@seda: Thieves are very good at smashing and breaking things, such as a lockbox. Even if they don't manage to break it open, they could do a lot of damage to whatever it's attached to. It's better to have something like a wireless keypad. If they smash the keypad, they're not getting in. If they smash the lockbox,…

@bullwinkle12: IIRC, with Ribbit, one issue is that it replaces your voicemail. With GV, you can keep on using your current voicemail.

@DaveyNC: Agreed.

@thePrototype: Forget pop3 — to compete with Google, hotmail needs, at a minimum, full-on IMAP support, complete with IMAP IDLE and smartphone push, as well as unlimited server-side filtering.

@aj_robins: I forgot to mention the obvious: to locate your local farmers' markets, just do a google search for "farmers markets" followed by the name of your county.

Meh, where I am, there are probably a dozen-plus farmers' markets, in various nearby cities, and Local Dirt appears to list only one.

@Mxx: While SSL helps a lot, it's not foolproof. Certificates can be spoofed: [blog.startcom.org]

@kettlewhistle: To put it simply, a bad guy just needs a laptop w/wifi and some freely available software. That's it. The "right hardware" is just about any cheap modern laptop.

It's not emphasized enough, above, but there's another big rule: never, NEVER enter any password on a shared public computer (e.g., ones in libraries, airports, coffee shops, etc., etc.). You must assume that the bad guys have taken control of these PCs, and are watching your every keypress and mouse movement. You…

@BiznessMan: While it may be a huge selling point for many people, it probably isn't all that big a deal for Apple. Lots more people will continue to buy the iPhone, with or without this.

For gadgets that have been out for a while, doing a google search for "XYZ sucks" does wonders (replace "XYZ" with the gadget name, of course). Keep in mind that you'll always find someone complaining — you want to check out how many complaints there are, and what they are.

VOTE: digital camera

VOTE: dropbox

Does the latest filehippo work with windows 7 x64? The older versions had problems, and filehippo does not list win7 as being supported.

@tmlfan81: In general, that's true, but all bets are off once you connect the linux box to the outside world and run web services (e.g., wordpress, phpBB, mediawiki, etc., etc.). If you do that, you've got to keep up with all of the periodic patches, just like windows.

I was going to say, "repeat" (of 2/19), but I think this article is actually more informative than the previous one.

@mynamesafad: I don't know how well it works, but virtualbox has experimental 3D video support.

@playstation87: I don't know if virtualbox will run on a pentium D (my guess is that it will), but physical RAM is likely to be a limiting factor. While you might be able to painfully scrape by with 1GB, I wouldn't even bother with virtualization without a minimum of 1.5GB (2GB preferred).

@maltesh: I've not had any problems getting virtualbox running on win7 x64 (on two different systems: one desktop and one laptop). Both of these are on the released/retail win7 x64, though.

Compared to virtual pc, virtualbox boots faster and feels much more responsive: e.g., window resizes, fullscreen switching, etc. is much faster than the slowness of virtual pc. Virtual pc also requires hardware virtualization support in the CPU, which prevents its use on low to midrange laptops. Virtualbox has no…