Author name: Doug Felteau

DX1 Input System

Computers, Gizmo of the Day / By /

DX1 Input System

The Geeks have featured a couple of keyboards lately as Gizmos of the Day, but a friend mentioned we had to feature the ‘fraggiest’ keyboard on the market called the DX1 Input System. After a quick look, we agree that this keyboard is ‘fraggin’ groovy; however, as non-hardcore gamers, we were left wondering what exactly ‘fraggin’ was.

The DX1 works perfectly for gamers because you can actually move the keys to fit your hand and assign a macro for each key. You just have to stick the keys where you want on the pad and then tell the DX1 what you want the keys to do designing your ultimate gamer keyboard. In addition to gaming, you can use the DX1 through different applications such as assigning the keys certain Photoshop macro keys or Visual Studio macros.

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INSTEON SwitchLinc V2 Dimmer

Gizmo of the Day, Home Automation / By /

INSTEON SwitchLinc V2 Dimmer

Make your home the envy of your friends and neighbors with the sophistication and elegance of the SwitchLinc Dimmer — the ultimate INSTEON-compatible dimmer. SwitchLinc Dimmers fill your entire home with personalized mood lighting for any occasion. You’ll always know how much more your lights can be dimmed or brightened thanks to an exclusive LED light bar that you can see at a glance.

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How do I keep dogs and cats out of my yard?

Gaming & Toys / By /

Smarthome has many products to keep your yard free of unwelcomed dogs and cats. Place one or more of these products outside your home to humanely deter these animals and others from your yard and property.

Dogs and cats have much better hearing than do humans. They also are able to hear higher frequencies well above that of normal human hearing. Our best systems use ultrasonic sounds to irritate these animals. Once exposed to these high frequency sounds, the animals react by turning around and running the away. For humans, it would be like listening to a loud high-pitched sound.

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5MB Of Data At Your Fingertip – Literally

Miscellaneous / By /

By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News

Researchers from the University of Tokushima and Hokkaido University have demonstrated that it is possible to read data written into a human fingernail using a laser, much like information is written on a rewritable compact disc. The data is read using an optical microscope. Two gigabits of data can be written per cubic centimeter of fingernail using these size dots. Today’s compact discs hold about 5.6 gigabits of data. A practical fingernail recording area of 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters by one tenth of a millimeter deep would hold 5 megabits of data, or about 300 pages of text.

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Which In-Car Gps Navigation Device Is Best?

Automotive, Miscellaneous / By /

By Alexander Barnes Dryer

Writer Alexander Dryer tests out five GPS in-car navigation systems and tells you what he thinks. The 5 systems are the Cobra NAV ONE 3000 (you can find it for around $850), the Garmin StreetPilot c330 ($700), the Lowrance iWAY 500C ($800), the Magellan RoadMate 760 ($1,100), and the TomTom GO 300 ($700). Not long ago, you could get such systems (which use data from the government’s GPS satellites) only as a dealer-installed option in high-end cars. There’s now a fiercely competitive market for portable, after-market systems that sit on your dashboard. Getting started is simply a matter of plugging one into your cigarette lighter and pressing the power button.

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Page meets Brin: A Brief History of Google

Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet / By /

By John Battelle

When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Page’s dissertation topic led naturally to the birth of a search engine and his name was the basis for an algorithm that is still hotly debated on the Web today, PageRank. Google started life on Stanford’s network in 1996 and its crawler once consumed nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth, not to mention bringing down Stanford’s Internet connection regularly.

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Mars Plan Envisions Comfy Colony

Miscellaneous / By /

By Mark Baard

A group of aspiring Martians has drawn up detailed plans for settling the Red Planet, and is working on a cookbook that will use ingredients grown on Mars. The Mars Foundation is proposing a settlement in the next 20 years that would start with a dozen initial inhabitants and eventually expand to several hundred. The settlement, about the size of Boston’s North End neighborhood, will use local materials for construction and provide the comforts of home to terran migrants, including cars (rovers, actually), garages and living areas with skylights. The foundation has even scoped out a potential building site for the settlement, along a hillside 80 yards above the valley floor in an area called Candor Chasma.

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Leatherman Micra

3 Comments / Gizmo of the Day, Sports, Health & Fitness, Outdoors / By /

Leatherman Micra

The Micra from Leatherman is unlike any pocket knife or multi-purpose tool on the market. Closing to 2.5 inches and weighing just 1.75 ounces, the stainless steel Micra is so small you will hardly notice it until you need it. Then it goes to work for you with 10 useful tools, including spring-action scissors. Nothing else of comparable size gives you scissors this big, this strong, or this effective.

We suggest that you use your Micra to destroy alien races only if they have taken you without consent and only if you already have the root password to the mother ship.

Just over 2 inches long and about a quarter inch.

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Yahoo May Be Working On Blog Search Tool

Miscellaneous / By /

By Elinor Mills

It appears Yahoo may be working on blog search technology that would compete with Technorati. In a blog posting earlier this week, Ian Forrester writes about a talk given at Open Tech 2005 last weekend in London by Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny. “Jeremy Zawodny was very interesting and pointed out a couple of things: The rumors about Yahoo working on a Technorati killer, are true. The aggregator will support Microformats and RSS Extensions, including some of Yahoo’s rivals. Yahoo will be REALLY opening up more APIs. Zawodny failed or kept very quiet about the Konfabulator take over. Yahoo are counting RSS/Atom as a type of API not just as a syndication format,” the blog says.

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Vapo-Blaster

Gizmo of the Day, Tools, DIY, Home, Office / By /

Vapo-Blaster

Now you can be your own super-villain, launching smoky balls of brumous pain at all who stand between you and office domination. Or, perhaps you need to defend the world against invading alien hordes, gangs of office solicitors, or packs of ugly children. Whoever your adversary is, the Vapo-Blaster is your weapon of choice.

Each blaster is molded with the style of classic ray guns from the time before television. A clear plastic bubble in the Vapo-Blaster lights up as it fills with fog, to make the design pack even more retro goodness. Just dip the gun into the bubble liquid dipping tray, and blast away! The bubbles will stream out and when they pop, everyone will be awed by your ability to produce magic clouds. And then you can do it again and again – and soon you will be the office wizard and everyone will respect you.

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