technogamy writes: "Art.geeks -- check out The Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport, a 'portal to net art and digital arts, and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects.' Note specifically Jim Buckhouse's Tap--part of Creative Time's Beaming Network, Tap's collaborative, evolving, quirky app hops on to your Palm-based device through a sleek silver beaming cube. (I freaked out when I saw one of the cubes at a local Barnes and Noble ... especially when I realized that I knew the person who made them. ;]) Here's how Tap works. Get some culture, people!"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire has a review of the Dension DMP3, an MP3 player for the car that you purchase sans storage media. It sell for $249 and takes a standard IDE/ATA hard disk. With 100 GB selling for $200 these days the DMP3 gives you a ton of capacity for $450. The player itself is pretty basic, but I like the way they use a mobile rack frame to handle fast file transfers rather than use USB to spoonfeed tunes at a snails pace. Dension has also made the internal specs public including the playlist (.ply), logo (.lce), message (.msg) formats as well as the communications serial line protocol for adding third party devices like a mouse. Overall a neat toy, but most of all very reasonably priced for those who like to rip their tunes at the highest compression rates."

LambSpam asks: "I had a nightmare week (last week) with two of our servers running Intel's U3-1L RAID controller (RAID 5). Whenever there's a power outage in our building these controllers randomly mark one or more of the drives in the array offline (even with adequate UPS support), which means I have to manually mark them online and/or rebuild. Intel acknowledged the problem, but their solution involves updating the backplane's firmware, the controller firmware (destructive upgrade!), and even the firmware on our IBM drives in the array because they 'draw too much power' in certain conditions. I've only used one other RAID 5 implementation (MegaRAID), and it NEVER had these kinds of problems, whereas if you sneeze too hard around this U3-1L card it will go offline. Is this common with most hardware RAID implementations? What RAID 5 implementations works without hassle? What should I stay away from?"

andori writes: "ComputerWorld is reporting that the Census Bureau is wanting to conduct the 2010 Census without the use of paper. They want to use 500,000 handhelds with GPS and wireless communications abilities. And they want to do it for $100 an unit. I sure hope the industry is able to that price point some day! I will personally take a few if they do."

antis0c asks: "After reading many stories on Slashdot about building custom PC cases, I'm highly interested in building one myself. The only problem - I have absolutely no experience working with PlexiGlass/Acrylic/Lexan, basically any plastic type materials. I'd like to learn the basics, cutting, adhesives, special tools, all the skills required to build a PC case out of this stuff. A quick Google search left nothing really good on it, and I can't even find any books on Amazon on the topic. I hoping some Slashdotters might have some insight on good books on the topic, sites, or perhaps just information."

pinqkandi writes "Network Computing recently ran an extensive shootout of video streaming servers, in areas from setup to quality to buffering times. The free, open source Darwin Streaming Server, which streams QuickTime content, edged out costly and closed source Windows Media & RealVideo streaming systems." Well, it edged out Real. It blew Microsoft away.

greenape147 writes: "BurnOutPC has this review of a tachometer modification for your PC. The tachometer, made and sold by Xoxide, works via the serial port and displays the CPU utilization in RPM's! The classical look of this external tachometer is really nice to see after the "window phase" everyone seems to be going through. Not to mention the fact that analog meters are so fun to watch. Currently supported in Windows NT/2000/XP, a GNU/Linux driver is in the works."

baptiste writes "While we marvel at the latest CPU release or new motherboard chipset, we still put the same old fans in the neon lit cases and then complain that it is too loud. Well, maybe someone has finally come up with the next generation PC fan. Y.S. Tech has announced a new fan which is driven at the blade tips by a magnetic motor in the housing. Without the motor in the middle they claim a 30% airflow improvement meaning, potenitally, you could get the same airflow of today's fans at a lower RPM meaning less noise. They also claim the fan tips result in the bulk of fan noise. In this design they are sort of enclosed, reducing noise further. There is also a PDF datasheet available."

A user writes "Apple Remote Desktop provides remote administration and viewing for Macs. It works back to Mac OS 8.1, over the Internet, provides remote software updates, system checks, screen locking and more. Sweet." Sweet indeed. I could use this for my home network (right now consisting of five Macs, going on six). The cost is $299 for 10 clients, $499 for unlimited clients.

