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  1. J

    eBay/Paypal holiday discount coupons

    For those who might be buying some things on eBay this month, there are a few holiday coupons: $5 off of $50, code: C2-Holiday2005 $15 off of $100, code: C3-Holiday2005 10% off ($25 max savings), code: C1-Holiday2005 I don't know the expiration dates, but the C1 code worked for me. Enjoy!
  2. J

    How to stop junk mail

    I never thought of this, but apparently you can tape those postage-paid return envelopes to a package. See here. I'm tempted to mail some of the worst offenders a nice box of used kitty litter. :evil:
  3. J

    Powerleap upgrade dead, need suggestions

    About a year and half ago I upgraded my 440BX board with a 1.4 GHz Celeron Powerleap upgrade. Today when I went to my machine it was unresponsive. I tried hitting the reset button and it didn't even post. I opened it up, switched some of the DIMMs in the hope that maybe it was only bad...
  4. J

    LCD TVs

    A while back I started a thread after I broke my TV. I haven't bought one yet because my brother let me borrow his 27" until I saw one I liked. I initially was going to get a flat screen, and then when I saw the prices dropping I decided to wait for a CRT HDTV. Anyway, my dad recently...
  5. J

    MAG 972PF-s 19" CRT any good?

    Best Buy has the MAG 972PF-S for $99 after rebate. I've been in need of a better monitor than what I'm using for a long time. In case anyone is curious, my original 15" monitor got too dim to be useable about a year ago. Ever since I've been using a 15" I found by the curb. The color isn't...
  6. J

    How long have you lived at your current address?

    Having lived at the same address for the last 26 years and 4 months I think I might hold the record around here. How about everyone else?
  7. J

    Intermittant site not found

    I mentioned this problem in another thread also. Sometimes I'll post here, go back to SF a few minutes later, and then get "site not found", or whatever the message is that IE gives when it can't connect to a site. This condition may persist for only a few minutes, and sometimes even the...
  8. J

    Is a browser cache worthwhile with broadband?

    I've been on broadband now for close to two months. More and more I'm starting to wonder if there is any point to having a browser cache since pages I've already looked at don't seem to load any faster than ones I haven't. I'm not concerned with gaining back a lousy few hundred MB of disk...
  9. J

    Dogmatic thinking is ignorant

    I read your last post, Mercutio, in that "Something Random" thread, and I couldn't help but think how small a gulf really separates you from the dogmatic religious conservatives that you loath, at least as far a mind set goes. Did you not consider that the suddenly lowered esteem in which you...
  10. J

    36 million Americans now living in poverty

    Despite the so-called economic recovery, it seems more Americans are living in poverty this year than last year. I think the figures would be even worse if they were adjusted based on the cost of living for a particular region. For example, I totally disagree with the $9,573 income figure for...
  11. J

    Bold New Plan For Social Security

    I read about the The Social Security Personal Savings and Prosperity Act of 2004 yesterday. This is actually a proposal I like. The plan would allow workers to put up to 10% of the 12.4% taken out for the retirement portion of Social Security into private accounts. This would only apply to...
  12. J

    Used Receipt Taximeter Pre-Sale

    I'm helping to sell off my friend's stock of used receipt meters from the rate change this past April. Before putting anything on eBay I want to see how many people here would be interested in owning a piece of NYC history. These are genuine New York City receipt taximeters in working...
  13. J

    Housing price growth is finally slowing down

    This article states that the rate of housing price growth is likely to reach the lowest level seen in three decades, and that in terms of inflation housing prices may actually decline over the next few years. I'd say this is long overdue. The rapid rise of housing prices was driven in part by...
  14. J

    Booting Windows from a network

    As some of you may know from the tech support forum I recently set up a small LAN. After playing around a bit and searching I was able to create a boot disk (Bart's network boot disk) that lets me boot into DOS and maps the drives from a remote machine to another drive letter. Theoretically...
  15. J

    Suggestions for hooking up cable internet

    As I mentioned in this thread my brother will be moving back in with us soon, and he has gotten used to high-speed Internet. As a result, we need to hook up to RoadRunner. I'm planning to use the cable in my bedroom for the cable modem, and from there want to have several PCs sharing the same...
  16. J

    Landlord from hell

    My brother will be moving back in with us within the next month thanks to circumstances beyond his control. For twelve years he had a great arrangement renting the top floor and finished attic of a private home for $600 per month (very cheap by NYC standards). The owner of the house, a very...
  17. J

    Fushigi @ 1000 posts

    :beer: Congratulations on reaching the magic 1K mark! I've enjoyed reading your informative posts on the Computer forum, and especially liked our discussions in the P&B about politics and environmental issues. Whether I or not we agree you always put forth a compelling case, and force me to...
  18. J

