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User: compwizrd

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  1. Re:Oh my! All those sweaty geeks in one place. on Inside the World's Largest LAN Party · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My guess is picture 3 is the aftermath of the smoke generator you can see is running in picture 1.

  2. Re:Shakeawake on Ask Slashdot: Best Tools To Aid When "On Call"? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sure.

    http://www.amazon.com/Sonic-Alert-SBT425ss-Vibrating-Telephone/dp/B000EX5HXS

    not sure why the analog one came up, but I have one of these units.

  3. Re:Deaf alarms. on Ask Slashdot: Best Tools To Aid When "On Call"? · · Score: 2

    Those will generally wake everyone currently occupying the bed.. and will wake up everyone in a nearby bedroom.

    The OP could try one of the travel alarms though, as they don't have as large of a vibrator unit. I don't know of one offhand that has a telephone input though. My alarm clock has a standard RJ11 plug that I can connect and when the phone rings the shaker will go activate...

  4. How does the visual tracking work? on Rise of the Ping Pong Robots · · Score: 1

    If i wear a shirt the same colour as the ball and get too close to the robot does it start smacking me instead?

  5. dban not always possible on Ask Slashdot: Best Way To Destroy Hard Drives? · · Score: 1

    sometimes you can't run dban on the drive because of media damage or head damage. I have two boxes(used to be 10 reams of paper in each box, so it's a fair size) full of hard drives that I haven't gotten around to destroying yet.

    Be very careful if you are doing the bend, drill or sand method of ruining the platters.. Laptop drives are usually glass.. shards will go all over, including into your hands.

  6. Infrared hearing? on Human Brain Is Sensitive To Light In Ears · · Score: 1

    I remember reading not too long ago about using infrared light to stimulate the hair cells or nerves in the ear.. it was thought that using an infrared laser could work better than the current electrode method of a Cochlear Implant.

  7. Re:JERRY LEWIS CAN REST IN PEACE NOW !! on 16-Year-Old Discovers Potential Treatment For Cystic Fibrosis · · Score: 1

    Try MD.

  8. Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like? on Experimental Batteries Charge In Minutes · · Score: 1

    Better efficiency on your new unit, and it's quite likely someone actually did a heat-loss calculation and calculated the proper size.

    30 years ago, if you really needed 60,000 btu, they'd take a wild guess that you really need a 100,000 and tack on a 20% fudge factor, giving you a 120,000.. or the homeowner would complain their old unit wasn't cooling the house effectively, and then upgrade from there.. or just replace with the same unit you had before.

    With modern houses it's much easier to figure out the most efficient size.

  9. Re:Haven't seen captioning on 3d yet... on 3D Cinema Doesn't Work and Never Will · · Score: 1

    My local theatre can barely keep their 2d RWC unit running (it's frequently down for weeks on end), I suspect it'll be many years, if ever, before they get something compatible with 3d.

  10. Re:Haven't seen captioning on 3d yet... on 3D Cinema Doesn't Work and Never Will · · Score: 1

    I should clarify, I was thinking of close captioning as in the rear window captions used in theaters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window_Captioning_System

  11. Haven't seen captioning on 3d yet... on 3D Cinema Doesn't Work and Never Will · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Lack of closed caption support doesn't help either.

  12. another ozone depletion story from rockets on Calculating Environmental Damage From Space Tourism Rockets · · Score: 1
  13. Blockbuster exclusive dvds. on Blockbuster Files For Bankruptcy · · Score: 1

    The evil part was Blockbuster versions of DVD's... which had the special features removed.

    The REALLY evil part was that they considered subtitles and captions to be special features.. Rented quite a few dvd's to find out that despite what the box said, there was no captions.

    At least they generally refunded any rental fees.

  14. Re:Lots of uses for this technology... on New Toshiba Drives Wipe Data When Turned Off · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You've got some redundancy in your list there!

  15. Re:Mistake my ass. on Malfunction Costs Couple $11 Million Slot Machine Jackpot · · Score: 1

    there was a machine up at toronto's D&B that we almost completely cleaned out.. the one where the pushrod goes into the round tube to either push a prize or a "xxx tickets".

    We were playing for awhile and someone realized that when you won the 250 tickets thing, instead of removing one play, it would add 3.

