I just finished reading the review and comments about Das Keyboard on Slashdot which apparently seems to provide a better typing experience for a hefty price tag. In case you are wondering what Das Keyboard means it’s a mix of German and English with Das Keyboard simply translating to The Keyboard.

The keyboard comes as a professional and ultimate edition with the only difference between the versions that the ultimate Keyboard ships with blank keys which should be fine for everyone who wants to improve his typing skills the hard way. (the first weeks will be rather painful I believe).

Well, I would not want to pay $80 - $129 for a computer keyboard and I usually prefer simple solid keyboards from manufacturers like IBM or Logitech that come without all those extra “multimedia” keys that modern keyboards seem to ship with. My keyboards are cheap usually but provide great feedback when pressing a key on it. I really don’t feel comfortable with those thin Notebook like keyboards and those ergonomic keyboards that I usually throw at the next wall whenever I have to use them.

continue reading "Ask the Readers: What Keyboard are you using ?"

Can you tell me how many hours your hard disk or Solid State Disk has been running and how many times it has been powered on since you started using it in your computer ? My Samsung 1 TB hard drive was powered on 106 times and active for 814 hours since I build my new computer a few months ago.

How I know that ? I looked it up in the software Crystal Disk Info. This software basically displays all kind of information about hard drives and Solid State Disks and two that are not displayed in every other of that type are the two I mentioned above.

It does display all the usual information as well. Begins with the hard disk temperature, serial number, transfer mode, drive letters and supported features among other parameters. Two of the aforementioned parameters are worth a closer look if you are experiencing crashes or slow downs.

continue reading "How many hours have your hard disks been running ?"

Did you know that a lot of newer color laser printers create yellow tracking dots on their output which can be used to identify the printer and probably even the person that printed the document ? It’s not a fictional scenario and the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started creating a list of color laser printers that do and do no create the tracking dots.

It’s interesting that they state that the cannot be sure that the printers that did not create the tracking dots are not using another way to add a tracking code to the printed documents. The printer manufacturers apparently gave in to the demands of the US Government in a “purported effort to identify counterfeiters”.

Currently there is not enough information to validate a tracking dot with a 100% certainty unless the manufacturer himself stated that the printer would indeed make use of it. The EFF has been using three sources of information to compile the list:

continue reading "Color Laser Printers and Tracking Dots"

The speed difference of USB Flash Drives that support the USB 2.0 standard can be more than 15 MB/s with maximum speeds of about 30 MB/s for fast drives. That’s still less than modern hard drives are capable of but better than a few years ago. I think it’s really astonishing that there are only a few recent comparisons of USB flash drive speeds available on the first results pages of Google. A recent (another one) comparison from May 2008 that tested seven USB flash drives showed differences of more than 15 MB/s between the fastest and slowed drive while copying files of a certain size

If you already have an USB flash drive and want to know how it compares you can test the speed of it with the free version of HD Tune which can benchmark USB drives as well. The free version will only test the read speed and access time but it should give a good impression of the capabilities of the device at hand.

To make the test accurate you should set the test speed to Accurate in the benchmark options. The last two steps are to select the USB flash drive from the pulldown menu at the top and to click on start to start the benchmark.

continue reading "Test the Speed of your USB Flash Drives"

It can happen that your new LCD monitor is having dead or stuck pixels which can be rather unfortunate depending on the location of the pixels and the laws of the country you bought the monitor in. Some dead pixels on a newly bought monitor may not be enough to return it.

It can also happen that dead or stuck pixels appear after using the LCD monitor for a while. It’s a good idea to test the LCD monitor before or immediately after purchase with a software that can reveal stuck or dead pixels. The best case scenario would be obviously a test before buying the monitor to be sure that it does not contain dead pixels.

The tiny application Is My LCD OK [via Shell Extension City] provides several test color schemes that reveal if pixels on the monitor are not working properly. It can be run from any location on the hard drive. The first start uses a German interface, press E to switch to the English interface.

continue reading "Test your LCD Monitor"