vonmar writes "A 20-second re-recordable message has been hacked into the "Boogie Bass" talking fish. The audio is stored on an ISD 1420P solid-state chipcorder voice record/playback chip. The head, tail, and mouth movements are also re-recordable, and are stored in EEPROM inside an ATMEL AT89S8252 microcontroller. Read more about it at the creator's site."

Kennric writes "I'd like to describe a device I have been wishing for, an electronic class notebook. I know a lot of Slashdotters are college students, how often do you use a laptop for schoolwork? Wouldn't I be great to be able to take notes by hand, draw diagrams, doodle in the margins, and save it electronically?"

krow asks: "So every flight I get on I wonder, could I partially recharge my laptop off of the headphone outlet? What about using alligator clips to the recharger for the airphone? Anyone else have some creative ideas? How much juice do you think you could pull before tripping a breaker?" Well, this was a fun question for once. I've always wondered the same thing but figured the current/voltage would be insufficient for anything more than a trickle charge, if even that. Anyone have any clues? Or better yet ... anyone have alligator clips for those wacky Airphones?

Dru writes: "This is an article about a hardware technology that is largely unknown in the new Unix community. In theory, with this inexpensive hardware, your BSD or Linux box could start doing guranteed reboots in under 2 minutes (no fsck required) and super fast database writes. It could leapfrog all of the journaling filesystem projects as well. Yes, I wrote the article. The article is long, detailed, and mentions FreeBSD often. However, I do believe it is relevant to any other PC Unix. If enough people learn about it, maybe they will start demanding it from their favorite hardware vendor." With RAM and hard drive space both continuing to decline, I wonder how the speed / use curve for individual PCs' storage (from L1 cache to backups) will evolve. With a similar bent, Arek urges you to "take a look at our company's Solid State Disk Drives." How'dja like 8 or so gigs of DRAM next time you edit a video or burn a CD?

nofx_3 writes: "Viahardware has a preview up of VIA Cyrix's Samuel 2 core processor. The Samuel 2 is the first .15Micron x86 processor, and has a die size below 50mm2. 3D performance is still lacking, but 2D performance is every bit the Celeron's equal. Also, it requires no active cooling. Sounds like a great Linux Webpad CPU." Remember when AMD was an also-ran instead of the (arguable) price/performance leader? Nice to hear about the smaller players, especially when they're making inexpensive integrated hardware my mom would like to use.

Tom asks: "I was once a Dvorak keyboard user but the fact that where ever I went I was forced me to go back to QWERT. IMHO the ultimate solution would be a small software independent hardware converter that acts between the keyboard and where you put in the motherboard. This solution would allow you to move to any computer and quickly use Dvorak without messing with software key remapping. I searched hard around the web and the only thing I found that was close to it was the Chameleon Keyboard Customizer also linked here (just scroll down a bit on this page) made by some company named Sirius Industries. Does anyone know where to get this converter or have any other hardware converters that they know exists? Or any type of schematic diagram that will let one build such a convert? Help is appreciated." The first link lists a number for Sirius Industries, but it was tied to a fax machine at the time of this writing. It would be nice to know if they are still in business and if there is any way of contacting them directly about their product.

Bart van der Ouderaa asks: "With the Christmas bonus in the pocket, I decided to invest it in a multitool/Swiss army knife so I don't have to borrow the screwdriver every time from a co-worker. Yet in surfing the Web for reviews, I only came across reviews made by outdoorsman, etc. none of which tell me anything about how good they are for disassembling a computer. With all the different implementations (Leathermans, SOGs, Gerbels, Vincerinox cybertool) I have a hard time deciding. So If you needed to disassemble everything in your office/cubicle and reassemble it and you could only use one non-electric in your pocket fitting tool (including attachments if needed) which one would it be?"

SourceVisigoth asks: "The recent story on non-traditional keyboards got me thinking, what else is out there in terms of hardware with an interesting design? Is there anyone who specializes in making cases, keyboards, pointing devices, etc. out of unusual materials or with nonstandard colors or patterns? What about hardware that won't necessarily be more efficient, but simply looks cool? Apple is definitely onto something with the different colored iMacs and the G4 cubes, but someone must be doing this in the x86 world also. NCSX sells 'colorful shells' for the Dreamcast and Playstation, so there must be some demand for this kind of thing, especially among gamers. Not only would a glow-in-the-dark keyboard provide illumination for late-night coding, but nothing says 'I 0wN j00' like a box with racing stripes running down the side!" Gotta admit, something like this might make a nice Christmas gift for your favorite geek. Maybe next year?

Flying_Donut asks: "Greetings! This is related to a question that popped up on Arstechnica. I, and several others are having this problem with our DVD consoles, connecting through either Hauppage TV Tuner cards, or ATI All-In-Wonder Pro cards. The problem is, that on some DVDs, we see annoying scan lines in the movies. For myself, I use BeOS Pro 5.0.3 and the All-In-Wonder Pro card, connected to an external DVD console (a Toshiba SD-2109) and the only time I see these scan lines are on Widescreen DVDS (which copmprise about 99.999% of the DVDs out there). I assumed it was some form of copy protection that the combination of BeOS and the All-In-Wonder Pro card, were seeing (sort of like old Betamax players and copy protection), but the other gentleman with the problem is using Windows (ack!) and sees the problem on some of his DVDs. Others have suggested switching from SVideo to Composite cabling, but it didn't seem to help. In any case, I wanted to tap into the Slashdot community and see what they have experienced and/or had to offer to fix this issue."

kryzx writes "MIT Technology Review has a piece on recent developments in flexible transistors. " The applicability of the flexible transistor, at least from the article's point of view, is the applications in everyday life - it's interesting to see how things are developing.

