7830/a ction/211677a/

i know exactly that are you looking for..
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7830/z oom/

look how she would look:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/7830/a ction/211677a/

... is not to play.

Have you ever actually watched a movie on your PSP?

I've watched hundred of hours of movies and TV shows on my PSP.

Air travel + PSP + movies (on a memory stick) = Heaven.

No need for a laptop in your carryon means you can "sail" through security. The instant on/off is wonderful as well. You can use it while actually standing in line. One 4Gig stick will hold an entire season of a television show plus a movie or two.

You get good battery life (a little under three hours) because it's not hitting the UMD, but for longer flights you can get: a USB battery box and a USB charging cable. It will suck down batteries (but this setup allows the brightest screen mode) but work like a charm. I went through 16 AA's on a 24 hour flight once.

Oh yeah, I also rest it on the treadmill in front of me while running. I've lost 10 pounds when I never had the patience before. No physical media = no skipping.

I just kick myself for waiting a year to get one. It is by far the best video player available and Sony has marketed it INCREDIBLY poorly.

Never played a UMD though. Those are a waste of money IMO.

I used a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure power usage on my two computers. My main computer is a less than 2 year old single-core AMD-64 3800+ with 1 GB RAM, two hard drives, an 83% efficient power supply, a fanless water cooled CPU, a 20 inch flat panel monitor and runs Kubuntu Linux. The monitor uses 40 Watts and the rest of the computer uses about 94 Watts most of the time. In the sleep mode the monitor only uses about 1 Watt. Under heavy use the CPU power usage is much more. I don't like noise, so I chose a graphics card that did not require a fan and which probably does not use very much power.

I also have a second computer hooked to the same keyboard, monitor and mouse through a KVM switch. It is an AOpen Mini PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5600 1.83GHz CPU and 2 MB of RAM and Windows XP Professional. It uses 23 Watts most of the time, but uses more under heavy usage. The 20 inch flat panel monitor uses an additional 40 Watts or just 1 Watt in the sleep mode. Occasionally, I run both computers at the same time and with just one monitor, keyboard and mouse can switch back and forth between computers in about a second or so. Even when I occasionally run both computers at once, I am not using an unreasonable amount of power.

I am not a gamer and for what I do both computers meet my needs very nicely. The AMD-64 running Kubuntu computer is my main computer. I haven't measured the power usage during all the different sleep modes so my information is somewhat incomplete. With the monitor in the 1 Watt sleep mode, I can leave the computer on most of the day without feeling like I am wasting an unreasonable amount of power. To me, 500 Watts sounds way too wasteful.

Eventually I learned to sleep through her alarm clock at 5:00am and after a while of getting good at it, my own...

Back when my wife had an earlier schedule than mine, I also learned to sleep through her alarm (and her 3 mandatory snoozes...), which also trained me to sleep through mine. I had developed a reflex to shut down my alarm in my sleep, without waking up. I have now moved my alarm clock (which is basically my Nintendo DS) far enough from my bed that I acually have to get up to shut it down. Although it did happen a couple of times that I somehow managed to get up, turn the alarm off, and get back to bed without waking up (!!!), it still ain't bad enough that I need one of these.

Eventually I learned to sleep through her alarm clock at 5:00am and after a while of getting good at it, my own...

Back when my wife had an earlier schedule than mine, I also learned to sleep through her alarm (and her 3 mandatory snoozes...), which also trained me to sleep through mine. I had developed a reflex to shut down my alarm in my sleep, without waking up. I have now moved my alarm clock (which is basically my Nintendo DS) far enough from my bed that I acually have to get up to shut it down. Although it did happen a couple of times that I somehow managed to get up, turn the alarm off, and get back to bed without waking up (!!!), it still ain't bad enough that I need one of these.

Eventually I learned to sleep through her alarm clock at 5:00am and after a while of getting good at it, my own...

Back when my wife had an earlier schedule than mine, I also learned to sleep through her alarm (and her 3 mandatory snoozes...), which also trained me to sleep through mine. I had developed a reflex to shut down my alarm in my sleep, without waking up. I have now moved my alarm clock (which is basically my Nintendo DS) far enough from my bed that I acually have to get up to shut it down. Although it did happen a couple of times that I somehow managed to get up, turn the alarm off, and get back to bed without waking up (!!!), it still ain't bad enough that I need one of these.

http://consumerist.com/consumer/starbucks/starbuck s-caffeine-inhaler-207881.php

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/caffederm.shtml

Heh. All in the interests of efficiency, of course.

It's time for a RFID-blocking wallet!

Although they aren't popular, they are for sale:

Glowing LED umbrellas

Now if only they made cool lightsaber sounds when swung around.

Ask and you shall receive...

I own several computers and have washed keyboards many times. Keyboards from brands from memorex, HP, Dell, keytronics, microsoft and logitech.

I have a keyboard I had since 1993 (keytronix) and retired it in 2003. That is 10 years, and washing it in the dishwasher almost yearly. Sure the ink on the keys wears out fast, but it saves you $80 http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/8396/

The 3 dangers are
Water: Be sure to let it dry.
Soap: can corrode metal and could leave a conductive film. Use a light amount of soup.
Heat: Use top shelf, and or turn of heat dry.

I usually take the face plate off when washing it, and let it dry for at least a week to a month. I also wash ~5 keyboards at a time and I use about 1/2 the soap, and turn head off. I use twisties to keep the cords in large loops. I have not washed a wireless keyboard in this fashion.

Please wash your keyboards!

Wouldn't this UV Disinfectant Wand from ThinkGeek be a bit easier? Killing 99.9% of bugs with a 10 second clean cycle seems a bit more reasonable to me than a 7 day clean/dry cycle. Especially for those of us who work on a number of computers all day long.

-gary

• $34.99 here
• The rest can cover my "personal expenses"

Yup, this technology has been around for at least a year in mass production. You can buy the extension cords at Thinkgeek.com.