I subscribe to the daily email newsletter from How-To-Geek and often find it informative or amusing, and sometimes it saves me some money. Today it saved me some money. It offered a link to AppSumo.com for a free video tutorial, entitled Google Docs Unleashed.

This video is apparently geared towards the Marketing type, or an App developer. Frankly, I’d have been pretty angry if I had paid $99 to find that out. I did not find the video useful or interesting, and the faces seen in it are a little off-putting as well. Production values are good for Web video, but the clearly-amateur actors would be better left as disembodied voice-overs.

Overall, I would be quite interested in the tutorial if I fell into the narrow audience it seems to be aimed at. Since I am not (I’m the get-your-hands-dirty, PC-technician-buried-to-the-elbows-inside-a-tower-case type), it left me feeling… Well, meh.

I’ll be going back to AppSumo a bunch though. We Gnomes love deals!

Sure, you could go and swap cabling around, by a USB headset, or perhaps install a front-mounted port.  While those are all well and dandy, I found a solution that is affordable, and allows me to use any of my various (regular, non-usb) headphones.  Our friends over at ThinkGeek sell a Speaker/Headset Switching Hub.

Setup is a simple as inserting it between your sound card and speaker input, then you have push-button simplicity for switching between your speakers and headphones.  Once it’s in place, you’ve got a nice volume control to use, and you can independently determine if your mic will be in the equation.  Or, if for some reason you really love your cell wired headset, that can be plugged in as well.

In the end, this device’s functionality may not be evident by it’s low, low price, but trust me – it’s well worth the purchase.

This is a thouroughly entertaining, and very well-written, scifi tome. Per some of the online reviews you can read, this book is what introduced the word “cyberpunk” into the lexicon. Released in 1992, this book follows the adventures of a protagonist (conveniently?) named Hiro. The main setting for the book is the Metaverse, what we, today, would simply call virtual reality running over the internet. Reading the book now, 16 years after publication, you can really get a sense of how prescient Stephenson was.

So much of the technology and computing seems completely in line with what we have today. Some of it you may have to look past, but there is very little of it that seems out of tune with our day and age. Thankfully, we’ve not arrived at the rather harsh future Stephenson paints. And we can also be thankful that we aren’t hooked into our computers (ala The Matrix) to the extent we can physically “crash” due to a computer virus (though it is an interesting theme that we may encounter som day yet).

In the end, I’d recommend this to any person who is intersting in scifi without hesitation.

Due to a deal I found on Dell, I’ve got this running with 2 x 500 GB drives, rather than the single drive most configurations come with. This provides automatic mirroring, so even if one drive fails, I’ve got another copy there and ready to go.

Some other functionality it has (that I’ve not yet played with) includes a BitTorrent client and iTunes streaming. One very nice feature we’ve already made use of is the fact it can act as a print server. Just plug a USB printer into one of the three USB ports, and you’re off to the races!

This little box has a great set of features (click on the image to go to the product site), especially for the price. If you’re looking into some network-attached storage, put this one on your list to check out.