moonlit

Shannon Morse, I should talk directly to you on a public forum with no introduction or explanation? Welcome to the internet, enjoy your stay, touch that switch and I kill you.

I voted Rockstar, but Monster is just as good. Relentless is pretty decent to, as are V and Red Devil. Red Bull not so much, it might be "the" energy drink but it's certainly not the best. Also, Rockstar, Monster and Relentless all come in double-size cans for the same price tag, much better value than half a can of Red Bull. Edit: Oh, and for mixing? Pernod and Red Bull. Pure club juice, keeps you nicely buzzed.

+ http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.205-7588.aspx + http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/atom-po...-ride-your-lcd/ + Windows 7 Ultimate + MCE remote = <3

Grab a graphics card with TV out (most modern cards from ATi or nVidia) and... ...the TV should have a SCART (21 pin rectangle) or S-Video (PS/2-like circle) input. If it doesn't, composite (the round yellow one) will suffice for watching movies, and if it doesn't have any of those then it's really not worth the effort or cost to use it. It's not impossible, you could buy an RF modulator which will convert the video card's TV-out into a signal you can feed right into the antenna socket on the TV but the quality will be very poor. The graphics card's TV-out will likely be a small, black and round PS/2-like connector. This is usually S-Video or a variation on it (extra pins for manufacturer-specific cables and extended functionality). Connecting the TV to the graphics card is usually a fairly simple affair, connect the appropriate video cable (see above) between the TV and the PC's graphics card along with adapters if required. Also connect audio (the red and white round connectors, same as the yellow composite connector) from your soundcard, you'll probably need a 3.5mm stereo to 2x RCA cable for this, connect it from your sound card's line out to your TV's line/audio/AV input. If you do have SCART (unlikely, unless you're in Western Europe), you'll probably need a SCART to S-Video/composite/2xRCA (for stereo audio) adapter and to connect everything, do as above and ensure that if the adapter has a switch, it's set to "input" rather than "output". As has been mentioned though, don't expect miracles, it's going to be blurry and it's going to be low resolution. Fine for watching standard definition movies or TV shows on but your desktop is probably going to look like a blurry mess.

Old news, but just so my post isn't entirely pointless I'll point out that this works on Vista too, so if you install with no key you can just rearm every 30 days.

You know, after thinking about this for a couple of days (since hearing about the 8 year old taking the record), I actually think it's something of a shame, allow me to explain: Back when I was starting out in the wonderful world of computers, much like many others, I had limited resources at my disposal. I didn't own my own computer, had limited access to what would now be seen as gutless calculators at school, and computers of any power were very expensive. Include in the equation also that there weren't easily available experts or even enthusiasts to beg for help and the internet was barely out of its conceptual womb. This drove me through a pile of different systems and platforms with different characteristics, different hardware and OSs and I had to learn everything I knew myself and I had to make use of the decidedly (but comparatively) limited power of those machines. To obtain my own computers I had to scrounge and save and piece together junk, which taught me a fair chunk of what I know about hardware, and if I wanted to make them do what everyone else was doing (read: everyone with a current generation machine) then I had to learn how to optimise stuff, improvise, and I had to be patient. Maybe it's a personal pet hate, but it does irritate me when kids kind of expect all these machines and gadgets to just drop into their laps. "Back in my day..." I believe this all gave me a stable foundation upon which to learn and grow in the world of technology and computing. Fast forward to today, however, and computers are everywhere. Not only are they everywhere but they're cheap, they're orders of magnitude faster than those of old (and that's an understatement, I can't imagine encoding H.264 on an ARM7 or a 68000). Surely this waters down the creativity and will to make things work somewhat? Perhaps I'm wrong, and if you disagree then please do tell me why, I'm actually interested to hear it.

Don't quote me, but I believe it does. Give it a shot, can't hurt.

