Reviews

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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19" widescreen monitors are awesome!

I'm having a major bout of monitor envy. At work, after my suggestion, they upgraded the office so everyone is on LCDs and as part of the deal the Geek gang got swishy new 19" widescreen Viewsonics. They're awesome. With a native resolution of 1440x900 it has 1.6 times the screen real estate of a 15" 1024x768 screen, has lots of width to place windows side-by-side (useful for code comparisons) and doesn't make you crane your neck to look from top to bottom, unlike some larger screens.

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TaxCut vs TurboTax

For the first few years we had to do a tax return in the USA I used TurboTax to do so. Back in 1999 it was pretty simple for us to do our taxes as we had almost nothing to list in it. Over the years it got a bit more complicated but continued to be manageable. Around the 2002-2003 time-frame Intuit, who makes TurboTax, decided to do some naughty things with their software - the installed some extra limitations on how or when you could install their software, which would pose problems if we ever needed to verify the data in future years.

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