Wednesday, November 30, 2005

L33T Scrabble Tiles

L33T Tiles

L33T Tiles are a replacement tile set for Scrabble® and other word games, based on internet slang known as leetspeak. The letter distribution has been modified and extensively tested for optimal play using leet words in the add-on dictionary (see below).

Each set of L33T Tiles comes with 103 tiles, a satin pouch and a manual with additional rules for gameplay. The tiles are colored to emulate a classic terminal window, and the manual is printed on a genuine IBM punch card.

TAO 89830-PHI 1" KeyPix Digital Picture Keychain – Round - Retail at Newegg.com

TAO 89830-PHI 1" KeyPix Digital Picture Keychain – Round - Retail at Newegg.com
82-135-008-04

Stores up to 56 images (from PC, via USB port) for viewing up to 2 hours in slideshow mode, or longer in manual mode 1' CSTN LCD (96 x 64), 4096 colors USB 1.1 compatible Compatible with photos in JPEG format Includes 512KB of internal flash memory

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

BBspot - Top 11 Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 5

BBspot - Top 11 Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 5:

Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 5

Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 5

11. I entered the probability equation into my TI-89 Titanium Graphing calculator and it predicted you would go out with me, see! (hold up calculator)
10. What's a nice girl like you doing on an unsecured webcam like this?
9. Can I have a large coffee with sugar and your phone number, please?
8. Do you prefer the static or expanding universe theory more? Because, since I first saw you, I'm expanding.
7. That Princess Leia slave girl outfit would look great in a crumpled heap next to my bed.
6. You make me want to be an honest man, and register all my shareware.
5. Yes, that is a real light saber replica in my pocket, but I'm still happy to see you.
4. You're so beautiful, I'd take my Steve Austin action figure out of its original packaging for you.
3. Do you want to come back to my place, and we can prank call George Lucas?
2. I don't mean to disturb you, but Heisenberg's Uncertainly Principle said I already did that by observing you.
1. Did it hurt when you fell out of heaven, because F=ma and your acceleration after falling that far would be incredible.

AnandTech: $600 Notebook Roundup - Crowning the Affordability King

AnandTech: $600 Notebook Roundup - Crowning the Affordability King:

The first and most important point we want you to take away from this roundup is that for $600, you can actually get a pretty decent notebook. The build quality of all of the notebooks here was far from poor, and any of these notebooks have the performance and battery life to work just fine as entry level machines.

The next thing to keep in mind is that it is very easy to have a $600 notebook turn into a $1000 notebook with options and upgrades that manufacturers will push on you before you check out. If we could have anything on these notebooks it’d be: more memory and wireless support. Not a single notebook in this roundup offered us more than 256MB of RAM, and for Windows XP these days, you need 512MB to keep from swapping to that slow 2.5” hard drive. The Compaq offerings all gave us built in wireless, but generally for less than $50 you can add wireless support to both the Gateway and Dell solutions - and for a notebook, it’s definitely worth it.

Friday, November 25, 2005

Download Squad: How To: Fix iTunes

Download Squad: How To: Fix iTunes:

It took quite a while for me to come around, but iTunes eventually changed the way that I listen to music (and download podcasts) on my PC. I was a long, long, long time WinAmp user, and until iTunes released a version that minimized to my system tray, and I could find a way to control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts, I wasn’t interested. Well, the first problem was dealt with a while ago, and for my second problem I found iTunesKeys, a program dedicated to solving iTunes’ woefully missing keyboard shortcut access. But, after using iTunes for awhile, I realized that while Apple has given us an incredibly elegant and fun to use media player, its developers suffer from some serious delusions that iTunes users will never make mistakes, or decide to delete songs. I can’t quite fathom why you would have an application show a [!] symbol when it finds a missing file, yet offer no way to actually remove the reference to that missing file.

Enter idleTunes. idleTunes was made for people who love iTunes, but wish that it would just:

  • Find and insert album artwork into tracks
  • Copy iTunes playlists to any MP3 player
  • Export iTunes playlists as M3U, PLS, or B4S
  • Remove "dead" tracks from your library
  • Create playlists for all of the albums in your library
  • Create playlists for all of the artists in your library
  • Delete user playlists
By far the coolest feature of idleTunes is the way that it makes iTunes compatible with non-iPod portable music players, including intelligently renaming files when copying a playlist onto a screenless flash player to ensure the play order stays intact. Brilliant! And did I mention it’s free?

