The Menachem Begin expressway is one of the better engineering projects built in Jerusalem in recent years, providing a rapid path for driving across much of the new city. It has cut my commute time to work by 70%… Image: Adiel lo, via Wikimedia Commons. There is only one minor detail about it that I … Read more
The triangular Polycom conference phone is a familiar device; in many companies there is one in every conference room. It is so familiar that few give thought to its miraculous ability to transmit high quality sound from one roomful of jabbering humans to another. In fact, this involves some pretty sophisticated technology for echo cancellation and … Read more
Modern car dashboards have numerous indicators and controls. Some are necessary: without a fuel gauge, for instance, we’d be in frequent trouble. Others are optional but quite useful: the rear collision warning beeper is a good recent arrival. But one indicator is totally unnecessary, yet present in a great many car models: the Tachometer, or … Read more
One problem with CRT-based television sets and computer monitors was that they took a long moment to turn on, because of the inherent necessity to heat up the filament of the picture tube. How fortunate, then, that the new generation of flat screen displays does not have a filament, allowing them to turn on practically … Read more
Everyone knows that the QWERTY keyboard layout sucks, because it carries a legacy from the early typewriter days; still, we’re all locked into its use and live in oblivion of what we’re missing. But we have another legacy from mechanical typewriters that is hard to forget because it bites us daily. i REFER TO THE … Read more
These days nobody is surprised to see a software product expect tens or even hundreds of free Megabytes on the disk – a far cry from the frugal eighties, when entire operating systems would fit on a floppy or two, but this is life and we accept it philosophically. But when a piece of Hardware … Read more
I needed a screen grabber, and based on recommendations from a friend downloaded the trial version of Snagit 9. I was impressed and disappointed.Impressed, because this is one potent package. It can do everything you may ever want to do about image grabbing. I particularly liked the “Scrolling window” option, for capturing a web page … Read more
And now, following Parts 1 and 2, here is the last installment… These days, more and more Notebooks come with displays branded by the makers as VibrantView, or CrystaslBrite, or OptiClear… exciting names indeed. What they all refers to is glossy LCD screens, which would be much better described as GlareMirror, or UglyReflector, or maybe … Read more
We discussed the recent trend that is eliminating the optimal resolution in notebook computer screens. Another undesirable trend is the move to widescreen displays. These days it is almost impossible to buy a notebook PC with the traditional 4:3 screen form factor; all new models boast a “wide” screen with a 16:10 form factor such … Read more
Something very odd is happening to the LCD screens on the Notebook computers that play such a major role in our existence. The first aptly named “laptops” had small, low-contrast monochrome screens that had “eye strain” written all over them (well, not all of them did – the Grid Compass, in 1982, had a lovely … Read more
