PARENA writes: "Estari comes with a Dual-Screen Laptop! "A what?!" Yes: Dual-Screen. In fact, they are 2 15" TOUCH screens. According to TwoMobile: 'Unlike electronic tablets, the 2-VU(TM) allows users to view two full-page files or documents simultaneously. Users can page through two books at once, or take handwritten notes in a notebook on one screen while paging through a book on the other screen.' Sounds pretty cool!"

David Macfarlan asks: "My father owns a small medical practice and has always desired to get information to himself and his patients rapidly. With recent advancements of 802.11b and powerful Pocket PC's he's developed an itch for information-on-demand through a wireless handheld (preferrably color) while he is in the examination room. A database for the knowledge he's looking to access already exists, and can be queried via any browser. He has approached me on implimenting a system of reliable, fast PDA's which could deliver a browser-based wireless access (within 100 feet) of this system. Is there anyone who has experience with the PPC's, and could offer any suggestions as to which is best suited to such an application?"

mikenetaim asks: "Numerous people have started projects aimed at emulating the PPC based Macintosh. Those that run on machines with a PPC tend to succeed (MacOnLinux, Sheepshaver, iFusion), and every single one which attempted to emulate the CPU failed. Everyone admits that an emulated CPU will run slowly, but no one has ever released a working PPC emulator at any speed (except for an incomplete one, whose name escapes me, that was released a long time ago to statically translate AIX binaries). There are a ton of 68k emulation code floating around the 'net, and a PPC emulator should be easier to produce (due to fixed instruction length, branch predication, opcodes that dictate if CCR flags must be generated, etc). Most of the authors just claim their project was harder than they expected before disappearing. Why do all these projects fail? Can anyone point me to any information or code?"

coldfire writes: "At LISA2001 there was a neat presentation on a PC104 based mini-parallel computer. It seems that the how-to has now been posted, for the world to behold." From last year or not, this has some great pictures.

sandv!per writes: "If you want to spruce up the front of your case a bit, and those lighted case badges don't seem like enough, check out Matt's guide on making a "bubble-plexi" mod." There are disclaimers and warnings all over the place about injuring yourself while attempting this mod, so have fun but don't bitch if you lose a thumb ;)

Dejected @Work writes "IBM developerWorks just ran this article on Verizon's partial 3G network set up in some areas of the US, most of the North East. The article goes into some good technical background about these fatter pipes called Express Network. Has anyone tried this out?"

Raju writes: "For many years we were told that SCSI is superior to IDE. I always made my systems with SCSI and the others in the household got el-cheapo IDE disks. In the past SCSI beat IDE hands-down but now according to Simson Garfinkel, "today's IDE drives are significantly faster than SCSI drives". In the article at O'Reilly Network he talks about the tests they had run for storage of network data on disks. In the light of this article does anyone see any reason for going with SCSI in a desktop machine? For servers with heavy disk usage patterns it might be different due to command queuing." Disk types aren't what the article's really about, though -- it's a top-level look at network forensics (including advice on building a traffic-analysis system), and makes some interesting points about the unbalanced growth of storage and bandwidth.

mike asks: "I'm mulling the logic of my company building its own desktop computers. As the IT Manager (plus sysadmin, janitor...) of a struggling-yet-thankfully-still-alive dotcom, money is really tight. We have around sixty ~400MHz desktops which are increasingly showing their age. Acceptable P4 systems from the big guys run at least $1000. By recycling the OS (Win2k), case, cdrom, floppy, and K/V/M, I figure I can assemble a good AMD system for about $600. That's a 40% savings. Is it worth it? The cost difference could very well determine whether this project proceeds or gets put on the back-burner again."

fiftyfly writes "Wired's running a story about the Pixter - a sort of etch-a-sketch/palm love child. At an estimated $50.00 I'm sure someone out there must have had a go at hacking it. No mention of anyway of getting the drawings off, I'd imagine that would be a good place to start. For $75CAD I'd give it a go, eh?"

