This page started off as a set of links to information about various gadgets, along with some digital photography. It's due for some revisions, for most everything here is ancient history. There used to be links to a few digital photographs from this page. The images still exist, but now they're accessed from the photographs page.
| Nikon LS-1000 Super Coolscan | High-quality desktop scanner for 35mm film. This scanner has long since been discontinued and replaced with even better products. |
| Casio QV-10 Digital Camera | It was the first digital camera to have a color LCD screen, a feature that's now de rigeur on every digital camera. Like many first-of-its-kind products, though, it was a great idea with some really serious problems. |
| VideoGuide | Now discontinued, VideoGuide was a set-top box which received TV listing information. VideoGuide remains one of the slickest pieces of consumer electronics I've encountered. |
| Ricochet | A flat-rate wireless Internet service available in several metropolitan areas (at the time this article was written: Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Seattle), Ricochet worked well and was based on really neat technology. The company (Metricom) cratered in the .com implosion, however, so the service currently isn't operating near me. The new owners of the technology (Aerie Networks) tell us that the service will return to some areas soon, but it seems to me like an idea whose time has past. |
| Event DJing | A tutorial introduction to the fine art of DJing parties. I did a lot of this in college. The article has been updated once since then (to address more modern equipment like minidisc recorders); it needs to be updated again in order to cover digital music (MP3 files and the like) as well as some of the more-sophisticated CD players now on the market. |
| X-10 | One of my servers uses an X-10 computer interface to control numerous devices in my home. The original link pointed to a page describing lots of the details of interfacing computers and X-10 controller. That site's now long-gone; I've replaced it with a pointer to an information site that may be of some use. Think carefully before giving X-10 any business, though; they've been around forever and they make a pretty good product--but they also were one of the early pioneers in browser pop-up ads and aggressive email advertising. The Internet is not a better place for their existence. |
| VAX/VMS on Linux | One of the first computers I ever used was a VAX 11/7xx series machine. It's now possible to run old VAX software (including the legendary VMS operating system) on a variety of platforms including Linux through SIMH, a really well-thought-out hardware emulation system. This document provides step-by-step detail for getting VAX/VMS up and running on a Linux machine. |
| Installing
Windows XP Professional on the Sony Vaio TR2A |
The Sony Vaio TR2A is a really
nice laptop. It's absurdly difficult, however, to do a Windows XP
install on this machine from scratch, at least if you want all of the
hardware to work. This document contains instructions for doing it,
plus (at no additional charge) some ranting about how stupid and
unnecessary this is. |
Phil Wherry, [email protected]