Das Keyboard Silent Pro
Fri, July 9th 2010 at 08:39pm
In the mail today I recieved my brand new toy, a Das Keyboard Professional Silent keyboard. I am currently typing this post on it right now, and I have to say that it is one of the most fulling experiences I have had with a new gadget for a long time. Even though I got the silent edition which does not feature the loud “click” when you hit a key, the silent version still gives you are satisfying feeling when you press a key.
It’s actually quite hard to explain how much difference a good keyboard can make. Up until now I have been using a laptop style keyboard on my desktop, mainly to conserve desk space. But even after a few minutes of using the Das Keyboard I can not imagine going back to that again.
My typing speed has already gone up significantly just because I can tell immediately when a key has been pressed. While with other cheap keyboards you often think you hit the key but it’s so mushy that you can not really tell.
Anyway, this is not a full review. Just wanted to let all know about this company, and if you decide to drop the cash for a good keyboard these are worth a look. Well made and delivered on their site.
Finally IE6 is Dieing!
Tue, July 6th 2010 at 05:06pm
Amazingly enough even though we are at version 8 of Internet Explorer IE6 still seems to be clinging on and holding back the internet. IE7 and 8 are still poor, but atleast Microsoft is finally starting to see that if they continue to ignore standards their market share will continue to dwindle despite having the huge advantage of shipping with Windows.
However when I was admiring the nice new design of Dan Cederholm’s new micro-blog theme I noticed that the only CSS directive he had was the following:
<!--[if gte IE 7]><!-->
<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen, projection" href="http://simplebits.com/-/css/bitstream.css" />
<!-- <![endif]-->
After looking at this and CSS for awhile I could not figure out how he handled the IE6 problem with all the transparent icons he is using. Then I used Adobe’s Browser Lab in CS Live to view his site in several browsers and he handled the IE6 problem by completely ignoring it! This makes me very happy because I have been considering doing this for a long time.
Obviously a personally micro-blog is hardly a mission critical site that must work, but I think having high profile web developers start to shun these poor browsers from Microsoft is a great start.
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The Modern Warfare Problem
Mon, July 5th 2010 at 02:54pm
There has been a disturbing trend with online PC games recently, they have all been taking on the more console like multi-player model. This model involves matching players together, then on the fly picking one of the players to be the “host” of the game effectively turning them into an impromptu sever. Modern Warfare 2 was the first PC game I have seen to employ this so that is going to be my focus.
Modern Warfare 2 is a great game but their decision to use this model for multi-player gaming creates many problems vs the traditional server client model. I am going to go over some of them here.
more »
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England World Cup 2010 Wallpaper
Sat, June 12th 2010 at 02:01pm
We may have tied the USA in game 1, but I still have high hopes for my country of birth in this World Cup. So on that note I made a quick wallpaper for myself and thought I would share.
England Wallpaper 1920x1200
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Hover.com – Simple Domain Name’s
Wed, June 9th 2010 at 12:20am
For a long time now I have been a GoDaddy user, simply because of the low price and advertising blitz. When I was looking for a Domain name they always just popped to mind. I suffered through using their appallingly complex user interface, and getting nickel and dimmed for essential services.
Then recently on twit.tv I saw an ad for Hover.com and from the screenshots of the site I could see right away that they are doing things better. The site is very Web 2.0, clean efficient and just there to help you get your work done. more »
Firefox vs. Chrome… who cares?
Thu, May 20th 2010 at 12:24pm
After reading a short Tech Crunch Story about Chrome vs. Firefox market share I found myself thinking, who cares about this? For years there has been a push by developers and supports of open standard pushing Firefox over Internet Explorer, mainly because Microsoft was trying to control the web via their own standards by not supporting Open Standards and pushing their own versions of HTML, Javascript, etc. Personally I think the more browsers there are the better, just as long as they all support the standards.
That is why proposed “battle” between Firefox and Chrome that TechCrunch is pushing does not really exist. They are both excellent browsers and both support the Open Web-standards. So does it really matter to anyone beside Google and the Mozilla Foundation which browser has a larger market share? I don’t think so.
For me this is the future of computing, a completely open set of standards and technologies that make the type of computer, phone, web browsers, tablet you are using irrelevant. They all talk to each other and work.
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Google Buzz Take 2
Fri, April 2nd 2010 at 09:16pm
If like me you have not looked at Google Buzz very much since the initial release, you might consider taking another look. I have been reading the Google blog for a while, and noticed several posts over the last few weeks about updates they have made. For me the biggest of those changes is smarter comment collapses.
My biggest complaint about Buzz was that I could not read posts from people I followed without scrolling through several pages of comments first. After the comment collapse changes it is now much better. I can easily skim the people I follow, and if something is interesting expand the comments and join in the discussion.
Keep up the good work Google, Buzz still does not differentiate itself enough from Twitter and Facebook. But if changes keep coming I think it will find it’s place in time.
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Google Buzz – What’s the Difference?
Sun, February 28th 2010 at 11:21am
After using Buzz for a little while it seems to be quite a different animal than Twitter or Facebook. While all three services are similar for the user posting the way they all handle replies from other users is what sets them apart.
more »
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Adding TRIM Support to Crucial SSD
Wed, October 28th 2009 at 11:49pm
Still playing with my new system, and really loving the new SSD. However in the back of my mind I was a little worried about the dreaded performance drop off of SSD’s after writing data to them for extended periods of time. So when shopping I made sure I bought a drive that was going to support the new TRIM command supported by Windows 7. Anandtech.com explains what TRIM is much better than I can, so I will leave that there.
WARNING: Backup all data before flashing your drive, or trying anything even remotely like this
However, the Crucial drive I have (CT128M225), like all the other SSD’s out there, require the drives controller to be flashed to support the new TRIM command. So I downloaded the iso and booted into the flash utility, but no drive showed up!
So it seems there is a little hiccup with the flash utility from Crucial, it does not have RAID drivers for the Intel P55 Express chipset on my motherboard. So I had to do a little trickery, basically you simply boot into the BIOS configuration and change your drive settings from RAID to IDE. This basically disables the RAID functionality and makes all your hard drives look like IDE drives.
IMPORTANT: do not let Windows boot with this setting changed, Windows will figure you removed the RAID, mess with drivers, re-assign driver letters and who knows what else.
After turning off RAID I rebooted using the Flash CD, flashed my Crucial drive, removed the CD and rebooted back into the BIOS. After changing back to RAID the system booted as normal all the RAID volumes were found again (I have my Crucial drive as the main, and two 750GB Seagate drives in RAID 1 for protected data drives).
Windows 7 required a restart again, I assume it updated drivers for TRIM? and now everything is running great.
You will not see a performance increase, but this will help keep your system fast while you use it in the future, and the firmware had some other bug fixes and features.
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Preparing for Windows 7: 32bit vs. 64bit
Fri, October 23rd 2009 at 11:00pm
Windows 7 is in the mail and I am starting to thinking about the first issues I am going to come across when installing it, 32 or 64bit. I have been using the 64bit RC version of Windows 7 for months now and there are two issues that keep bugging me, and both are related to Adobe Acrobat Pro 8. more »