    Combined with the fact the machine would lose track of where the home was and would keep resetting upwards closer and closer to the 250 button, it became trivial to hit that dozens of times in a row.. and when the machine would track too high to hit the button, just use up a play to send it all the way up to the top and hold that for a bit till time ran out.. it would reset and start from the bottom again.

    I think I ended up with something like 15,000 tickets before we had to go home.

  16. hearing aid costs in ontario on Why Are Digital Hearing Aids So Expensive? · · Score: 1

    I wear a set of Siemens Centra SP's BTE's (http://hearing.siemens.com/uk/04-products/11-centra/02-instruments-features/instruments-features.jsp#bte) .. Cost in Canada per ear:

    ~2400 for the hearing aid
    ~675 for fitting (mandated by the gov't)
    ~80 for the hearing aid mold
    ~1000 for the extra two years warranty

    Total is about 7k for both ears.. The Ontario gov't pays for $500 per ear, so cost to me was 6000. It's my understanding the hearing aid cost in Ontario is set at the cost of the device by the govt, and the fitting agency makes the money on the fitting and warranties.

    Ontario gov't will fully pay for a single cochlear implant should I wish to go ahead with it, I've already been approved.. At this point my hearing is still mostly better than a CI would give me (www.compwizrd.com/hearingtest), but should that change I might go ahead with it.

    A decent digital hearing aid is much more than just an equalizer.

    Mine shifts the higher frequencies down into lower frequencies, and leaves the lower ones alone.. I hear better in the lower frequencies, and almost nothing in upper frequencies, so the hearing aid is programmed to work with that.. if i couldn't hear lower frequencies, but could hear higher, then it should shift everything upwards.

    It also amplifies differently according to what the input is.. soft sounds get amplified more, louder very little.. makes it hard to tell exactly how loud something really is, but deals with what i can hear.

    Also has wind noise cancelling, feedback cancel, sharp noise reduction(sharp noises get smoothed out so they don't clash).. dual microphones.. it listens behind and ahead of me, and whatever is behind, is subtracted from what's in front, so that i don't hear background noise. telecoil link, remote control.. battery that lasts about 3 weeks.

  17. Re:Holy shit? on Heart Monitors In Middle School Gym Class? · · Score: 1

    And they can damage cochlear implants:

    http://www.hearinglossweb.com/tech/ci/kids/static.htm

  18. Re:Computers are cheap - just get another box. on Using 1 Gaming Computer For 2 People? · · Score: 1

    Any higher end options than the X1550 in PCI? Have a P4-2.8 on a Supermicro P4SCA, and need the 2 ISA slots(yes, a p4 with ISA!) for a CMM system.

    I see there's Socket 775 boards available now, with PCI-E and ISA, http://www.ibasetechnology.net/mb886.html, but i need two ISA slots... nice board otherwise.

    ibase also sells some with two isa slots, but they're pentium 4 only, no c2d.

  19. Re:Weren't the earlier betas much faster? on Windows 7 "Not Much Faster" Than Vista · · Score: 1

    False.

  20. Re:How much is your time worth on Handmade vs. Commercially Produced Ethernet Cables · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Any decent tester will be able to tell you which end you fubar'd though..

  21. Re:Laugher in cube next to me on Worst Working Conditions You Had To Write Code In? · · Score: 3, Funny
  22. Re:Why bother? on Most Hackable Coupon-Eligible DTV Converter? · · Score: 1

    cable uses QAM, OTA uses ATSC/NTSC

  23. Re:SLOW VERY SLOW on Using Your BlackBerry As a Modem On Linux · · Score: 1

    Yeah, if I'm roaming in the US, my provider charges me 8 dollars a meg for traffic.

    My regular plan includes 25 meg a month, believe it's 8 dollars a meg over that as well.

  24. SLOW VERY SLOW on Using Your BlackBerry As a Modem On Linux · · Score: 0

    My crackberry 7520 is about a third the speed of dialup, with much higher latency..

    can't picture using this as a modem.

  25. Second set of wisdom teeth on Tooth Regeneration Coming Soon · · Score: 1

    I had 4 wisdom teeth taken out when I was 17.

    Luckily for me, two more grew in almost 10 years later...