You're gonna be needing to vLite that, 4GB isn't quite enough for a Windows 7 install. I've installed Windows 7 on a 701 though and it works nicely, all except the lack of Glass (there's no Vista driver for the graphics chipset). Edit: Oh, and I forgot to mention, providing the USB stick is already bootable (use HP USB Format tool), you can just copy the contents of the ISO to the drive and it will magically boot.

Need an Ubuntu CD, but have a slow or unreliable connection? Maybe you just want something a little more pretty than a CD with badly scrawled marker pen on the front for your OS collection. Order one for free from Canonical themselves. May take up to 10 weeks to ship. Offer applies worldwide AFAIK, and was valid at time of posting.

I'll kick off with something that's always useful, free SIM cards (UK only): O2 T-Mobile Orange Tesco Mobile One last link, and this one's not active right now, but keep an eye out for it because each SIM comes with £5 free credit: Virgin Mobile Again, these are all UK only, but if you're either in the UK or planning a trip there in the near future, it'll save you buying a new SIM for your phone (though you'll require an unlocked GSM phone). You might also need to have someone in the UK order it for you if you don't live there. All links work at time of posting.

Whether it be free keyrings, OS CDs or digital photo prints, we all enjoy free stuff. If you've come across something useful, post it here and share the wealth! One restriction: No pyramid schemes or "free ipod/ps3/etc" offers. Only things which require no further action and no purchases to be made. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Oh, and one last thing: if you know or discover that a given offer will result in heavy spam or endless marketing calls, please don't post it, or if it's already been posted, add a warning.

He didn't pay his feral taxes? *bah-dum tsch*

Nope, the storage is soldered to the motherboard.

Apparently this G33K's not very L337.

Jesus Christ, it's the holiday moron season. Lock-ed.

It was a JOKE. That's what the original post was. A JOKE. Goddamn Americans, oblivious to humour...

I apologise but unfortunately my ability to converse in English is poor. I wish to customise the U3 portion of my U3 capable USB stick but as the U3 partition appears as a simulated CDROM drive I am unable to write directly to it as one might expect of a flash-based drive. I would like to write an ISO to it which contains my own extensive modifications to make alternative uses of this technology. I have found the LPInstaller application but I am unable to persuade it to correctly function. I have heard that a local Apache server can be run in combination with modifications to the Windows host file in order to deceive the LPInstaller application to download what it perceives as its update ISO from the local machine.

This one's gonna come up again and again and again and again and again and again...

Also, it'd work out more expensive than an Arduino, but a Gumstix may be smaller and/or even more convenient to work with. Linux is very functional on Gumstix devices and some models already have an integrated ethernet port. Another piece of information either could log is what speed the connection is, though I'm not sure either Gumsticks or Arduino Ethernet Shields support GbE. Still something to think about though.

You could probably build one from an Arduino board with an ethernet module, just have it ping an address that's almost guaranteed to be up (or perhaps several well known addresses). You could have it run a series of tests and display the result on an RGB LED or an LCD text panel, for example red/"No Connection" for a totally dead port, orange/"DNS Fail" for internet connectivity with no DNS, green/"Success" for internet connectivity with working DNS and perhaps blue/"Local Only" for local connections without internet access. Tests could be performed against sites like bbc.co.uk, wikipedia.org, google.com, nbc.com and could be tested by domain and by IP. Common router/gateway addresses could be included too like 192.168.1.1. The thing could easily run from batteries, and I'm sure you could probably have it log each result too, so if you had a large number of ports you could plug it in and have it keep logs of IP acquired and ping results (possibly requiring a button if some sockets are dead, otherwise it won't know it's plugged in).

*groan* *headdesk*

You can't write to virtual CD drives, but you can create an ISO with just about any decent CD burning app. ImgBurn is a good choice for Windows, it's small, lightweight, portable and very functional. You can then take this ISO and feed it to the virtual drive to read it and if you need to burn them you can copy them to another machine.

+1 for Dilbert reference.

1, 6, 11. These are channels which don't overlap, causing interference and slowing speeds.

The task at hand is as easy as pie but it's malicious. Such activities are not welcome or encouraged here.