Spasemunki writes: "The NYTimes has an article lurking in their tech page today on Palm's plans to add wireless connectivity to their whole product line. Wireless connected versions of the Palm III and Palm V lines should start appearing "in the reletively near future", with some changes to the product line appearing by the end of this year. Free registration required; you know the drill." From this article, it's not even clear what sort of wireless they're going to choose, but even so: the ubiquitous, wireless personal computer is crawling up onto land. If you had a nearly-a-billion-dollar IPO, you might want some wireless tools / toys, too.

jeffx asks: "Okay, it has been long enough and I finally bought a laptop. Not going to get into a great big discussion about what type of laptop I got but something that is just as important,.. the carrying case for it. I have so many gadgets my belt looks like I should be starring in the next Batman movie. So I don't want some silly business-looking laptop bag to carry my new 'gadget' in. I am fond of some of the backpack-looking cases but they still look too professional. So anyone have any input on what I should use to carry my laptop around in? I know this sounds like a trendy thing but before I got the 'right' case for my Palm Pilot I rarely used it. The case needs to be functional more than anything."

Anonymous Coward writes: "EETimes describes how electronic valves will replace camshafts in diesel engines starting in 2007. Lower emissions, better performance should follow." This wouldn't be a bad idea in gas engines, either. There's potential here for low emissions, better gas mileage, and greater performance, all at the same time.

esobofh asks: "I would estimate it's been about four to five years now that making your own CD's and burning CD's in general has been a commonplace thing. I'm finding now, however, that CD-R disks that I purchased a few years ago, are completely unreadable now. Data and Audio. I'm listening to a backup of a Pink Floyd disk I created less than a year ago, and there is now a very intrusive static that wasn't present a month ago. The CD is in perfect shape, without scratches. Is anyone else noticing this with their personal CD-R collections? I'm finding it's especially affecting my KAO and ArtMedia disks, whereas my Sony, HP, Memorex and others seem to be fine. Any idea if certain hardware - DVD players, CD audio component players etc. - shorten the life of these discs? Or do I just live in some weird area of radioactivity that is killing them?"

nd writes: "Van Smith from Tom's Hardware has written a proposal that calls for open source benchmarking. He talks about the need for increasing the objectivity of benchmarking. The proposal is basically to develop a suite of open-source benchmarking tools and new methodologies. It's a rather dramatic column, as he discusses Transmeta, bias towards Intel, among other things. " Well, once you get through the inital umpteen pages of preamble, the generically named A Modest Proposal is the actual point. Interesting idea - but I shall weep for the passing of bogo-MIPs as the definitive measure of system performance. *grin*

krp writes: "From the LART FAQ page: 'The LART is a small yet powerful embedded computer capable of running Linux. Its performance is around 250 MIPS while consuming less than 1 Watt of power. In a standard configuration it holds 32MB DRAM and 4MB Flash ROM, which is sufficient for a Linux kernel and a sizeable ramdisk image.' Full schematics and CAD files for the main board, kitchen sink board, the boot loader (BLOB) and patches for the Linux kernel are available for download as well as various software tools. This tiny machine could be ideal for embedded / portable / wearable applications -- there are some pictures (including a LART running off a small battery!) in l'ART gallery. "

As seen on the OpenBSD -announce list, OpenBSD now has hardware cryptographic support to boost IPSEC performance. "Currently, only cards using the HiFn 7751 chip can be used. This Hifn chip is an IPSEC-oriented DES/3DES and SHA1/MD5 hmac engine; ie. only symmetric cryptography..&nbsp.we are getting 63.12Mb/s 3des/sha1 ESP IPSEC. That's documented as the top performance the chip can provide. In other words, we're pretty damn impressed at ourselves." Read on for more from the message, or go straight to the OpenBSD Hardware Crypto page.

dayeight sent us an article at ZD Australia which talks about overclocking as a counter-culture. There are of course so many subsets of the generic (and overused) 'Geek' term, but this is definitely one of the cool ones. It's also an easy one for the mainstream world to understand since they are already quite familiar with the automotive gearhead culture that has existed for decades.

And the endless parade of questions from Anonymous Cowards continues: "I just got a new Palm VII and I got to thinking, 'Hmm, can I use this little antenna for anything other than the built-in service through Bell South?' This is what I was wondering if the /. community could help out with. Can I make two Palm VII's talk directly to one another? Can I rig a PC or other type of receiver to communicate with a Palm VII or multiple Palm VII's? My vision is a large corporate campus or building, where the company has its own receiver, and has lots of employees running around with Palm VII's checking e-mail and doing other productive stuff without having to use the provided Internet access. Any other cool ideas are welcome. If you want to see what Palm is offering as far as development ideas, check out their development area."

