A word of warning – don’t buy keyboard/mouse products from Gyration. They make a line of radio frequency keyboards and mice with 30-100 foot ranges depending on the model. I bought one to work with my living room home theater pc and man what a piece of crap. For $100, I got a keyboard that would only intermittently connect to the base station and a mouse that for the first 2 days completely refused to work. The mouse did eventually start working automagically one morning, and I did get the keyboard to finally connect to its base station, but even when it was connected and 3 inches from the base, it would miss literally 1/3 of the key presses. The thing was completely useless. Fortunately Staples let me exhange it for a Logitech. It doesn’t have anywhere near the supposed range of the Gyration, but the thing actually worked right out of the box.

Subsequent research on various htpc forums has shown me that while some folks are very happy with their Gyration products, there are also a lot of folks like me who have had or are having nothing but problems with their products. My advice? Stay far away.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to score an IBM versapoint or Slitek Airboard off of ebay. They’re cult favorites so it’s pretty competitive bidding on them, though it does look like I will be able to get one for less than I initially paid for the Gyration.

There’s a new bit torrent client available on sourceforge called azureus. It’s fantastic. It’s the first client to have a really decent GUI, plus they’ve added a number of very excellent features, including built-in irc chat, personal torrent serving, extensive monitoring tools (those alone make the thing worth grabbing) and a novel scheme to help make the leechers suffer for their greed. My advice? Grab this stat, then wander over to sharingthegroove.org and get yourself some (legal) killer live music. Or head over to file rush and get the latest game demos, or at least use it the next time you’re trying to score some demo and you don’t want to wait on fileplanet for 45 minutes hoping your turn will come up. Or maybe tv is your thing, if so check out sites like digital distractions or tvtorrents.com – who needs a vcr when there are sites like this?

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to torrents, but hopefully it’s enough to get people started.

Now this little number would be extremely useful. Imagine being able to share usb peripherals between many machines easily. As long as this requires no software on the client machines, this is a perfect solution. No word on price or specific technical details but I will be keeping my eyes on this one; I need a way to share a laser printer amongst linux and windows desktops. I hope it’s in the $50 range.

I’ve mentioned a few times how I think it’s like that over the next 5-10 years LEDs will come to replace the incandescent bulb in most uses. The New York Times has a pretty good article that covers the basics on how this transition will take place and why. An interesting tidbit – this has the potential to cut your electricity bill in half. Worth a read if the subject interests you. Note that you probably need a (free) account on nytimes.com to use this link.

Suspect that someone besides you is using your wireless access point? You might find airsnare handy. It’s the only free windows program I’ve come across that seems worthy in this category.

Do you find window’s search feature to be a slow, useless piece of crap? I definitely do. Give locate a try, for simple file searches on the system it’s super fast and there’s none of the useless interface clutter one finds in the MS search function. It doesn’t search the contents of documents the way the MS one does – it’s a straight port of the unix locate function – but the windows function is to slow to bother with anyway so you lose nothing by making the switch. There’s something to be said for small, elegant code.

These folks are providing a free service to turn your handwriting into a font. Submit a scan of your handwriting, and they generate the font. Very slick! There are companies that charge for this, in fact you occasionally run across their ads in computer magazines. I’m surprised to see this being offered for free.

Link originally found on the most excellent zeldman.com