One Terabyte Hard Disk

After turning 50, the hard disk has finally reached a capacity of 1TB (Terabyte, equals 1,000 Gigabytes). At the next Consumer Electronics Show manufacturers will be showing off the new drives.

Due to high data density the drives will be using perpendicular recording technology. Basically, data will be stored vertically to the disk, as opposed to longitudinal recording. Wikipedia has more info and a picture that helps understand this better. The bottom line is that more data will fit on a square inch of a platter.

The 3.5" drives will be available soon for consumers. You may think you don't need that much space, but you will eventually. Games get larger, video editing is getting easier and thus more popular, and downloading music isn't going away. Some people run an external hard disk on USB for backup purposes. Eventually you'll rock a TB too! Expect to spend around $400 USD.

Very Funny Notepad Glitch?

Notepad Secret Trick - video powered by Metacafe
I have no idea who figured this one out, but it is weird. Type "Bush hid the facts" in Notepad, then save it anywhere under any name, and close it. Now open the text file you just created and see the result. When I saw the video I thought the guy had some encoding setting off or so. I still couldn't believe it when I tried it myself. It only works on Windows XP. Funny!

PS2 Games On Your PC

The PC SX2 emulator is at the point where you can play many of the Play Station 2 games on your PC. The emulator is a free program. People have been working on it for roughly four years, and have come a long way. Check PCSX2, and grab their feed if you're into emulators, gaming consoles, and older games. For more details, check their website.

The Near Future Of Wi-Fi

802.11 a, b, g. The three wireless standards you are probably most familiar with. For quite a while now, there is a new standard in the works that will offer improved speed, coverage, and connection stability. 802.11n is what it is going to be.

The visible or physical change you will see is that routers and adapters will have multiple antennas [commonly 3]. This is the key to the new technology. The standard is aiming to improve the speed, by making simultaneous connections. Range will expand, and stability as well since basically antennas can hand off transmissions to the one with the clearest path. Speed is the most exciting word in this. Wireless will be faster than your 100Mbit connections. I have read rates of 200Mbit, thus double that of wired 100Mbit connections. Of course, with the new CAT6 cabling standard we are up to 1000Mbit (Gigabit) connections, but most places have not upgraded their cabling, routers, switches, and computers yet.

Pre-N hardware has been available to consumers for I don't know how long. But is it wise to spend your money on that? We are warned that since the standard has not been set, it will change, logically. It will be possibly another 6 months before the N-standard is here. Hardware purchased before then may not work well, or at all, when new hardware is produced according to the future industry standard 802.11n.

Even though that risk is real, as I said, manufacturers have already released hardware, and will hopefull continue to support that. I'm guessing that firmware upgrades will allow you to increase the compatibility of your hardware with future standards. If you have the money, need the speed and increased stability now, or are a techy that needs to try the latest, go for it. If you have a currently stable set up, especially for a business environment, then I suggest you hold off.

Check with manufacturers such as Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, and Belkin for pre-N hardware. Keep your eyes open for Wireless-N!

Google's Cheat Sheet

You may use search engines just to search with keywords, in the hope to find what you need. Search engines can do more though. You may have heard that Google's SE can be used as a calculator, or to search one specific site, or search for synonyms, or do a safesearch to filter out adult results. There are a number of Operators that can make your searching more effective.

Check out Google's Cheat Sheet to learn about the Operators.

On that page is a reference to Google Labs, which is their Technology Playground. You can test new products and services that Google is working on. They are functional, but not ready for prime time. One I like is Google Suggest. The same Google SE, but it suggests keywords real time while you're typing your search. It saves time, and can be useful when you're not sure about spelling, or what words to use. It also shows you how many results are available for each (set of) keyword(s).

myLot Earnings

As promised, I would let you know what the ~25 replies and 1 new thread made me! It's really nothing to write home about, but hey, it is a whole forty-two dollar-cents.

The thing is though, if you need to ask for help on a forum about any subject, you can do it here. People will respond, because they get paid for it, and there are many that actually post good stuff. The one thread I started got like 90+ responses. If you enjoy this kinda thing, you can make some money with it. A good running website will earn much more for you.

Earnings will improve a bit when you get a lot of referrals, and get many good threads going. I read that once you have 500 posts, you can get paid for uploading images with your new threads. So it can pick up a bit when you commit to it, but I doubt you can buy groceries for it.

Because traffic is high (~53,000), it is a good place to drop your URL when you see a place for it. A lot of people that are trying to make a buck on line are on there and many have Blogs. So you decide whether it's worth it. It may not be a lot, but one thing is certain. It's easy money. Please sign up through me if you are interested.

Celestia - Your Own Hubble Telescope

Google Earth junkies! Leave the planet with Celestia! Are you one of those people that played for two hours with Google Earth when you first got it? I know I did. Celestia is very much like that.

