News and Views

If you’re running AVG Virus Scanner, it’s probably been bugging you lately about upgrading to the newer version 8.0. But if you clicked on the link, it tried to sell you the upgraded version. There is still a free version available here. You have to confirm a couple of times that you really, really just […]

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My old Kyocera PDA/phone is on it’s last legs. I can’t dial numbers from the keypad anymore, only from Contacts, so I bought a Samsung i760 smartphone this weekend. Mostly I like it, and will probably keep it. The slide-out hardware keyboard is pretty nice. I liked Palm just fine, but I guess Windows Mobile […]

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Here’s an article from Mechanics Illustrated in 1968 forecasting what our lives were expected to be like in 2008. You can either page through the images of the article above, or read it in plain text below. I think we’re a little behind schedule…

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Today is the spring equinox, when the night is just as long as the day. Normally the equinox falls on March 21, but because this year was a leap year it has shifted back a day. It will slowly shift forward to the 21st over the next three years. In the winter the earth’s axis […]

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Today is “Pi Day”, the day we celebrate the relationship between the circumference and diameter of a circle. Can you guess why? Some people on this day mark the time of 1:59:26 as Pi second. I’m afraid that time has already passed as I write this, unless you live well west of Arizona. Pi is […]

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There is some interesting research out there indicating that drinking artificially sweetened foods actually causes weight gain, at least in rats. The rats that were given artificially sweetened food tended to eat more of other high calorie foods when they were available. The hypothesis explaining the data is that “artificial sweeteners condition the body to […]

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This video they played at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is pretty funny.

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I got the Ultra Mini PC (UMPC) for Christmas that I was hoping for. It is even smaller and lighter than I expected — about the size of a thin hardback book (Not a Clancy book!). It’s a full PC — in fact it would have been state-of-the-art 5 years ago or so, with a […]

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I finally decided to give Linux a try. I took an old computer and installed Linux on it (Ubuntu 7.04 if you’re curious), then added a “KVM Switch” so I could share my single monitor, keyboard and mouse between that computer and my existing Windows 2000 computer. Without going into a lot of detail, I […]

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I have had my HP Deskjet 890 for almost 10 years. I’m not exactly sure when I bought it, but the date of manufacture is 08/1997. Local stores no longer sell cartridges for it and refilling only works about half the time. It’s been a workhorse for me, but I decided it was finally time […]

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