An anonymous reader asks: "My girlfriend has moved off to grad school on the opposite side of the country, and we've been video conferencing over GnomeMeeting instead of using the phone (we don't have landline phones, only cell phones, so we can't use the phone before 9pm w/o burning through minutes). GnomeMeeting works well, but we are tethered to our computers by our headsets (since headsets seem necessary to prevent echoing). Are there any inexpensive wireless computer headsets with microphones out there? I saw the DIY Bluetooth headset story, but I don't feel like scrounging for parts this time... I want to by a working headset right now. I've seen $200+ headsets out there. Are there headsets out there with roughly 20 meter range for less than $100?"

NETHED writes "Circuit Cellar has an blurb about a guy who obviously got sick of waiting for a cheap solution to the BlueTooth cellphone headset. So in true geek tradition, he rolled his own. Here is the description of the toy (which looks bulky as-is, but could be fixed w/ some refining). It actually didn't win any prizes in the PSoC contest, but you have to admit, its pretty cool. There are other honorable mentions like a poor man's O-scope to something that seems to attach to a moth and check its muscle movements. Neat and nerdy stuff for the circuit etching crowd."

benzick writes "3d Retreat has posted a hands on look at a 2gig ram drive called the Rocket Drive. Article blurb: Overall the rocket drive is the best in I/O performance I have seen. It outperforms U160 SCSI drives by almost a factor of two. Yet there are some drawbacks to the Rocket drive, foremost is the price, although listed at the end of the review is some alternative pricing options to make it less expensive. And the rocket drive can not act as a boot drive. Also, if you have some extra money to spend, you can use multiple rocket drives in parallel."

axehind writes "Carlo Daffara posted to the openMosix mailing list about his game cluster. It's a 6 node cluster using Athlon XP cpus and running linux & openmosix (with some qdisc trickery) for the OS. It is used to host approximately 1000 users playing online games, like Jedi Knight and Quake III. Here's a link (italian) to the pictures."

jutus writes "I work for a company which creates medical simulators using off-the-shelf components (including Linux and MacOS X). We're looking for battery powered LCD VGA monitors, but can't seem to find many appealing solutions. This just happens to be one of the rare times when Google has failed me. Does anyone know of a good starting point for such monitors and other industrial PC components?"

An anonymous reader writes "This article at LinuxDevices.com introduces a unique Linux-based 'secure PDA' co-developed by IBM and Consumer Direct Link, Inc. (CDL). The Paron MPC combines the functions of a PDA, Bluetooth wireless access, cellular telephone, and biometric fingerprint recognition, along with a security-oriented hardware/software architecture. The device is claimed to be the world's first handheld wireless device with built-in biometric user authentication. The Paron is based on an Intel StrongARM SA-1110 processor and uses a Linux 2.4.x kernel and provides a GUI environment and PDA app suite based on Trolltech's Qtopia and Opera's browser much like the Sharp Zaurus."

A reader sent us the HOWTO for changing that red LED on your fancy-pants new optical mouse to blue - or, I suppose any other color. I think I'm fine with what I've got - although, the glass tops on tables does make using optical mice a pain there.

An anonymous submitter wrote: "Just when you thought the award-winning data leech Microsoft had become invincible... cellphone manufacturer Sendo, in a statement on the front page of its web site, announces the termination of its Z100 smartphone development on the Microsoft platform, licensing the rival Symbian from Nokia instead. (Further reports by ZDnet and Heise.)"

Anonymous Coward writes "Valence has apparently caved to pressure from Mac fans and finally released iBook/TiBook compatible cabling for their N-Charge Power System. The N-Charge is a $300, 10-Hour Lithion-Ion battery that powers laptops and cell phones/pdas at the same time. The next step? How about adapters to power my miniDV camcorder?" There's also a lighter version that has about half the power, for half the price.

strredwolf asks: "After upgrading my Zaurus SL-5500 to the much-better OpenZaurus 3.0 ROM, I'm left with a lack of an e-mail application that does POP. Short of compiling one up, what would folks there use with the OZ-bearing PDA? Ether a POP-capable mail app, or even a webmail system I can use Konqueror on? (And no, Yahoo! Mail doesn't work on it, even though Opera on the Sharp ROM worked well with that site)"

M. Woodrow, Jr. writes "Ars has a very eye-opening article on the real causes of bandwidth latency and why we should just drool endlessly over maximum throughput issues. In particular, I think the author's look into the PowerPC 970 and the P4's frontside bus is interesting considering how we're constantly being told by marketers that more speed is always going to translate into massive performance gains. The issue is, of course, far more complex, and this article does a good job of thinking about the problem from an almost platform agnostic point of view."

sockit2me9000 writes "Apple released their new PowerBook today. They include faster processors across the board (up to 1GHz), Radeon 9000 GPUs, and the top-of-the-line model will include a slot-loading SuperDrive. Price points remain about the same. New iBook was released as well."

