Well, the day has finally come. Unless you've been stuck in an elevator for the past 24 hours, you've heard that Apple has released a multi-button mouse called the Mighty Mouse, breaking their usual stance of sticking to the ol' one-button wonder for simplicity's sake. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a production model and have been mousing away ever since I got it.
Sony’s most economical learning remote gets upgraded with a daring new design, additional buttons and new macros.
There’s nothing written in stone that says an affordable remote control needs to be limited in capabilities. Case in point, the Sony RM-VL series. Although items bearing the Sony label are typically associated with commanding something of a price premium, for several years now Sony has actually had the least expensive fully capable universal remote control models available.
When the 8-device 11-macro Sony RM-VL900 (read our review) was introduced in early 2000 at a price of $59.99 USD MSRP, it didn’t particularly feel like a monumental event at that time. But the RM-VL900 would hold the crown as the most economical learning remote for nearly two years before being usurped – by yet another Sony model!
Final Words Armed with four 1GB sticks, we ran into more than a few cases where the i-RAM's size limitations made it impractical for use in our system. Although 4GB is enough for a good deal of applications, an 8GB card would get far more use. Based on the size of applications and games that we tried installing on the card, we'd say that 8GB would be the sweet spot - which unfortunately would either take two cards or much more expensive DIMMs. We wouldn't recommend going with a 2GB partition unless you have a very specific usage model that you know won't use any more. With only 2GB, we quickly found ourselves very constrained for space. The past few years of having much more storage than we could ever ask for has unfortunately made us forget about how tough things can get with only a couple of GBs of space.
Although the card is presently cramped with just four DIMM slots, one option for Gigabyte is to introduce a two-slot version with support for eight DIMMs. The problem that we foresee most people running into is that older memory may be plentiful, but is usually smaller in size. By the time current Athlon 64 users migrate to DDR2, they may have a handful of 512MB or 1GB sticks laying around, but presently, the only spare memory that you're most likely to have is a few 128MB or or 256MB DDR modules from older builds. Without being able to re-use older memory, the cost of outfitting an i-RAM card with a full 4GB of memory starts getting expensive. At $90 per gigabyte of memory, you're talking about $360 just in memory costs, plus another $150 for the card itself. For most folks, that's a pretty steep entry fee, but then again, if you've just splurged on a GeForce 7800 GTX, then maybe your budget can handle it.
But that right there hits the nail on the head; by no means is the i-RAM a cheap upgrade, but then again, neither is an Athlon 64 X2, or a brand new 7800 GTX, or an SLI motherboard. If you put it in perspective, an i-RAM with 4GB of brand new DDR400 memory isn't all that expensive compared to some of the other upgrades that we've recommended recently. So the question then becomes, is Gigabyte's i-RAM as important to your overall system performance as an Athlon 64 X2 or a GeForce 7800 GTX?
For gamers, there is a slight improvement in level load times if you keep your game on the i-RAM. Most games will fit on a 4GB card, but as we noticed during our testing, not all will. The reduction in load times isn't nearly as dramatic as we had originally thought. It seems as if level load times are actually more affected by CPU and platform performance than just disk performance.
Those users who have one or two applications that occupy all of their time, and tend to take a while to load or work with due to constant disk access would be more than happy with the i-RAM. By far, the biggest performance improvements we saw when using the i-RAM were obviously with disk intensive operations such as file copying. If your applications or usage models involve a lot of data movement without much manipulation, then the i-RAM may very well be what you need.
At the same time, for all of the situations where the i-RAM was quite useful, there were a number where it wasn't. Multitasking performance went up, but only in one out of the three Winstone tests, and even then, it's going to be rather tough to install a large number of applications on the i-RAM due to its size limitations, so your multitasking performance benefits will be numbered. Game load times weren't always improved by a great deal and as we saw with the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone tests, sometimes you are better off with a faster CPU than with the i-RAM.
The important thing to focus on is that thanks to Gigabyte's battery system, data-loss was never an issue during our use of the card; and despite the lack of ECC memory support, we never had any data corruption during our testing.
In the end, the i-RAM is an interesting addition to a system, but it's usefulness will truly vary from one user to the next. With a bit more capacity, and especially for those users who happen to have a few 1GB sticks laying around, the i-RAM could be a very powerful addition to your system. Hats off to Gigabyte for making something useful, and we can't wait to see rev 2...
AcoustiFan's No Dust fans are incredibily quiet. With the ability to protect the motor from dust, they will certainly last longer, possibly making them worth the expense. At $28 and $35 per fan, they are most likely too expensive for all those but the most dedicated seeker of silence. I would like to see the lack of the extra cables to lower the price a bit, for the fans are quiet enough when running at full blast. Plus, who will want to swap cables in and out of their system for some added airflow when playing a game. Finally, the jury is still out on if they stay quiet over time, I will have to get back to you on that one when I have a few months of dust build up.