P800guy writes "Psion Place has a review of the SonyEricsson P800 available in Q3, this looks to be the best PDA/phone combined in the world. Running Symbian OS v7.0, 208x320 color touchscreen, triple-band GSM compatible, Multimedia Messaging (MMS), Bluetooth, GPRS always-on internet connection, built-in digital camera, support for HTML, xHTML, Java, iMode, WAP, Word, Excel, PPT. Check out the pictures, open, closed. In the US it'll work on Voicestream, ATT Wireless, and Cingular just don't expect it to be offically supported from day 1 of release." Getting closer- now if it just had a few gigs of memory for MP3s ;)

evilpaul13 writes: "Somebody got an IDE Harddrive hooked up to his Dreamcast! He plans to build a new case for it as a later project. Maybe this will encourage new Linux for Dreamcast work with the greater possibilities it presents for a small SH6 based web server?" This is still a work in progress -- but it's encouraging, especially given the current price of Dreamcast consoles.

jherro writes: "Looking for the coolest case on the block? Already have enough fish tanks? Then might just want to build a PC inside of your old classic mac. Makes a great little mp3 server. Sadly, the mirror at angelfire will probably be faster than the original at Smuniverse." Finding a cheap 9" monitor would be a nice trick, too.

omen asks: "I know the subject of keyboards seems to come up every week or so, but the FingerWorks has recently come to my attention. Before I shell out $330 for the TouchStream Stealth, I was wondering if anyone has any experience with it. Is the gesture system useful? How hard is it to get used to 'zero-force' keys? How well does the 'two finger' mouse work? Any thoughts on the Qwerak layout?" This keyboard looks to be another incremental improvement on ergonomic keyboards, but are these keyboards really good enough to justify their prices?

Aknaton asks: "As I begin to plan for my annual fall purchase of new hardware, I would like to try something different. I have already owned several PPC Macs running MacOS X and many PCs but they still leave me wanting more. I have begun looking for non-Apple/X86 alternatives but I am not finding much. SGI still makes machines but they don't even list prices. Sun offers the SunBlade 100, for just under a grand and it is a consideration. Can anyone else suggest, or know of, any other options? Or is it just a PC world after all?"

EconolineCrush writes "What's 200x181x280mm, decked out in brushed aluminum, and supports a Pentium 4 processor with DDR SDRAM? Shuttle's SS50 bare bones system The Tech Report has a review up of the latest aluminum cube from Shuttle, and it's an impressive little beast. Small form factor PCs are becoming more popular, and this is the first platform I've seen with Pentium 4 support, DDR, and decent on board video via SiS' 650 chipset."

Alvaro asks: "My question is rather simple: i've recently acquired a Soyo K7V Dragon+, an excellent Ahtlon XP motherboard which includes by default a smart card reader. My intention is to get this smart card reader working on Linux, but i've no idea on how to start. Is it a serial interface? Does it have an embedded controller in the MB? Does it need kernel support? Which programs should I use to access (read from/write to) the smart cards? I've searched the web to find useful information, but so far, no luck. The final idea is to use the smart cards to hold the key to decrypt an EFS (Encrypted File System), and the computer won't boot if the card isn't inserted since the BIOS also supports booting on smart card insert! Can anyone help me?"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Toshiba has announced a new portable storage device, Bluetooth Pocket Server, that can be used as a HTTP/FTP wireless server. This device with a 5GB of data can hold up to 37 hours of MPEG-4 moving images. You can read the press release on the Toshiba web site. Now while walking you can be a human web server..."

AndersBrownworth writes: "Creative has released what they are calling the VoIP Blaster, a $15 USB device (2 for $20) that lets you plug in a normal POTS type telephone and make Voice-over-IP calls to anyone on the Internet. Creative has some closed source software with it that they manage to sneak per call charges in with, but ignoring that one can install the open source fobbit software and do point-to-point unmetered VoIP calls to anyone else with a G.723.1 codec VoIP phone. I just got off a NC to CA call placed from behind a firewall and the quality rocked. It sounded far better than a cell phone. The Fobbit software is fairly solid on FreeBSD and Windows with a couple bugs in the Linux port." This device has been out for a while now, with mixed reviews, at least with the included software, but it's nice to see this effort to turn off the meter.

MJArrison writes "Yahoo is carrying a Reuters story about a laptop that isn't much more than a foldable LCD screen. It's very small screen 6.7"x5" appears to be a strange black on green monochrome, so it better be cheap. It's made by Samsung and will be launched in Korea first." It's a start; I can't wait for them to integrate an IBM 701cs style camber for both screen and keyboard. T. adds: Rather than a general-purpose laptop, it looks like this is being pushed as an specialized device for reading e-texts.

paradesign writes "Citing both Apple and Sony's intentions to become the hub of the digital lifestyle, Popular Science has pitted an $1,800 800MHz flat-panel iMac up against a $3,400 1.7GHz Sony Vaio PCV-MXS10 to see which really comes out on top. The bottom line is that the Sony PC -- almost twice as expensive as the iMac -- just narrowly edged out the iMac, with an overall score of 42 to 40."