Category: Cool!

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Added to My Wish List

Newly added to my “Redneck Geek’s I just GOTTA get me one-a these gizmos!” list:

Mosquito Raygun

A redneck geek’s dream toy…

(Hint, dudes: DDT is easier, cheaper and as safe. Yes, safe, despite Rachel Carson’s lies, as entomologist (that’s “bug scientist”) and mountaineer J. Gordon Edwards demonstrated by eating a teaspoon full–a truly massive amount for one “animal” of human size to ingest at one time–of the stuff weekly for about 30 years with no apparent ill effects. Yeh, he’s dead. Died at age 84… while mountain climbing. You should die so healthy.)

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This weekend…

…is starting early for me. I’m going to be playing with Virtualbox, and I’m putting other things in… another box, for now. (Lovely Daughter’s dropping by Saturday, so that day’s out *heh*)

Meanwhile, THIS is an open trackbacks post, open all weekend long. Link to THIS post and track back. 🙂

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Still Avoiding Current Events…

…mostly.

Here’s another diversion.

Unnecessary confession: I use Windoze. Because I have to. (I also use PCBSD and Ubuntu, but that’s for pleasure… and some work/productivity.) So far, I have managed to avoid installing Vista on any twc central computers. *whew!* (Wipes forehead gratefully. *heh*) I have seen enough Vista computers “in the wild” to become convinced that, apart from the eye candy, it’s just not worth the hassle for most folks to switch from XP to Vista, if they must use Windows. And even buying a new computer with Vista installed can be problematic; I’ve already seen enough software incompatibilities in the workplace and problems with drivers for peripherals to know it just is not for most of the folks I know, including me. And this is quite apart from the fact that Vista–even installed new on “Vista-ready” computers is generally–from what I’ve actually seen “in the wild”–*heh*–a resource hog and slower than a properly-configured XP computer.

And, despite the monthly or more bug fixes and patches, Vista’s SP-1 is not really available for general installation–not that it is a definite improvement.

Still, there are a few things about Vista that are nice. The eye candy. 😉 But… all I had to do to get the “AeroGlass” look in PCBSD was simply download a skin. And for various versions of Windows, skinning and other Vista-like functionality is available for free via various downloads(free registration required for download), some of which also offer the 3D “flipping” of cascaded apps, etc.

The screencap above is on a Win2K machine with some of the functionality of PCMag’s “VistaMagicPack” (the first link above) enabled. Not half bad, and no discernable performance hit on a middlin’ old 1.3Ghz machine with only 512MB RAM and a tiny lil 16MB vidcard. Try running Vista with all the eye candy on that machine. Not.

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Add to my wish list

For years I had a 61-key midi controller sitting on my desktop (PC keyboard was underneath on a slideout tray). Kinda bulky and space consuming. The clip below shows something that’s now on my wish list: a PC/MIDI USB keyboard from Creative. OK, so the sounds are the typical rather low-quality Creative midi patches (I particularly dislike the strings patch), but it’s still a cool product, and used with better patches (Roland, say :-)), it’d be a nice addition. I like it, too, that when not in use, a cover for the MIDI keyboard converts it into a palm rest.

Yeh, I know the thing’s been around in earlier versions for a while, but I kinda need a new desktop-capable controller, and this one’s the best fit for my computer use I’ve seen. At $50 or so, the price is about right, too… if I can find it in stock for that. *sigh* Oh, well, $75 would be OK (and I’ve seen it marked up to that from Creative’s suggested retail in some places). Heck, my previous 61-key controller was about $250 (and I may find a use for that in the future, still).

No, the thing wouldn’t be useful for actually playing music (for one thing, it lacks the sustain pedal my old controller has, and for another, the keys are off-size), but it’d sure be useful for sketching out pieces in transcription software, which is all I really used the other one for, anyway.