    The JoJo @ 1000 posts

    It seems our esteemed moderator passed the magic 1K mark a while back and nobody noticed. A toast is in order. :beer:
  19. J

    NYC Taxi Rate Change

    For about the last eight weeks I've taken a hiatus from this place, and thought it might be of general interest to relate what I doing during some of that time. As I mentioned shortly before I left I was asked to help my friend run his taximeter shop during the taxi rate change. I told him yes...
  20. J

    Cleaning up spyware

    Yesterday I went to my sister's for her 40th birthday. :b-day: I had heard she was having trouble with her PC being slow so while I was there I decided to do some troubleshooting, which was actually better for all involved since I avoided the people downstairs. :mrgrn: Anyway, there were...
  21. J

    Where are you on the political spectrum (test)?

    Here is a nice little test to find out how far left or right as well as libertarian or authoritarian you are. My results were as follows: Your political compass Economic Left/Right: -3.62 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.87 I'm a somewhat left-leaning libertarian. This puts me closest to...
  22. J

    Most ignorant thing I've ever heard in my life

    I know many people are technophobic and/or technologically ignorant, but this person my sister works with has reached a new level of ignorance. First of all, she thinks that when you change the batteries on your remote you need to do in another room because if you don't it can cause the TV to...
  23. J

    My mom's a senior citizen today

    As strange as it seems, both my parents are now senior citizens (my Dad turned 65 on October 2, 1999). For what it's worth, they generally don't look the part, although my Dad is about 100 pounds overweight. If I'm still posting here in 24 years, you'll all know when I become a senior...
  24. J

    The flu sucks :(

    Anyone else going through this? My mom was sick before Christmas, and eventually diagnosed with the flu and bronchitis. I think I've got at least the flu. Temp was 101.7° F early this morning. Normal for me is around 97°F. I go from ready to pass out to able to sit for a little while in...
  25. J

    Suggestions for new power supply

    As some of you may know from reading this thread I'm in the market for a new power supply. I'm leaning towards this one as the price is right and it has most of the things I'm looking for (active PFC and fairly silent operation). I know the ones from Thermaltake and Seasonic are better, but I...
  26. J

    Most stupid waste of $700 I ever saw

    Read this thread and weep. I knew the level of technical expertise (and common sense) on SR was sinking, but this takes the cake. This guy spent $700 upgrading a Pentium Pro system, including $410 on RAM. :clown: :rofl: :clown: If this isn't the dumbest thing I've yet seen someone do, then I...
  27. J

    Stealth inflation

    It seems economists have found a new form of inflation-stealth inflation. Basically, what this amounts to is all sorts of new fees and charges being added to bills but not counted in the CPI. In addition to the charges mentioned, you also have credit card companies not crediting payments...
  28. J

    Random Hard Drive Shutdowns

    The last few weeks I've noticed something strange going on. Generally, after my computer has been on for a few days straight, I 'll hear one of the hard drives shut down and restart. This totally freezes the system, and the drive won't recognize again until I power the system on and off...
  29. J

    Online IQ test

    Since some people here have already taken tests for AQ, EQ, and SQ, I figured we might as well throw IQ into the mix. The test results seem accurate compared to other IQ tests I've taken. I got 136. Last time I took one of these(about 20 years ago) I scored 138. Somehow I don't think we'll...
  30. J

    Handheld printer due out in early 2005

    I thought this was very interesting. The printer can supposely print on any print media through a process called Random Movement Printing Technology. An internal navigation sensor compensates for hand movement, and the output is said to be comparable to standard digital printers.
  31. J

    HP 940C Cartridge Problems

    I've been going crazy the last month trying to get my printer to print consistently. The black cartridge(hp 6615) is very inconsistent-sometimes it prints fine, sometimes some lines are missing, sometimes it doesn't print at all. Not way to tell in advance since it can print fine and then a...
  32. J

    How to print unprintable PDFs

    I have a few PDFs that I downloaded which I need to print so I can read them. My screen is too small to make reading a 20+ page document comfortable, and I want to have a paper copy for easy reference when I'm away from my machine anyway. The problem is whoever created these decided not to...
  33. J

    Best Buy Special-50 pcs 4X-12X CD-RW for $19.99 after rebate

    I bought these yesterday so I thought I would give everyone a heads up. They formatted error-free and so far seem to work pretty well with INCD in both my Lite-On drives(16X10X40X and 48X12X50X). These are the hard to find at a decent price 80 minute high-speed disks. Backing up before on the...
  34. J

    Another death in the family

    Unfortunately, threads like this are getting to be a regular thing for me. :( Our cat Suzette passed away at 5:45 PM this past Thursday(July 24). She was a beautiful Persian with a sweet disposition, and she enjoyed the same type of special relationship with my mother that I did with Tiger...
  35. J

    Power outage

    A stray tree limb knocked down a power line on my block. We were without power for about 4 hours. This got me thinking how dependent upon electricity we as a people are. The sad fact was that for the whole time I literally couldn't do anything other than watch them working on the power lines...
  36. J

    What are your thoughts on automated cars?

