LR2 Blogs

Asus set to debut volume shipments of the $199 EEE PC

Asus has announced it intends to begin shipping the ultra low-cost EEE PC in September. According to Asus, the E’s in the title stand for “Easy to learn”, “Excellent Internet”, and “Excellent mobile computing experience.” Asus reportedly plans to ship up to 500,000 of these systems in 2007, and up to 3-5 million in 2008.

I think it’s officially time to resurrect my mini MAME project. This would make a sweet desktop arcade cabinet and the price isn’t so bad.

ASUS Eee PC Hand’s On Preview - HotHardware

One of the biggest news stories out of this year’s Computex wasn’t of a new chipset, GPU, or graphics card, but rather of the announcement of the ASUS Eee PC, a small, slim, and light portable computer that is priced at $199. Introduced by Jonney Shih, Chariman and CEO of ASUS at Intel’s keynote address the first day of the show, the Eee PC has already made headlines world wide.

This look promising.  No hard drive, no fan, not a lot of power, 4 USB ports and an external VGA.  Should be a handy little laptop for hacking projects.  I can see one of these making it into the mini MAME cabinet that I’m designing.

My Quiet Life » DoD Hard Drive

I had some repairs done on my laptop today — the extended support plan is gonna expire soon, so I had them replace the LCD, keyboard and hard drive (the old one was yielding frequent IDE channel resets). So, the Dell rep shows up and goes to work, and all goes well. As he’s walking out the door, he says “by the way, it looks like the hard drive they (Dell) sent you wasn’t a new one — I fired it up just to make sure, and it booted up Windows 2000 with a Department of Defense login”.

This is screwed up in more ways than I can say.

via: Blogitude

bookofjoe: Ray Earhart’s Floor Desk: Way cool — and you can make it yourself

Ray Earhart’s Floor Desk: Way cool — and you can make it yourself

This does look way cool. I wonder if the wife would approve of computing in bed. I’m guessing so as long as I build her one too.

Craftsman 21754 CompuCarve Compact Woodworking Machine, Computer-Controlled at Sears.com

Compact, computer-controlled, 3-dimensional woodworking machine with an easy-to-use interface. It allows a novice to make a complete project without a shop full of tools.The unique configuration allows it to perform many other woodworking functions, including ripping, cross cutting, mitering, contouring, jointing and routing. The CompuCarve can work in most soft materials, including wood, plastics (polycarbonate or cast acrylic) and certain types of high density foam. Set includes CompuCarve machine, (1) 1/16 in. carbide carving bit, (1) 1/8 in. carbide cutting bit, CarveWright Memory Card, starter software package, (2) 1/4 in. bit adaptors, vacuum bag adaptor, bit removal tool, hex wrench, owner’s manual and Quick Start Guide.

CNC at home! This looks like it’d be a lot of fun.

Disgruntled Dell customer finds crafty path to lawsuit settlement - Engadget

Dori thought to have the papers delivered to a Dell shopping mall kiosk instead. Quite unsurprisingly, no-one from Dell turned up in court on the stipulated date, resulting in Dori winning a $3,000 default judgment and a ruling to allow bailiffs to close the kiosk and seize items if the judgment was not paid.

And The Best Antivirus Is…

One thing I always hate to do is to find the best Antivirus program that will protect my computer. The two best paid versions that I have always heard about are Kaspersky and NOD32. For free software, I always look towards Avast or AVG. Of course, that is what I knew before but it looks like there may be some new people climbing the ladder.

Not surprisingly Norton is down the list a ways.

VintageComputing.com | Vintage Computing and Gaming » Blog Archive » The Dial-Up BBS Revisited

Visiting such old BBSes is incredible — it’s like traveling back in time to the early-mid 1990s. Each BBS is a unique a time capsule, stocked with trinkets and ephemera from the period. On message boards, you’ll find posts from 1994 about the O.J. Simpson trial and which player-made Doom levels are best. In file transfer sections you’ll run across large archives of long-forgotten Windows 3.1 screen savers.

A bit of a blast from yesteryear.

soap homepage

Interesting.

Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing. We have tried soap for a variety of application scenarios, including wall display interaction, Windows Media Center, slide presentation, and interactive video games described in this list of example scenarios.

Maluke Co. → Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

This looks very cool. Can’t wait to play with it.