Harry writes “Microsoft’s new Windows ad, with shopper Lauren buying a cheap 17-inch HP laptop instead of a $,2800 MacBook Pro, has unleashed the whole ‘Are Macs Expensive?’ debate again. I’m diving in with a pretty exhaustive comparison of the MacBook Pro against machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Sony that were as comparably configured [...]
Mac OS X only: Feel like you waste too much time on Facebook, Twitter, or some other internet time sink? Free application SelfControl is serious about blocking those distractions when you need to focus.
The app is dead simple to use. Just add any domain to the blacklist (like twitter.com), use the slider to set [...]
Al writes “A super-cheap, thin and flexible touch interface developed by researchers at New York University and could be used to add touch sensing to all sorts of gadgets and devices. It measures a change in electrical resistance when a person or object applies different pressure. The “Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices (IMPAD)” consists of [...]
Firefox only: Gmail’s powerful filters and labels make it great for organizing, but when you have multiple labels assigned to a message the subject barely fits on the screen—unless you auto-hide them with a script.
The simple Hide Message Labels in Gmail script changes the labels to only display when you move your mouse over the [...]
Barence writes “The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that ’search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the [...]
Tomorrow’s April Fools’ Day, which means we should all brace ourselves for the inevitable, widespread prankage. If you haven’t prepared your own pranks, we’ve already got ten ready-to-go geek pranks for your perusal.
Our compendium of great geek pranks includes everything from the classic Blue Screen of Death screensaver to the clever Upside-Down-Ternet. Even better: They’re [...]
narramissic writes “Honda has released a video of experiments showing a person wearing a large hemispheric scanner on his head and controlling Honda’s Asimo robot by visualizing movement. Back in 2006, Honda and ATR researchers managed to get a robotic hand to move by analyzing brain activity using a large MRI scanner. This latest work [...]
Gather around boys and girls, we’ve got deals on espresso machines, saws, speakers, and cheap MacBooks in need of a good home.
Geek Gear!
13″ MacBook w/ DualCore processor, 2GB RAM, 120GB HD for $799.99 After Rebate (Regular Price: $999.99) [via]
Altec Lansing 5.1-channel Speaker System for $39.99 + Free Shipping (Regular Price: $99.99) [via]
RCA 50″ DLP HDTV [...]
ahziem writes “Ubuntu’s Intrepid Ibex and Redmond’s Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan “Better, Faster, Freer,” but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came [...]
Toward the end of last year, a hosting provider involved in sending 75% of spam emails was shut down—dropping spam levels by a whopping two-thirds. Unfortunately, according to the New York Times, spam has made a full recovery, back to 94% of all sent email. Also, like any good virus, spam has evolved to more [...]
