My wife forwarded this link to me earlier today because she knows I love LOVE gadgets. It’s a company that is making a dual-screen laptop.

I don’t mean a dual-video laptop, which most are today. I have my laptop hooked up to an external monitor in my office and can display different content on each. That’s not what this laptop does. Instead, it carries around it’s own second screen so I don’t need an external monitor! That may not be very practical, it’s probably heavy, and I’m sure the battery life sucks.

But still, I want. One. Now.

Dual Screen Laptop coming soon.

Gizmodo Article

A while back I wrote about a device called the Snap Server. It’s essentially a box with two hard drives inside and an ethernet port outside. It makes it really easy to add network storage.

Last week one of the drives failed to start up. The disks were fine, they just weren’t getting any power. Of course with any older hardware getting spare parts can be problematic. I finally tracked down the current owner of the technology (it had been sold a few times since I purchased the original units) and asked them for a quote on a replacement power supply.

They told me $135.

I told them thanks, but no thanks.

Instead I purchased two brand new Netgear Duo boxes. This is a similar device except that’s it made for users to be able to swap drives in and out. The Snap had a sticker on it that voided your warranty if you opened the box and installed larger capacity hard drives without their permission, mainly because they wanted you to pay them for their (overpriced) larger drives. Netgear’s device is not only made to be updated / upgraded but the drives are hot-swap, so you can pull one out and plug in a new one at any time.

Cool stuff.

I purchased two Duo devices and four TB drives from Amazon and got a really good deal. I now have 2TB of backup storage (had one before) and the overall purchase for everything was less than what I paid for one of the Snap devices years ago.

As an added bonus, the Netgear devices are whisper quiet. I can actually hear myself think in my office now, which is a bit disconcerting.

How private is your music collection? No, wait, let me write that another way. How private do you want to keep your music collection? More…

Yup, in case you haven’t heard, this guy : – ) is now 25 years old. And he doesn’t look a day over 19.

It is interesting to me to see how many bits and pieces of computer history are actually preserved. Like we really do know who invented emoticons. It was a professor at Carnegie Mellon that claims that he was the first to put together some punctuation marks and tell people to “turn your head sideways” to read them.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started.”

Read the full story on Yahoo

When Did This Happen?

I’ve been a loyal winzip user for years. Frankly, why wouldn’t I be? I paid my shareware registration years ago, and their agreement lets me use the program on as many computers as I have. I don’t remember which version I started with, but it could very well have been 1.0. The original author allowed free upgrades for life, meaning each time a new upgrade was available I was able to download it, install it, and enter my registration code.

Not any more.

More…

Not too long ago I read about a survey from a British insurance company. It seems that they talked to 2,000 adults about their driving habits. The result? Men apparently waste six million hours a hear driving around lost. Yes, male drivers waste an average of 20 minutes when they get lost before stopping to ask for directions, while women wait an average of only 10 minutes. See? That’s justification for a gadget purchase if I ever heard it. More…

The special “Science, Technology, and The Future” issue of Discover magazine arrived a few days ago. One of the articles was about how much the Internet weighs. Turns out they didn’t really solve the question that they asked, but who am I to quibble.

More…

The next post in my “GotM” series brings you the Snap Server 2200. It’s not sexy, but it does its job very well. What is that job? It’s a hard disk enclosure with an ethernet port. Plug it in to your network, run a very brief install program, and you have network-attached storage for a home or small business network. More…

The Epson P-2000 is a multi-function device that I use primarily to download and review pictures from my digital camera but it’s actually capable of quite a bit more. I purchased it after taking a 4-day camping trip a few years ago. It’s much more convenient to download my digital pictures from memory cards to this than to lug around my laptop and have to worry about running out of power. More…

A long time ago I worked in the technical support department for a software company. This company made what was – at the time – the number one backup utility for personal computers. The product was named FastBack, and it would dump your hard-drive to floppies faster than any other product on the market.

Working in technical support was my first computer-related job. And it was also a source for some humor.

More…