I just bought a new keyboard/mouse combo today to act as inputs for my laptop when I’m at work. I went with the Microsoft Wired Desktop 500 set and it’s pretty nice. There is one, glaring, problem though: the keyboard has a PS/2 connector. Pretty useless on a laptop that doesn’t have a PS/2 port!
Why Microsoft would even make non-USB keyboards anymore? I guess I should have gone for the more expensive wireless set. At least the mouse is usable.
This is kind of cool. It seems a company in America has come up with a way to transfer power of fibre optic cables. So, the converse of Broadband over Power. If you can’t be bothered reading the article, the method used involves pretty much what you would expect – using high-powered lasers to transfer photonic energy which is then converted back to electricity by photovoltaic cells.
I had the opportunity to see an actual iPhone in action today. I must say that, even though I’ve seen plenty of pictures and read a bunch of reviews on the product, I was surprised as how nice it looked. They’re quite small and the touch interface is pretty slick. Browsing the web with Safari was pretty simple for such a small device and a couple other apps I saw looked good as well. I didn’t get long to gawk at it though so I don’t have anything in-depth to report.
It does make me wonder when exactly Apple will release them down under. I sincerely hope that the few annoyances they have are sorted out by then: things like phone company lock-in and charging 99 cents US (which should be $1.69 here, same as iTunes songs) is all kinds of ridiculous. Allowing for 3rd party applications would be good too. As a web developer I think that because of the iPhone, combined with the new iPod Touch, Mobile Safari is going to become more and more popular so I’d better start looking into how to make my sites compatible with it.
The new computer is up and running with everything working well. I thought I’d go through some of the things I’ve noticed and learned.
Yes folks, my new PC is now up and running. Everything seems to have gone swimmingly hardware-wise. Today I got the final pieces of the system: a Winfast 8800GTS 640MB and a Ritmo “55-in-1″ card reader.
Today I started building my new PC. Like all my desktop computers this one is intended to last a while so I tried not to skimp on the hardware too much. At the same time I don’t exactly have unlimited funds so keeping the price around $2000 was the target. I already have a nice monitor, sets of 2.1 speakers and a keyboard and mouse so I only need the stuff “in the box”, most of which I managed to acquire today: Read the rest of this entry »