As for the Soft Silicon Gaskets, I would pick these up. These help emensly, especially if you have a rattling fan in your case now. For the $7 they cost, they are well worth it, though a bit tough to install in some instances.
As spyware and adware have become increasingly powerful and difficult to remove, developers of anti-spyware programs have added a wider range of functionality to their applications to give users more powerful tools as well as greater control over those tools. Moreover, although anti-spyware applications have long resembled standard anti-virus applications in many ways, they have also started to acquire their own distinctive set of features in order to help users deal with the unique problems posed by spyware and adware. Given the bewildering array of programs and features available to users looking for anti-spyware applications, users may find it difficult to usefully compare anti-spyware programs and their feature sets.
To remedy that potential confusion, this page presents two Feature Comparison Tables for the major anti-spyware programs currently available. An explanation of the features considered can be found below the table in the Notes section
Updating its WLAN offering, Socket Communications has announced the introduction of its Go Wi-Fi! E300 SDIO card. At a length of 40 mm, and a weight of 4 g, the card is considerably shorter and also somewhat lighter than Socket's previous Wi-Fi SDIO card, which the Go Wi-Fi! E300 is replacing. Despite its small size, the card incorporates a LED to display connection status, and is, according to Socket Communications, three times as fast as its predecessor.
Compatible with Wi-Fi 802.11b, the card supports WEP and WPA encryption standards including WPA-PSK as well as 802.1x authentication with EAP-TLS or PEAP under the Windows Mobile 2003 platform with which the card is solely compatible. Available immediately worldwide for $89 USD, the card comes bundled with Socket's Wi-Fi Companion software for Windows Mobile 2003.
Laser printers are infamous for shredding papers instead of printing them. But what about turning your printer into a high-volume paper shredder - on purpose?
The genesis of our project was the all-too-common 'paper jam' ID10T error on a printer at a rapidly growing software firm that my good friend Mike owns. He also has a mountain of sensitive documents that seems to grow as quickly as his business, piling up next to his paper shredder.
Generally speaking, small business owners are not always technically inclined and are unaware that their laser printer can run too hot. After several attempts to use a new special plastic-based paper, feeding in sheet after sheet and not getting a single sheet returned, Mike then realized there might be a problem. Upon closer inspection several pages of this special paper had melted in the printer and completely destroyed it: The ultimate 'paper' jam.
About the same time I decided to see if I could find an automatic bulk paper shredder solution for him. Sure enough I was able to find some options, but they ranged from $3,000 - $12,000. Obviously that wouldn't do for the creative-minded geek. So after some brainstorming and a lightning strike or two, I had the idea to modify the remnants of the laser printer to fill the role.
As this was going to be a volume-based solution, we needed a robust and well-built paper feed mechanism, and a solid feed rate. Xerox has built its reputation on the quality and performance of its printers. Of course, with a reputation like that, what self respecting modder wouldn't jump at the opportunity to apply a personal spin to it?
I recently lost the TV remote for my old Sony TV. In itself that was no problem, as I bought a replacement remote which did the job. However, when the TV lost its colour setting, I had a problem as it could only show pictures in black and white, and the replacement remote didn't have the buttons for colour adjustment. I decided to write a program on my old Jornada 525 Pocket PC to send the correct codes to the TV using the IR port.
There appears to be three main protocols for sending IR codes to devices. Sony uses the 'Pulse Coded' method which entails sending a steam of data containing header bits, '1' bits and '0' bits separated by spaces. These bits modulate a carrier of 40KHz, and are of different lengths, 2200 us for the header, 110 us for a 1 bit and 550 us for a 0 bit. The spaces are 550 us of silence. Most Sony equipment uses 12 bits of data, which is separated into 6 bits of address (the device type) and 6 bits of command. So the data looks like this: hxxxxxxyyyyyy where h is the header bit, xxxxxx is the 6 bits of the command (msb first) and yyyyyy is the 6 bits of address. I won't go into any further details on this, as there are many sources on the internet that describe the protocol and list the codes for the different devices. Some newer Sony equipment use 19 bit codes, and I believe that other manufacturers use the same format that I have described. It should also be possible to write similar classes for devices that use 'Space Coded' or 'Shift Coded' protocols.
I have written a class called CIrPulse using Embedded C , which encapsulates the functionality to control Sony and compatible devices from a Jornada 525 PC running Windows CE 3.0. It should work with other devices and Operating Systems, but you will need to try it!