Finally, no post about how to fix iTunes would be complete without some directions on how to clean up your library and get consistent ID3 tags. For that, I'll direct you to Connected Internet, who has a great primer on how to use MusicBrainz Tagger to rationalize your music collection. It takes some time, but MusicBrainz makes it as quick and painless as it can be, and the results are definitely worth it.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Om Malik : » Sprint’s PPC6700 Stands Out

Om Malik : » Sprint’s PPC6700 Stands Out:

You may have heard the argument: When talk turns to converged consumer electronics devices, many tech industry observers point to the clock radio as one of the few success stories. Everything else, no matter the maker, tends to sacrifice usability in the name of feature-lust. So what to make of Sprint’s new HTC-designed, UTStarcom-produced, PPC6700? In addition to posing as a dual-band CDMA phone (800/1900MHz), Sprint’s new business-focused smartphone also packs both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, operates on Sprint’s nascent EV-DO network, includes a (surprisingly good) 1.3 mega-pixel camera, the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS, an integrated QWERTY keyboard, and a removable storage slot. As it turns out, the 6700 may be the best-designed and implemented PDA phone to date. I spent the last four days testing the 6700 encountering no major problems; in fact, the 6700 may be one of the first devices to offer a viable alternative to towing around a laptop on short trips. Not only was I able to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi at home and the office (its internal antenna was able to pick up a Starbuck’s signal 29 floors below and a block away), at times I was able to get download speeds in excess of 400 Kbps using Sprint’s EV-DO network here in San Francisco. (Here’s a list of cities in which Sprint curren

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Amazon.com: Quotes & Trivia: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air - The Complete First Season (1990)

Amazon.com: Quotes & Trivia: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air - The Complete First Season (1990)

I wish I knew how to do the carlton dance

The running gag of the 'Carlton Dance' throughout the show was actually a parody of the dance Courteney Cox did on the Bruce Springsteen music video 'Dancing in the Dark' in 1984.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Running Windows with No Services

Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Running Windows with No Services:

A Windows service provides functionality to the operating system and user accounts regardless of whether anyone is logged into a system. Windows XP comes with around four dozen services enabled by default, including ones that many people consider superfluous like Remote Registry, Alerter, and SSDP Discovery (Universal Plug and Play). A question many Windows administrators commonly have is therefore, which services can I safely disable? What if I told you that for at least basic functionality like Web surfing and application execution, Windows doesn’t need any services? In fact, you can also do those things without system processes like Winlogon.exe, the interactive logon manager, and Lsass, the local security authority subsystem.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Wireless RF Remote Control Extender Review

Wireless RF Remote Control Extender Review:

The Remote Control Extender uses a truly unique method to convert remotes into RF. Instead of actually converting the IR signals through an external box or device that would have to strap to the front of the remote, this system embeds a tiny RF transmitter into the battery compartment which 'listens' to the remote control's internal RF commands. All remote controls send out low level RF commands when they are used. The Remote Control Extender picks these up at close range, interprets them, and transmits them to the base station for rebroadcast as IR commands. Since the transmitter is stored in the battery compartment it was essential to shrink it down small enough to allow for a reduced size 1.5V AAA battery to work with it. To accommodate some larger remotes that use AA batteries, an additional sheath was developed that slides over the rechargeable battery and transmitter, allowing it to work in the larger battery compartments.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Target : Retro Black Chair with Step Stool

Target : Retro Black Chair with Step Stool:


• Steps glide in and out
• Grip-treads for safety
• Comfortable padded vinyl seat
• Classic chrome finish
• 22Wx35Hx16D'

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Japan Today - News - BitTorrent file-sharer jailed in Hong Kong - Japan's Leading International News Network

Japan Today - News - BitTorrent file-sharer jailed in Hong Kong - Japan's Leading International News Network

Ouch! of all the movie to be sharing.

HONG KONG — A Hong Kong court sentenced a user of the BitTorrent file-sharing software who shared movies with other Internet users to three months in jail Monday for copyright infringement.

The Tuen Mun Magistrates' Court meted out the ruling to Chan Nai-ming, 38, who was convicted on charges of copyright infringement on Oct 24 for using BitTorrent to share three movies with dozens of users on the Internet. Copies of the Hollywood films 'Daredevil,' 'Red Planet' and 'Miss Congeniality' were found on his home computer during a customs raid in January.

The Impulsive Buy » Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools

The Impulsive Buy » Stooples: Office Tools for Hopeless Fools

amazon.com

amazon.ca

Office supply catalogs to a quasi-product review blog editor are like stolen Victoria’s Secret catalogs to creepy lonely men and Russian mail order bride catalogs to creepy old lonely men. We love looking through them, letting our imaginations run wild, and occasionally getting pages of a catalog stuck together.