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I was recently shopping around for a new set of speakers for my PC because I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with my current low-end Labtec set. They’re not bad for what they are, they just don’t have very good low end response when listening to music. I was really thinking about going 5.1, even though I mostly think it’s pointless to have surround sound for your computer desk.. I guess unless you’re a big gamer, of which I am not. However, the other reason is that my laptop docking station has a digial coax spdif output, which would be awesome for 5.1 surround.
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If you have or have ever had an 18 month old child (and older) one thing you find is that they like buttons. Mine do anyway. They like to push them. Remote control buttons, computer CD-ROM eject buttons, elevator buttons, alarm clock buttons.. you get the idea. The most annoying, however is the TV power button. The annoyance comes in two forms. First, of course when your watching TV and the child likes to turn the TV on and off. Second, when you’re not watching TV. The older child convinces the younger to turn the TV on so that she has plausible deniability to claim “I didn’t do it.”
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We recently had a storm come through that knocked out our cable internet for a day. Adding to the torture of being without internet for almost the whole weekend, my router started to wig out when the connection did come back up. I was able to plug my machine directly to the modem, and get a connection, but I got nothing when connected to my Linksys WRT54G.
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So, I’m a regular VOIP user now. I’ve been using Skype for over a year now to make PC to phone calls and I’ve been very impressed. Over the last few months I’ve been using it much more heavily and I just purchased a Skype In number to receive calls from regular phones. However, it isn’t always convenient to use a headset attached to my PC to make and receive calls. I decided to try one of these cheap little USB to phone adapters.
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This is just a quick little hack that I did on my MythTV box some time ago. The motherboard that I have did not come with a cable for the S/PDIF audio output and it would have been $10 - $20 to purchase one. So, I did some searching around and found out it is actually quite easy to make one myself.
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Regarding my review on my Dell Latitude D620, I got a question from Robert about the performance of the audio output on the port replicator vs the line out on the laptop. He had read that the sound was pretty awful and wanted to know how mine performed. The quick answer is that he’s right… but my engineer in me can’t help quantifying it…
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Now that I’ve had the notebook for a few weeks, I’ve had enough time to evaluate and write a review.

I’m always a little skeptical when I personally read reviews like this, when the reviewer is the owner of the product (not just on loan for the review.) Sometimes they are really good because you get the perspective of a “typical” user. On the other hand, the “typical” user doesn’t always have a lot to compare it to. With that in mind, I’ll do my best to write this from the perspective of a very picky geek user, because I’m probably not typical.
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For quite a while, I’ve been looking at the radio in my truck and thinking it would be cool to replace the standard white backlighting with blue LEDs. Now that I’ve finally done it, here’s the write-up on how I did it. Obviously the designs of radios vary dramatically across manufacturers, but hopefully you can get some ideas on how to make your own modifications.
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As I was building my Blue LED Radio Faceplate mod, I needed to find something to do with one of the old LEDs that comes all the way out to the faceplate near the volume control knob. I decided to turn it into a red blinking LED “theft deterrent device.” Whether it actually deters theft or not is a whole separate issue and I honestly don’t care. I just think it looks cool.
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.. or so I thought. This article on Slashdot today prompted me to write about my recent processor purchase.
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