MrCreosote writes: "This story from the BBC announces the availability of a printer for the Babbage Difference Engine. Originally designed to print the tables that were calculated by the difference engine, it includes advanced features such as user definable formatting and auto line wrap. It is widely believed that the lack of peripherals was a significant factor in the failure of the Difference Engine taking off and gaining a significant market share -- a situation that has led to the current Microsoft monopoly." Kudos to the folks at London's Science Museum who actually built this.

mlc asks: "I'm involved in some projects for social justice, et al., and I'm also a geek. But I've never really given much thought to reconciling the two. How ethical are computer companies, especially hardware companies? Do semiconductor factories in Taiwan treat their workers better than any other factories in Taiwan? Does Dell donate any of its profits to charity? Are there any other tips for the socially responsible computer buyer?"

Anonymous Coward asks: "We've been looking for a solution for sharing calendar data from our Palmpilots with other users on the local net. We'd prefer not to use Outlook/Exchange (or other expen$ive groupware) or a Web-based service. Is there an app, preferably open source, that perhaps has a Unix based server with Windows client software to sync the Palms?" Anyone have any clues? This is not the first time something like this has come through here. It would be interesting to know how far any Open Sourced calendaring solutions have progressed and if they offer any Palm compatibility.

Kalin R. Harvey writes: "Last week I wrote an article which dealt with the i-opener net appliance from Netpliance that everyone was so excited about hacking last month. The response from the community has been great, a lot of people really liked it. So did Netpliance it seems. I was recently contacted by their CTO, Marc Willebeek-LeMair, and asked to meet with the company at their headquarters "to brainstorm about the various issues" raised in the article. He described my article as "intriguing", and I found the message to be very positive overall; it means they have been listening. It means there is a good chance that they want to do the right thing. We haven't set a firm date yet, but are hammering out the details now. What I want is to get from the /. community and the i-opener-hacker community is feedback. Put aside the bad blood that has been brewing between the open source community and the company since they decided to thwart the hack. Look honestly at the situation and consider the issues involved. What would you say to the decision-makers at Netpliance if you had the chance?"

strider415 asks: "After reading yet another article about WebPads, this time from Ericsson and running Linux, I have to wonder WHERE ARE THEY?! It's been years since I started to hear about the various WebPads in development and just around the corner. Have any of them been brought to market?" These devices sound really cool! Imagine making a phone call and browsing the Web all from the comfort of your sofa.

AC writes: "Another NetBSD port has come out of the closet. Ben Harris reports that NetBSD/arm26 can mount its root file system over NFS now, an important milestone! A binary test kit can be downloaded from his ftp directory."

Yet Another Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm in the market for a new monitor, and am considering a 20"-21". The problem is that I've had trouble getting much information about them; the local computer stores tend to max out at 19", as do the a lot of the reviews I've found in magazines and on the Web. The reviews I have found on the Web are contradictory in some cases, and for the most part are gamer sites which only have reviews for one or two large monitors, so it is hard to get a sense of relative "goodness". I'm particularly interested in text clarity at high resolutions, but gaming quality is a runner up. "

Anonymous Coward writes "Themes.org announced a new section today: Palm Pilot themes! Palm.Themes.org looks very promising, especially to those who have a color Palm Pilot. You can check out the news story here (which contains a link to the actual site)." The comments from early downloaders make it sound especially promising.

Mr_Meowman pointed us to linkage with pictures of Sony PDAs. Of course I'm not skilled enough to read the text, but it appears to be a pilot, in color, with the camera and memory stick from the VAIO picture books.

eoPh asks: "I recently aquired myself an Avatar Shark, a beautiful little portable 250meg removable disk drive. I only have one slight little problem. The company that makes these suckers has gone bankrupt and I need some linux drivers or even some good information so I can begin coding my own. Maybe an ex-employee of Avatar reads /. and is willing to help, because I don't think that I'm the only person to have run into this problem. " This is the classic case as to why I feel companies should open their specs. When I buy a device, I want to know what I'm getting and how it works. I don't want to become utterly dependent on the company that makes it, because it might not be around forever.

volk23 writes "Klaus -- pioneered by car maker Volkswagen AG -- drove in public for the first time around a German test circuit using three laser scanners, a stereo camera, video and satellite navigation systems and radar hooked up to a computer, VW said. "