Linuxathome writes: "I spent over $100 recently at a local Radio Shack (Columbia, Md.) and they gave me a free RCA cable modem with no strings attached (at least, to the best of my knowledge). Actually, it wasn't quite free, I still had to pay the 5% tax on it. Comcast has some deal with the Shack to push as much hardware as possible in hopes that the consumer will order the cable broadband service. At least I won't have to rent the equipment. I wonder how Comcast can actually make money this way? Especially since the Shack consumer has absolutely no obligation to buy the service. They can't even guarantee the buyer lives in an area where Comcast is providing service. Time to figure if this bad boy acts nice with a linux router." Soon we will be buried in "free" hardware and AOL CDs. Has anyone else encountered this giveaway? Is there any use more clever than signing up for cable Internet service? (And can you examine data which passes through it without violating an implied agreement? ;) )

Several readers submitted the news from CNET's story regarding the Serial ATA 1.0 Draft Released. Looks like the replacement for IDE is getting closer - a peak transfer rate of 150 MBs per second is nice to have under the hood.

Tihstae writes "Since this hasn't been mentioned yet, I figured I would bring it to everyone's attention. Of course I did ordered mine before the slashdot effect. You can get yours visorphone here " This looks a lot nicer then the clunky Qualcomm/Palm III version that was available for awhile, but I still think its a bit large. I'm still waiting for the handhelp PDA/Phone with a nice built in game system, and enough memory for a few days of MP3s tho. Oh, and 802.11 networking, and the ability to remotely display X11 apps. And it should cook rice perfectly every time.

option8 asks: "In the process of building a home theater with components, I've found a few all-in-one units that play DVD, CD, VCD, and MP3 CDs, and a few are pretty cheap (Apex's MD100 and MD600a for instance) but I wonder if the /. community has any to recommend that are solid performers and that are reasonably priced. Are there any pitfalls I should know about like: surround sound, skip protection for DVDs, etc?" We've had an earlier discussion on MP3/CD combo players so why not add few more disc formats into the mix? Do any of you have any experiences with such hardware and can you steer readers to the good ones?

Zeus305 writes: "Today NuTec Sciences, Inc. will be announcing its purchase of the world's fastest commercial supercomputer, second overall only to ASCI White. NuTec will use and lease time on the 1,250 clustered IBM servers to analyse genes decoded by the human genome project to try to better understand the causes of diseases like cancer by running month-long algorithms that analyse the relationships between different areas of the genome. This beast will have 2.5 terabytes of RAM and 50 TB of disk space."

Diabolus writes: "AnandTech have done a comparison of Intel-CPU chipsets on Linux here. It talks about performance, stability and support issues for the various chipsets; apparently an Athlon chipset comparison is due shortly. Nice to see that it's not just 3D performance now -- Linux is becoming more mainstream among the h/w enthusiast crowd." This is a cool followup to see to AnandTech's October comparison of video cards under Linux.

panicboy asks: "I had a client (a dotcom casualty) give me a new, unused 40GB Quantum Snap! Server in lieu of payment. I'd like to replace the pair of 20GB drives inside the thing with something larger -- say, a pair of 80GB drives. If this is possible, the thing would rock; right now, it's probably not quite enough storage to be worth using. I've looked for sites that might explain how to do this, but no luck so far. Anyone have any suggestions? I'd hate to have to sell the thing."

Here's another query from an Anonymous Coward with ringing ears: "I may be forced to spend a lot of time in a computer machine room soon, and was thinking of using some noise-cancellation headphones (like those made by Sony or BOSE). Unfortunately, I must spend a lot of time on the telephone. I can try and hack one of the airplane model units BOSE makes (which also has a built in boom microphone) to interface to a telephone, but it occurred to me maybe someone knew of something better that already exists? It would be nice to be able to listen to music when I'm not on the telephone..."

kinetix asks: "I'm in the market to buy a PDA, and I've basically narrowed it down to the ever popular Palm Vx or the very cool Xircom Rex 6000. I would like to ask the /. community, what they think about these (or any other) PDAs, especially about which interface better with Linux?"

Julius X writes: "This just came out, from Yahoo, 3dfx has announced that they will be sold to NVidia as soon as the deal is approved by its shareholders. From the release, "After aggressively pursuing a wide range of options that take into consideration the interests of our creditors, our shareholders, our employees and our customers," said Alex Leupp, president and CEO, 3dfx Interactive Inc., "we strongly believe that to reduce expenses, sell our assets and dissolve the company provides the highest return to our creditors, shareholders, and employees." I think we all saw this one coming. For more details, go to the press release." Actually, tossing in some details early is [hk]doogie, who writes: "Nvidia bought the patents, pending patent applications, trademarks, brand names, and chip inventory related to the graphics business of 3dfx. Get the full scoop [here]."