derekj

"Thanks to a wide variety of mature commodity hardware choices, plus infinitely and perpetually updated open source router firmware, I'm happy to report that now everyone can have a great router."

No, not really. When's the last time his mother or mother-in-law flashed their router to Tomato or even just updated the stock firmware? I've been running Tomato on a WRT54G for years now, and DD-WRT before then, and I love it, but you can't expect a normal person to have any interest in that. They buy whatever is shiny and/or the Best Buy guy tells them is good.

I'm in the same boat. Right now I drink diet soda with aspartame (max 2 cans per day) but I'm not convinced it is without risk. I try to avoid HFCS as well as limit my sugar intake.

I've done a bit of research on various sweeteners and have been trying to find the "perfect drink" but so far, no luck. I want something fizzy and sweet with caffeine but not sweetened using HFCS, sucralose, aspartame, etc.

I use powdered stevia on my cereal and in my tea. There is a soda out there sweetened with stevia but the cost is prohibitive. I have mostly replaced coffee with hot tea and will drink iced tea once in a while but the hassle is usually not worth it to me. Same with the carbonated water mixed with syrup route. Sparkling water does not taste good on its own.

For now, I guess I'll stick with Diet Sunkist until something better comes along.

You don't have to go down to the bottom of the page - you can still hover over the link and still click it, even though it's not blue and underlined.

True enough but for some reason a superscript is less distracting to me than a blue link. It's almost a compulsion for me to hover over each inline link to see where it goes. Hopefully this cuts down on that.

This is a great improvement. Should definitely help with sites like TechCrunch where they litter their articles with about 5,000 links to previous articles they've written.

Agree. If she doesn't use HP products, why does she care what they charge? That Excel-generated graph is terrible too.

Like others, I bought a cheap wireless Brother B&W laser for around $125 over a year ago and I'm still on the included freebie toner. Got a replacement as I thought it was getting low but the tape-over-the-hole trick has made it last months longer. I love being able to print from any laptop around the house.

It amazes me that I read through all of these comments and didn't see one mention of the Zune software. Yes, it's Windows only. Yes, it only syncs with Zunes. BUT, it offers a far better music-playing and music-finding experience. It's laid out better, looks better, is easier to use, has folder monitoring (I can't believe that's still not in itunes), doesn't try to move or edit any of your files or metadata, and overall just performs better.

I actually have a virtual machine of XP just so I don't have to install iTunes on my host Win7 box. I only open it maybe once a month to check out new podcasts that aren't in the Zune marketplace yet. Because of this, I don't want ituneshelper, quicktime, safarai, bonjour, etc etc. installed on my system and put in my Startup group just so I can open iTunes. It's just unnecessary. I cringe every time I see someone struggling with iTunes.

And I'm (im)patiently waiting for it to pop.

Wow. I live in the Midwest so housing is dirt cheap compared to other places, but half a million dollars for ANY house seems insane to me, let alone this "small" one he's talking about. I don't have any sympathy for him.

I also don't understand how he could have "near perfect" credit score when he had thousands and thousands of dollars of debt with massive interest rates.

Just goes to show that your income doesn't make a whole lot of difference if you can't control your spending. I pay all my bills and save about 10% of my income making $40k a year. And I really do have a near perfect credit score.

Live Maps > Google Maps

Birds Eye View is amazing.

This is exactly it. I am certainly technical enough to run Linux (and have in the past) but there's no real good compelling reason for me to use it. I don't get malware on Windows and, believe it or not, things hardly ever crash. And you know what? I actually like using Windows. I can run basically whatever I want and use basically any hardware I want. I'd rather get work or play done on my machine instead of tinkering with every little config file and stupid little problems that always occur in Linux. Win7's UI is fantastic as well.

Absolutely. I like listening to people talk when I'm interested in what they're saying and want to communicate with them, but when someone (like a co-worker) babbles on about their kids' baseball games or something, it is hell. I don't care! Stop talking!

This article spoke to about 90% of me. I've been introverted all my life (though less so in the past few years) but have always done pretty good with speaking in front of a group or acting in a school play or whatever. It's when there's a large group with many different conversations going on where I end up not talking to anyone and begin to feel like an outsider. One-on-one though, I can have a conversation with just about anyone. It usually takes the form of - They talk, I ask questions, they keep talking.