Hardware

Labtec wireless keyboard+mouse for free (review)

Here's a great deal I just came across tonight. Last night I dropped a full cup of hot Barry's tea on my keyboard so, rather than sticking it in the washing machine and hoping for the best, I went shopping for a new keyboard. As it turns out, most of the keyboards on the market fail two very simple requirements:

  • The six key insert/delete/page-up/down block should be three keys across and two down.
  • The function keys should have a default action to work as a function key.

For some reason both Logitech and Microsoft got it in their thick skulls a few years ago that everyone would rather have a cramped six-key block and wanted to press a special key before the function keys worked as advertised, so for the last few years it has been very difficult to find anything else.

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HD-DVD has won the high-def media format war?

It appears that HD-DVD will win the high-def media format war, if history is anything to go by.

History lesson: In the 1980's Sony's Betamax tape standard lost out to JVC's competing and technically inferior VHS tape standard primarily due to the adult entertainment industry's backing of the latter's lower production and media & equipment costs.

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Using CDs and DVDs for backups / archiving

A great article was written up by someone explaining exactly what types of CD and DVD media you should use for backups / archiving:

Having read through it I must say that some of the points were new to me, but it sounds perfectly legit and worth following.

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Have fun with wireless network intruders

Here's someone who discovered his neigbors were using his wireless Internet connection without his bidding. Instead of blocking them he decided to have a little fun, first redirecting all of their web page access to Kitten War, then he set up a web proxy so that he could manipulate what they were seeing, to interesting effect. Full details, including source code and configuration, are available.

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