Being editor of over ten sites, I spend a good chunk of the day browsing tiny little letters on my tiny little netbook screen. That can be tough. By 8pm, I feel cross eyed and ready to climb the wall. Those PC monitors can surely zap the good graces out of you. This condition plagues every IT professional, exec and student. Heck, it’s a problem for everyone with a PC. And now with netbooks becoming the vogue, screens get smaller and corrective lenses get thicker.

Where there is a problem, there come companies with solution. The most common remedy are the multicoated lenses offered at optical shops. Ive tried them and while they reduce glare, they fail to lower strain from fixating at a flickering screen.  Relief comes briefly- but after 4 hours, the tiredness sets in.

Now an innovative company goes a step further. Relaxo, an Australian firm discovered that multicoating addresses half the problem (glare), but falls short of nullifying the strain issue.  Strain arises when the eyes focus at close range for long periods. They literally cross (check out a guy who’s reading- he looks cross-eyed) and cause stress. Are you one of the suffering? Continue Reading »
How To Type 10 Hours Without Strain

Wi-fi has gotten faster. With Draft N burning alleged speeds 16x that of wireless G and at 4X the range, folks have been ditching their old routers for the new offerings of Belkin, Linksys, Netgear et al.  Im one of them.

And Im sorely disappointed. Continue Reading »
The Ultimate Home Network

Last night I ran into my eccentric buddy. He’s the kinda guy who likes collecting useless things such as stamps, snail shells and buffalo teeth. I didn’t think he could get weirder than that until I realized he was setting up a home network based on 80286 processors.  No kidding. He had five of these babies hooked up with old school parallel cables. Or were they serial cables?! I asked him why. His response? Just because he can.

Geez.

Anyway, for the rest of you who wants to embark in the same useless endeavor, there’s a site that supplies goodies from the years of yore… things like 8088 processors and even tweaked 386DX chips.  Fittingly, the site is called Weird Stuff.

Weird.

Out of the box, a new laptop or PC comes with a single partition. While that’s comfy, a single partition can  become unwieldy when dozens of directories litter the root directory. Partition Magic came to the rescue a decade ago by affording users post purchase methods of repartitioning an existing system.  There are challengers too. One of which is EASEUS Partition Master. It’s a good alternative because of an intuitive  user-interface that simplifes your tasks (Partition Magic confuses me at times), and enables you to configure and manage partitions of hard disk(s). Continue Reading »
EASEUS Partition Master For Large Drives

I’ve been a shutterbug for a few years now and currently own a Sony A350 with the 18-250mm lens. Yesterday, this clerk at a Hongkong ariport noticed my camera and offered me a wide conversion lense which magically broadens the view of any shot. According to him, it allows me to shot even wider angle pictures. Sounds useful  when I can not stand further back due to the location. He demonstrated with this horribly expensive lens in the shop that did appear to broaden the view.
“It’d look like you have an 11-220mm lens” he said. That whet my appetite and I plunked $100 for it. Continue Reading »
Sony Wide Conversion Lens: No Magic Here