    This idea came up in another thread but I thought it deserved a thread of it's own. What are your thoughts on automating driving? I say it's long past due and should be done as soon as possible. Since many cars are already drive by wire, so to speak, it should be fairly easy to implement via...
  37. J

    WARNING: False eBay message

    I'm posting this to serve notice to everyone here that if you receive a message similar to the following that appears to be from eBay it is false. A sign on page asks you for personal information or they threaten that your account will be closed. DO NOT fill out any information. This is a way...
  38. J

    Report by the E.P.A. Leaves Out Data on Climate Change

    It seems that since evidence on global warming is becoming irrefutable the powers that be are simply choosing to ignore it. This article tells the disturbing truth.
  39. J

    Blew up television, need suggestions for new one

    Thanks to an improbable set of circumstances I'm in the market for a new television. Last night I was cleaning my room, and rearranging things to accomodate a large used file cabinet which I just finished painting. I had three very small cabinets which were going to be replaced by the large...
  40. J

    Nichia Develops 60 Lumen Per Watt White LED

    I thought this article might be of some interest since I've noticed some others besides myself have an interest in white LEDs. This is a fascinating development since it puts the efficiency of white LEDs at about the same point as compact fluorescent bulbs and T-12 linear fluorescent tubes...
  41. J

    Why not power peripherals off the PC power supply?

    After experiencing the problems that occur when the power supply of a product is an afterthought, as it apparently was with the Microtek 4850 scanner my mom bought, it occurred to me that all peripherals should just tap into the existing PC power supply. Physically, this will mean no more...
  42. J

    Microtek 4850 Scanner Woes

    My mom recently purchased a Microtek 4850 scanner from WorstBuy(special sale $99.99). Her reason for choosing that particular model was that it came with a slide and negative adaptor, and also that it is capable of 2400 dpi native resolution. Unfortunately, since it's USB and her Pentium...
  43. J

    Fuel economy hits 22-year low

    This is one of the most disgusting things I've read in a long time, but it certainly comes as no surprise with vehicles getting more and more ridiculous in terms of size and horsepower. It seems the only way auto makers will ever improve fuel economy or go to zero emissions vehicles is if it's...
  44. J

    Full spectrum solar cell?

    I came across this article when researching white LED efficiency. By a stroke of luck, some scientists studying the properties of indium nitride as a light emitter found that it had properties that could make it an effective light to electricity converter. Current solar cells have efficiencies...
  45. J

    Any way to speed up a 56K connection?

    The reason I'm asking this is because I'm at the end of my rope right now. I was doing a 50MB download with Opera, which lets me stop and resume downloads. However, even with this feature sometimes errors occur and the entire download starts over again. This happpened twice already with the...
  46. J

    WTB: 4 pieces 64MB 72-pin EDO SIMMs (double-sided, 60ns)

    I'm interested in buying four(4) of these for my Linux machine(currently 32 MB). Best price so far on Pricewatch is $8 each, but it seems everyone is charging something like $20 S&H. :o One place had them for $10 each with free shipping(USPS-uninsured). If anybody has some in their parts...
  47. J

    Memory prices stable for the past few months

    Is it just me, or does it seem like RAM prices have been at their least volatile(at least by my memory-no pun intended) during the last few months? I've been checking RAM prices on Pricewatch on a fairly regular basis. After the price dipped to very low levels(a stick of PC133 256 MB for $10)...
  48. J

    My first Linux box(any suggestions)

    I finally got around to installing Linux on one of my machines after talking about doing it for a long time. Appropriately enough, given the Linux mascot, I did this last night after the blizzard. The machine is the one that I found, which I talked about here. I put in a 200 MHz MMX processor...
  49. J

    Space Shuttle Columbia Lost During Reentry

    I turned on the TV today and was astonished at the news: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=578&e=1&cid=578&u=/nm/20030201/ts_nm/space_shuttle_debris_dc Too early to speculate on the causes. It is not yet known if there are any survivors. A full scale search for debris is...
  50. J

    What SIMMs will work in a 430HX motherboard?

    Believe or not, I found a fully functional computer(minus monitor) while going for a walk yesterday. The machine was complete with 2 CD-ROM drives(8X and 32X), floppy, 2GB hard drive, 166 MHz Pentium processor(with a huge heatsink), and 16 MB RAM. It started right up once I let it come to room...
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