I have an eBay Auction running for my old Kinesis Maxim keyboard, a great little ergo keyboard that I barely used. I’m a bit of a collector of ergonomic input devices (10 mice, 4 keyboards), so it’s time to let go of some of the extras. I’m currently using an Apple Pro USB keyboard and loving it, so the others are hitting the road. No reserve so it could go quite low…
I’ve got Trillian up and running against Google Talk. If you want to chat, leave a comment and I’ll send you my gmail address.
I got a call from my friendly neighboorhood network security technician today indicating that I had been pushing a fairly heavy bit of traffic and opening and closing UDP ports with abandon, over about a four hour period. Fearing the worst, we started ransacking my machine for spyware, but nothing obvious turned up. I fired up TCPView from SysInternals and started watching the activity on my machine, and lo and behold, Skype was doing all sorts of interesting things. It looks like I was turning into a supernode on occasion, which resulted in some odd traffic and port patterns. This tripped our edge triggers and I got a call.
I recently heard about a Skype competitor, the Gizmo Project by the guy behind mp3.com. Looks promising, so I installed it this evening and I noticed nothing in the terms about using my computer to route other folks calls. I’m not completely sure this is a better solution, but I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it floats. If you want to reach me, I’m benlowery on Gizmo.
I think I’m finally going to cave in and admit that if I’m going to be spending 90% of my riding time on the road, I should probably look into getting a proper road bike instead of riding my mountain bike with slicks on it. So, here begins the journey. First off, I need to sell my mountain bike. It’s a Gary Fisher branded, Trek made OCLV (all carbon fiber frame) bike and it’s a bit special. It’s the Paola Pezzo team issue bike from 97 or 98 and it was only given to folks who rode for Fisher (or so I’m told). I picked up the bike off a semi-pro racer friend back in Michigan when I was riding more often and it’s served me fairly well, if infrequently. The bike is kitted with full Shimano XTR components and V-brakes and front suspended, so it’s one of the lightest mountain bikes you’ll ever ride. If I remember right, I think it’s a 17″ frame and the original owner was around 5’8″, 140lbs. If you’re interested in taking it off my hands, drop me an e-mail at mtb@blowery.org. I’m looking for $1000.
After using the Apple Wireless Keyboard at the local Apple store, I was hooked. It doesn’t seem to have any lag, the key action is awesome and I really like the lack of cords. The only thing is, I generally work on a Windows XP box, not an Apple machine. So, I did some research and it seemed like the things generally work with XP, though some folks have reported problems. Here’s what I found:
So, that’s the trick. The crappy Microsoft Bluetooth support is just enough to get me by and I’m quite happy with this little keyboard. Now if I can just find a way to remap the F14-F16 and volume keys to something more useful…