See a few quotes from the Celestia web site below. But first, let me tell you that it's an Open Source program! It will run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

Download Celestia | See Screenshots | Celestia Home

It may take you a little time to get used to the controls, because they're different than Google Earth. But buckle up, there is a lot to see out there! (I didn't see any aliens on my trip though)

Open Source Web Design

Not sure what to think of that? Well, it's really simple. People create web page templates, and share them. They are free to download, and customizable since the code is not hidden. Don't want to spend a lot of time designing the visible front of your Blog or other web site? Browse through nearly 1700 designs at www.oswd.org and download the ones you like.

If you are not interested in having the work done for you, but want to learn CSS, or maybe HTML, then you should know that you can learn a lot from reading code. For that too, this is a great resource. If you know it all and just need ideas for a new layout, also a reason to check this out.

In a way you could even promote your Blog here. If you know how to make good looking, quality templates, you can create them with links to your blog, and upload them to OSWD. This is not the only site offering Open Source Web Design, but it sure is a clean, well designed, easy to navigate, and to the point place. I think you should check it out!

Picture: Secured Or Confused?

My funny and bright cousin back in the Netherlands did this. In a chat he made a couple of typo's and then explained that he had to blind-type. Well, here was I thinking that he was sitting in the dark, on his laptop. The picture clearly shows that I was wrong.

I had to laugh when he told me he alphabetized his keyboard! For a moment I thought that it would be harder for someone to tell what password you're typing. But then I realized that after a short confusion upon discovering the layout of the keyboard, a person would just get a different string of characters, then compare it with a QWERTY keyboard and have the actual typed string. It still helps to confuse on first sight though.

On the other hand, if you're trying to make a secure password, you could sure do it with this keyboard. Just type a word, following the letters on the keys, and the actual typed password will be something totally different. It would likely not be a word from the dictionary.

If you can type without looking at the keyboard, removing the letters from the keys entirely would make it much harder to see what you're typing. I can see that to be a decent idea in some situations.

If nothing else, it'll teach you to blind-type! Thanks to Bart for sending me the funny picture!

myLot - Posting For Money

I've been seeing these web sites where you can write articles, review articles, post replies on topics, and then get paid for that. One of them is myLot. It's a place that is much like a forum or web board that accepts really any topic you want. The thing is just that you get credit for each post you make. Tonight I decided to try it, and I started posting replies to existing threads. A total of 25 I posted, and then I created a new thread myself. Their system updates every 24 hours, so when it does, I will report back here and let you know how much that made me. Referrals are rewarded, so if you decide to check into this, you can sign up through me here. Tomorrow I'll post the result of my 25 replies and 1 new thread. Stay tuned!

400 Visitors Since The Start 2 Weeks Ago

webspeaker was created on the 16th of December, 2006, that is last year :P. The next day I added Sitemeter to keep track of how many people come around here. Before midnight December 31st, local time, the counter hit 400! That's not pageviews, and that doesn't include my visits. It's actual visitors! Some returning, many new ones! The hottest post is a couple below this one, about the XP Themes!

I hope to keep this success going and will continue to post new techy stuff! Thanks to all visitors! Thanks to all services on the web that help us Bloggers promote our pages!

I want to list the ones that helped me out, so that if you haven't used these yet, you can start now:

• Digg
• HypeDiss
• MyBlogLog
  
• BlogTopSites
• BlogTopList
• TopBlogLists
• Bloggernity
• BlogHub
• Technorati
• And also the bloggers found in my sidebar! Check them out too!

If I'm missing any, I will add them later. I just wanted to thank those who helped and visited! Let's see how we'll do in 07!

Open Source (Free) Applications For Windows

Open Source. It's what we like. What is it? Big bunches of code that make up a program. But not just that. Usually companies that create software will protect their code. They don't want anyone to get a hold of it, because then their work can be stolen, modified, and abused. Open Source basically means that the code is available to anyone that wants to modify it, or create additional functions. Now, the reason we like this is because it makes it free. We love free stuff. We love sharing.

There is a lot more Open Source software out there than you might know of. There are complete operating systems, office packages, video-, sound-, and image-editing programs, anti virus software, disk utilities, screen savers, compression software, P2P clients, and much more. All Open Source. All free to use.

The website I want to highlight here is www.listible.com! There is a long list of Open Source applications.

Look into Open Source software, before you spend money on your yearly anti virus subscription, or feel the need to get a newer version of MS Office, or think you need to pay for some utility. Your wallet will like you.

Four XP Themes: Free, Simple, Beautiful

Best XP Theme! All Included In One Pack! Just Watch It! - video powered by Metacafe
Until now, every theme for Windows XP on the Internet required some kind of program to manage and run it. Nobody likes that. When I found this video, that was all over!

This video shows you how to get 4 really nicely made themes for Windows XP! They are free! They look great! They don't require extra software! You can download, install, reboot, enjoy!

The website to get them at is www.crystalxp.net, as shown in the video. Or go directly to the choices. Watch to learn how to choose, and go about installing the package. I chose the Vista look. It's working great so far, and looking sweet.
Oh, if, for some reason, you have a problem after the first restart of your computer, then make sure you have the Windows XP install CD. This is important because your system files will be modified. Take these precautions! Note that the Windows CD needs to be a system CD, not a restore/recovery CD. Nothing should happen though, so enjoy!