Friday, July 18, 2008

BBC NEWS | Technology | Say goodbye to the computer mouse

"It's nearly 40 years old but one leading research company says the days of the computer mouse are numbered."
Can you live without your mouse? I know Riley can. We all have had to get around in our computer without a mouse, but do you do it by choice?
We will see how this goes.
AlaskaJoe

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Dosbox

I've been a pinball enthusiast for 40 years or so. I have a bunch of old pinball computer games. Most of them are from the days before windows. Most of them won't run under windows. I used to use a DOS boot disk but, geting the sound to work was hit and miss. I finally googled DOS emualtor and DOSBOX came up. It's a DOS emulator for windows. It's basically simulates a 486 in windows. Most important it emulates a sound blaster 16 and Gravis ultrasound. It runs all my old pinball games fine. If you got old DOS games you still want to play, check it out.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

OnComputers Radio show Podcast 07-13-08

This is the On Computers Radio show podcast for 07-13-08. You can listen live every Sunday from 10AM to 1PM Pacific thats 1PM to 4PM Eastern. Join us for the live show and chat. If you prefer, you can download the same MP3 file here via ftp.

Links from the Gregg Zone

1) As usual I will start off the week with a green link. It should be rather obvious, what with the gas situation and all that in the near future we will be looking for something different to drive. This is a link I ran across dealing with the hybrids out there, quite a lot of links here to help keep you educated as to what is out there, or on the drawing board. http://www.care2.com

2) Next up a link on how to hypermile. Not a term you are familiar with well it is also related to the previous subject, but it is more oriented with today. This is the most extensive article I hound on how to hypermile. That is to get the very utmost gas mileage from what ever you are driving now. Tricks of the trade so to speak, some sensible and some down right scary. So if you choose to try some of these do so with utmost caution. http://www.cleanmpg.com

3) This link is to a scientific study on animal behavior I found quite interesting. They taught a group of monkeys to use money. It is very interesting to see they are a lot like us, they had what amounted to a bank robbery, started to spend their cash to buy fruit, and the most surprising was prostitution. I guess it really is the oldest profession. http://lists.ibiblio.org

4) If you are a Science Fiction enthusiast you might like to check out this site, you can even write and submit your own short novel in a contest. I have not had much time in the last few days to investigate this, I ran across it last week and had it in my follow up folder on the desk top, but I thought I would enter it here for those who might like to look around, I know I will be back soon as it looks pretty interesting. http://www.orionsarm.com/

5) The last one for the week an article on the Viacom YouTube fight. Seems YouTube has been ordered to turn over records of every clip watched, along with time and IP address of every viewer who watched it. Kind of makes you wonder where all that personal information on us all will wind up. Think the spamers might want to know what you are interested in, and what you IP address is, not to mention the government, lawyers, and the Lord knows who else. Maybe it is just me, but I do not like where all this seems to be heading. http://www.news.com.au/