Nate Carlson writes "I've been searching for a decently fast, inexpensive wireless 'net access solution. It's finally here! Sprint recently cut their PCS Vision pricing so that US$40/mo gets you unlimited data and 300 voice minutes to boot. I've written up a document on how to get this working with Linux - it works great, and averages 7-12kbytes/sec download speed. All I can say is, wow!"

SunPin writes "Slashdotters are doomed. An article from Reuters describes serious health problems from using CRTs (they call them "VDT") for too long. Studies show that we need more studies." So go ahead and expense a three-head LCD setup for your desk.

Montreal Geek asks: "I'm currently working on a pet project of mine for which I now find myself with the financial resources to bring to completion: the International Keyboard from Heck. The basic idea (most of the electronics and software for it have already been written) is that the keyboard has a variable layout (and a nice interface to change that layout) with the actual images on the keycaps changing to match what glyph/code-point it will generate. My problem is that I am unsure of which hardware solution to use for the actual, physical keycaps. My original prototype keycap uses a 7x9 array of leds under a lexan surface, but the power requirements of this many leds on a whole keyboard (even when scanning) is a tad prohibitive, and the lexan doesn't feel very good under a finger. Although glowing red keycaps look cool at first, I'm a bit worried that they will end up overly aggressive and annoying in the long run. Can you think of better alternatives? Keep in mind that the design must be resistant to repeated impacts (it is a keyboard after all) and, preferably, have fairly low power consumption so that the device remains practical for laptops." Although a few years from being truly affordable, might OLED technology be appropriate for this project? What other ideas might work out well for such a piece of hardware?

eexlebots asks: "I work for a small college which has a few Mac OS X 10.2 machines and a fairly standard Active Directory setup. Actual deployment of these clients rides on getting them to authenticate at login to our Active Directory server. Apple has stated that this is possible (easy! seamless!) with Jaguar without the use of an additional Mac OS X server, but I have found the case to be quite different. It is possible, but not without a good deal of nightmarish configuration issues. Documentation? HA! No sign of it anywhere on Apple's site. I'm not alone: at macwindows.com I found a good many people who think that Apple's claims of seamless Windows Network integration to be a bad joke and nothing more. I was wondering who else out there is having this problem, and what they have done to solve it."

El Puerco Loco writes "Area 450 has several guides to adding hardware to the Sampo DVE631CF DVD player. Even if you don't own this model, the firmware for it has been ported to many, many other models (with annoyances like macrovision and region locking removed). This player had built in support for an IDE device (a flash card reader) so a standard IDE drive can be slaved to the dvd drive and the player can read from a FAT32 formatted disk. The player decodes mp3s and VCD files, so it's possible to turn it into a cheap mp3 jukebox, or store movies in vcd format. I hope that when DiVX support becomes more common in DVD players one of them will be able to support a hack like this. It would be really cool to have 100+ movies built in to my dvd player."

MadCow-ard asks: "Here is one for the Electrical Engineers among us: I have a rack-mount case that I had installed an Intel D845GBV and P4. I had to switch them out with an Asus A7V333 because of incompatibility with my other hardware (which is a long story for another day), but they were functioning fine otherwise. In doing so we found that the new motherboard would not work in the system. We checked everything: multiple motherboards, video, RAM, power supply, cables, you name it. We were getting AOK POST sometimes, others not. It would randomly boot and other times it had no video, or a partial boot. After going nuts (in the field with a couple of clients) we switched out the risers the motherboard sits on. Voila. The risers appear to have grounded the system board. Not the Intel, just the Asus. I spoke with another tech associate who claims to have seen the same issue recently. Now grounding I understand, but it seems that it wasn't the risers specifically. It was their height. We tested two, the bad ones were 2mm smaller. It could be the alloy, but I thought that motherboards would shield the screw points from grounding. It appears to have been a field that built between the case and motherboard due to the smaller risers. It wasn't actual motherboard contact with the case, I checked. Does this make sense? Has anyone else seen this? Is it some sort of capacitance with the case that is generated specifically from the board design and layout?"

eagleyezx asks: "I have a rather large basement with nothing currently sitting in it (I moved all my crud to my garage). Since I am really into space and satellites, I have a satellite all designed. It's kinda based on one of the Amsat designs, but all it really does it beep, just like Sputnik. However, I would need a sterile clean room to build one that would function properly and not go beserk in orbit. I know everyone out there has thought about this at least once? Has anyone ever built a room like this? Any suggestions on equipment?" If you had the drive to do something like this, what would you need to do to be able to build a workshop that would even come close to "clean room" standards. Has anyone ever built an airlock on the cheap?

ttul writes "Vivato, a well-funded wireless startup, today came out of stealth mode to announce its "WiFi" switch product, a super high performance 802.11b access point that uses an array of hundreds of antennas to provide wide-area coverage to standard 802.11b clients. See stories at Wired, and The New York Times. Vivato's new AP completely changes the economics of WiFi especially for providers such as FatPort and WayPort, who now have the technology to deliver 11Mbps to your laptop even if you're miles from a location -- it's the Jetson's, folks!"