If you want to read library books, you need the Nook. It supports the popular Adobe EPUB (and PDF) format. If not, you need to break the DRM and then convert the book to Kindle format. This process is doable but the break may be illegal and the conversion is not great (weird formatting errors). If you buy all your…

Oh, I feel old. It was 1989 and I was complaining about having to drive to the university to type out COBOL programs in the lab using a terminal. My uncle, after hearing my lament, gave me a really old Tandy 1000 and installed a 2400 baud modem. The computer had no hard drive but I had a faster modem than many at the…

@blash: I use the Logitech Trackman and have been since the 90's. I like it better than regular trackballs because you can rest your hand on the body of it at a more natural angle than most full trackball pieces.

@macpatrik: They look like they would work great but not really applicable for those who use motorcycle gloves. These conductive pins are a much better idea for that.

@EvanSei badass M.D. wants to be a photographer: Click through man, click through. Clearly stated is that they are made of conductive silicone. Metal pin is on the inside.

I use twitter like an RSS feed. I follow businesses, websites, or causes that I have an interest in. While I have followed people I know, I realized early on that they have little interesting to say, and retweets annoy me. My last few tweets are from slickdeals and gegiveadamn. Gosh, I used to follow Gizmodo but gave…

@twothefutureandbeyond: Amen. The problem is caused by humans. Perhaps they should introduce some raptors into the area. They will help control the population. If we kill (either purposely or by habitat destruction) everything higher up on the food chain, of course animals that we consider a nuisance will thrive.

I somehow managed to eschew IE since its inception. I used Netscape until it died and then Mozilla and was an early adopter of Firefox. I am tempted by Chrome and use it for some things but still love my souped up FF.

There are safe free porn sites although they are few and far between. You can also stick to viewing the free content on pay sites. A lot of paid porn sites are malicious so I think the list is wrong there as well. Using ad blockers, pop-up blockers, and script blockers as well as add-ons like WOT will help you stay…

@shiro21: People make do. They learn how to do it with the abilities that they do have. My thinking is that rather than struggle, this could help people who have certain disabilities. I think sometimes people tend to forget that there are people who are not able-bodied AND that they aren't necessarily bright either.…

@shiro21: Folks really are blinded by the "fit" disabled people they see on TV.

What becomes obvious about the commentators on Giz and many other places, is that they are neither disabled nor considerate of those that are. While I understand that the marketing is mostly for the germophobe, the device does has other applications. Have you ever tried to use a roll of paper towels when one of your…

@vinod1978: I agree. Something has to be done. While I am a liberal, that does not mean that I am pro criminal behavior. The problem is, as can be seen in the responses here, is that everything seems to be black or white. People don't seem to even understand that the reason we have courts with a jury of peers is not…

The problem is we need to decide what jails are for specifically for non-violent crime. Is it punishment? Is it rehabilitation? Both?

This area of GMail needed a fix for quite some time. Awesome that it loads faster. Not so awesome that it didn't parse the names correctly to get them into first/middle/last fields.

@chocolatebanana: You are right. I didn't mean it from the perspective of who owns it ... I meant it from the perspective of that supply and demand set the price. Nonetheless, I also ignored the fact that there is no competition.

Let's see if true capitalism succeeds or fails. I think rather than these changing just once a month, they should change several times a day. Parking problems are often time-of-day issues.

I am so glad to see that others have the Sharpie addiction that I do. I send a lot of postcards so the new(ish) Sharpie Pens were gifts from *insert deity here* because they don't bleed through paper and hardly smear.

I have never met a sysadmin that didn't think he was a god. Most that I have met seem to think, just as Childs, that no one is qualified to do their job and pretty much manage to look down at everyone from behind their monitors while physically looking up at them.

And an e at the end of that domain name and it takes on a totally different meaning.