Home & Small Office Computer Guide

Here’s a bit of information that I’m sure you really do not want to know … but I’m going to tell you anyway.

The latest edition of Australian Personal Computer magazine is reporting that scientists in Singapore have developed a battery that produces energy from urine.

Just imagine one fitted to a laptop - no more annoying toilet breaks in the middle of coding that next killer app - you can take care of it and recharge your laptop right there are your desk.

I wonder what unit of measurement they would use to assess the life of a urine powered battery?

How’s this for a rather wild computer mouse. It’s thhe latest offering from Logitech and it features include:

Cordless

USB

Scroll Wheel

Application Switch

Tilt Wheel Plus Zoom

Rechargeable

Laster Techonology

Not only does it talk to the computer but the computer also talks to the mouse via a 2.4GHZz wireless connection. It comes with two rechargeable battery packs and the packs can be swapped on the fly. There’s even a battery level indicator that you can see on the top left hand side of the mouse.

This mouse will work with IBM or any compatible computer runing Windows98, 200, Me or XP that has a USB port.

The Logitech G7 mouse is rated at 4 times faster than conventional mice and is aimed at the gaming market. It’s also aimed at people who are prepared to pay for a quality mouse and retails for around $US100.00

Sony has recently released it’s latest S series laptop/notebook. It’s the S480 and it is definitely rich in features.

Those features include:

13.3″ wide XBRITE

Intergrated optial drive

nVida GeForce Go 6200 graphic card

Bluetooth wireless technology

915PM Intel Centrino Mobile chipset with integrated wireless LAN

Connectivity for a wide range of digital devices including digital cameras, video cameras and PDA

And all that comes in a slim and lightweight package.

I reported a day or so ago that Samsung had been a very naughty company and had been caught doing the wrong thing. I have to admit that I wasn’t too bothered by what they did but now they are really starting to get up my nose.

And it’s not the price fixing that is providing the irritation. It’s the attitude they display in released a new mobile phone.

The Korea Times is preporting that Samsung is about to release a new mobile phone that includes a 3 gigabyte hard drive. With that much storage users can carry up to 700 music files.

The new phone also comes with a 2 megapixel camera built in. The camera has a 2x optical zoom.

Unfortunately we Luddites in the rest of the world won’t be seeing this camera and here is a direct quote from the Korea Times to explain why.

The outfit has no plan to ship the models to other countries since there will be no demand for the top-of-the-line phones other than in Korea which boasts ubiquitous tech-savvy people.

Is that a sad reflection on us or on them?

On Friday a federal court in the USA brought down a landmark ruling that could have far-reaching implications.

The Court, sitting in Chicago, found that the ancient legal doctrine of trespass applies to the interference that spyware causes to many people’s home computers.

Where a ruling like that will take us is unclear but, it seems, that common sense and the Law have joined forces for once.

Hewlett Packard have announced the voluntary recall and replacement programme for battery packs used in some HP notebooks. The battery packs affected by the recall were manufactured between March and September 2004 and distributed worldwide.

Hewlett Packard have a full list of machines that could be carrying the problem batteries on their website at:

http://bpr.hpordercenter.com/bpr/

It seems that Asus is about to release a new video card that is fairly unique. The Extreme N7800 GT Dual is two Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT GPUs and a whopping 512 MB of RAM on one single board.

Basically that’s two PCI Express video cards in one package that takes up just one slot.

For more information check out the full report at Hot Hardware

I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who have heard about Konfabulator and their widgets before. If you’re one of those people then I guess that you’ll just have to humour me because I only found out about them on Friday.

Konfabulator popped into someone’s brain back in 1998 when that person thought it would be cool to have a skinnable MP3 player. From there it was only a short step to thinking about skinning any information you wanted to see on your desktop and that is how Konfabulator came about.

Kofabulator is a fairly quick download and an easy set up and once you have it you can then go to their site for the widgets that you think you will need. A widget is a simple script that can display information on your desktop.

There are currently over 1300 widgets to choose from and they include games, dates and times, news feeds, systems utilities, webcams from around the world and a lot of other stuff too. There are even several widgets for cricket scores.

Downloading the widgets is pretty simple too and most of them are self-installing. Once they are on your machine you can have them running on your desktop continuously. They consume little in the way of resources and disappear into the background when you’re working.

At the moment, because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet I’m running six widgets on one of my screens. There are

a couple of system utilities

an analog clock

an interesting little widget that shows which parts of the world are in darkeness (that might sound useless to lots of people but we work constantly with clients all round the world so it helps to know when they’re asleep)

a picture frame that cycles through any image directory I might point it to

a headline reader that shows me the latest offerings on slashdot.com

I think it’s a great idea and most people will find something useful in amongst all those widgets. Yahoo thought it was such a great idea that they bought the company.

Associated Press are reporting that Samsung, the world’s biggest maker of memory chips and other gizmos is about to be fined $US300 million for one count of a criminal anti-trust offence. It is understood that the company has agreed to plead guilty to the charge and further charges involving individual officers of the company could follow.

The charge relates to memory chip price fixing between April 1999 and June 2002.

Apple have just released their latest desktop computer - the iMac G5. It comes in two versions - 17 inch or 20 inch and what you see is what you get. There’s nothing else to this computer so it’s not going to hog a lot of space on your desk top.

The features of the iMac G5 include:

1.9GHz or 2.1GHz processor

a new PCI-Express ATI Radeon X600 Pro or XY grahics processor

128MB of dedicated video memory

OS X Tiger operating system

pre-installed AirPort Extreme Card for wireless connectivity

It also comes with USB2.0 and Firewall 400 ports, composite and S-video outputs, audio in and out so you can connect almost everything from cameras to extra hard drives to this computer.

You can find more information and have an online demo here