An anonymous reader writes: "Our company is planning to build a small server room. Initial requirements are for two or three enclosed server cabinets in which various servers and network gear will be installed. The cabinets are planned to hold between 15 to 20 servers of various types and sizes, switches, routers, four dial-in modems for after hours use by staff who do not have ISPs and a KVM switch. We would expect for a small desk as a work area, a book case, storage for some spare parts as well as server documentation and records. We know that we need some power protection in the way of a UPS and a generator. We also expect that this room will get quite warm in the summer months so it will need more air conditioning than the rest of the office. What should we expect for power and cooling needs? Are there any 'rules of thumb' when it comes to building a server room. Good suggestions and help would be appreciated."

Along with the Rio Central we reviewed here yesterday, SonicBlue sent us a Rio Receiver for review. This is a bare bones audio terminal: no local storage. Instead it feeds from either your windows PC, or from the Rio Central. It aims to let you put your tunes wherever you have HPNA or Ethernet. And unlike its expensive big brother, this thing is priced to reasonably for people who want either multizone audio, or just to stream audio from their PC to stereo.

NadizPicR writes "Lotus released the first Mac OS X beta for its Notes Domino messaging and collaboration system client. Version 6.0b1 also features improved toolbar handling. I just downloaded and installed it, and it seems to be an excellent implementation." Do people still use Lotus Notes? Honestly?

DrGonzo was among several who submitted news of the new Mini Motherboard from via. The Mini ITX standard is just 170mm squared, and this motherboard has audio, ether, IDE, video and tv out. Not bad for something so tiny. Here's an article about the small wonder.

My ongoing quest to find the perfect MP3 playing stereo component continues this week with the Rio Central. This is a $1500 box with a 40 gig hard drive that aims to do everything audio, from feeding reciever units, burning CDs, and populating portables, and of course, providing an interface to manage your tunes and play them on your stereo. And it's built on Linux- a USB keyboard is all you need to get to a command line!

Andrew Slough writes: "Fujitsu has announced the world's first PDA based on Intel's XScale architecture, making this the fastest ARM PDA in the world! Stories also at at Infosync and The Register. Pictures at PocketNow."

scrm writes: "Nokia just released a slew of new phones at CEBIT. Among them are two phones - a full-color phone and a cheap n' cheerful model - both of whose software can be upgraded with Java applications." And Haggis writes "Nokia are to use the Opera browser in the latest incarnation of their everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink mobile phone, the 9210i. Oh, and it will run Java applets too."

Some random reader sent in: "Hi, I'm wondering what others out there use for server naming conventions. Our data centre right now houses a little under 200 servers, with plans to grow up to 4000 servers within the next five years. We'd like to pick something flexible and easy to manage with any tracking system. The servers we'll be implementing include SUN, HPUX, and AIX servers, in addition to existing Compaq and HP Intel servers, so we'll have to adhere to limitations placed on hostnames by manufacturers (ie HPUX lets you have an 8 character hostname)." We had a similar story a few years ago.

racerx509 writes: "I just did something thats probably going to cost me much. I was reinstalling my hdd after trying to ghost the partition for another pc, when I jammed the cable in wrong. The cable is keyed and the keyed side was in correctlty, so I figured that it was going in right. However, I have severly bent several of the pins. The HDD will no longer detect even after I attempted to straighten the pins. Pin #11 has receded into the aperature and pins #15 and #16 are seriously bent. I've straightened them out with tweezers as much as I can, but it looks like this drive is gone. I would replace it, but i have some very important data on it. Does anyone know of a way I could straigten the pins and pull receded ones? If not, what about a good data recovery service in the Atlanta area?"

thaddjuice writes: "I'm interested in installing a computer on my sailboat to interface with the ship's navigation and communication systems. What I'm wondering is what needs to be done to a computer to protect it from salty air, potentially damp surroundings, and temperature extremes. What parts are most vulnerable? What about peripherals - can you protect keyboards, mice, and monitors from these conditions? Power is also a concern, it has to run off of boat batteries. Should I start with a laptop, desktop, or rackmount system?"

An anonymous reader writes: "The Tech Report has a review of two DVD writers, one from each of the two competing standards (DVD-R and -RW and DVD+RW). In addition to testing the performance of each drive, they also test a bunch of DVD players and DVD-ROM drives to see how well they read the different types of media."