For several years now, I have really enjoyed using the Sonique audio player. When I first downloaded it - it had already been discontinued. It seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle when another company bought its owner - Lycos.

It's really artfully designed, with some very unique features. In this mode you see here, the length of the song is actually displayed in a circle of lights which surrounds the lower section, while an animation appears in the upper section. The buttons are all animated, and they have great lighting effects on them.

If you press the up arrow from this point, you get to another screen - a square version of the program, and from there, you can choose three or four layouts - one which gives you a playlist, another which gives you an equalizer, or one which gives you a more traditional playbox more reminiscent of windows media player.

Since it was always free, and since it has been discontinued by its maker, I have taken the liberty to upload it to my website, and you can

download it here

The above download is unavailable temporarily, as I transfer my files to a new webhost.

It runs great on windows '98, windows XP, and windows Vista.

The most fickle piece of equipment one has to buy in order to build a computer is the hard disk. I will relish the day when we can transition completely to solid state disks. Taking out moving parts will really increase the reliability of the personal computer by leaps and bounds. I just spent the weekend dealing with an unforeseen problem. I had two Western Digital Caviar Green series disks fail on me. One was a 750GB box, and the other was a one Terabyte box. Needless to say, I will never buy that particular series of disk again, and Western Digital has lost me as a loyal customer. I latched on to Western Digital after years of being a loyal Maxtor customer. I felt I needed to find a brand I could trust - and in this case, that trust was misplaced.

My sneaking suspicion is that hard drive manufacturers find it cheaper to leave the production line running, and sell a few palettes of bad disks when they find an error and then accept them back under RMA. This happened recently with AMD processors - except in that case that company was honest enough to be transparent about the problem - it was a series of early quad core cpus which had what was known as a "translation lookaside buffer" problem (or TLB bug).

My practice for buying parts for my computer is to use the Newegg store. This company has places for hobbyists and technicians to leave feedback and information for other customers to read about the quality of the goods which they purchased. This allows you to see where there might be a bad batch of stuff before you encounter the same problems other people have stumbled upon.

The thing I look for most is overall enthusiasm on the part of the customers who bought the product. When I was looking to buy a notebook computer, I chose the asus eeepc - because there was an entire fan website set up for really happy customers - and these people were very knowledgeable technically about the product.

The other thing I look for is: are there failures of the product, or drawbacks - and what are they? Know that you are buying something with the drawbacks which are listed by people. Don't hope that you can magically avoid those problems which they discover.

In the case of hard disks, it seems to me that every brand has a bad batch which they sell, occasionally. The key is to see are there any failures written about on the first couple pages of comments ; and if so... how does the disk fail? I can deal with a disk arriving and being completely unusable a lot easier than I can deal with a disk that fails after thirty days or six months. I can also deal more easily with a disk which fails slowly with write errors, than a disk which fails suddenly with that clicking sound which means a head has entirely broken off the apparatus.

For other equipment, I try to steer clear of what people call the "bleeding edge" (or what is commonly known as "the cutting edge"). My experience is that the newest most exciting technology is often immature, and I've seen a lot of things in this world sold to very wealthy customers which are really prototype kinds of equipment that doesn't work very well. The general rule with computer equipment is that things will come down in price dramatically when the production quantity goes up... and at that point, the manufacturing processes will be perfected. So I earnestly disagree with the popular idea that you "get a better product for a higher price."

And in general, there is a certain ethic of high quality workmanship which some companies have that others don't. This expresses itself in a thousand little usability details being taken care of. I just splurged and bought this mouse after having held it in my hand and pined after it at my local office depot store. The rubber grips, and the smooth mousewheel all scream at you the notion that it is high quality workmanship.

I want to mention my favorite tool for creating a computer which can boot into different operating systems:

It's called Xosl.

The only other multiboot tools out there that I've been able to find are text based systems. There's the standard microsoft tool, and then there is something linux afficiandos call "Grub."

Apparently the original author of the tool, Guert Vos, isn't anywhere to be found these days, but XOSL is still a great thing. The only update I really would like to see is for it to support NTFS partition labels. It's difficult to see which partition is which without labels.

A word to the wise: Don't try to install a second operating system on your computer without knowing exactly what you're doing. You need some background knowledge about what a "master boot record" is, and what a "partition boot record" is - and you have to know how the computer boots up.

Dan Goodell gives a great overview of how to set up several different versions of microsoft software here.

There's a uk organisation which has mapped out all the quirks about multibooting with Vista, here.

To get linux to boot, I simply have xosl pointed to a partition where the grub bootloader is installed.

This is a great interview with Steve Wozniak, who founded Apple computer with Steve Jobs. He gives a brief rundown on his background leading up to the founding of that company. It's very educational to hear a person tell his own story in this way. What I have posted here is only a preview, and actually Steve doesn't start talking until about halfway through. If you want to see the whole ½ hour presentation, you can watch it at the fora tv website: here.

I have been very bemused about the fact that there has been this new push towards LCD screens. I still have a 21" CRT (box shaped monitor) screen which I bought at a yard sale years ago when someone was switching over. The color has generally not been as good on LCDs as it was on older monitors like mine. The color and contrast ratio of newer screens has improved a lot in the last year or two. My brother in law bought a macintosh recently with an absolutely huge and very attractive glossy high contrast lcd screen - it must be about 32 inches from one corner to the opposite corner. But still, I don't believe the resolution goes as high as what I typically use - which is the highest resolution on XP or Vista: 2048 pixels in width by 1536 pixels in height (although, I had to bend a monitor cord pin out of the way in order to get my windows Vista to display at 2048x1536). They don't even make CRT screens anymore from what I can tell from looking at my favorite tech websites. I have a preview version of Windows 7 - which will be coming out sometime this autumn perhaps.. and I couldn't get that to display the high resolutions I'm accustomed to. That's quite a dealbreaker for me. I would never use a computer system without being able to go up to the highest resolution which I've been accustomed to using. I just need the work area. A bigger desktop makes me a lot more productive.

The thought that dawned on me this morning, though... that perhaps most people have the opposite situation with their eyes. I am slightly nearsighted - I believe my vision would be rated at about about 20/40. But my reading vision is fine. I wonder if most people are slightly farsighted. The standard for what most people can see at 20 feet away doesn't tell you what most people can see at 3 feet away, now does it? Perhaps I should redesign this website to make it easier to read my text - the background texture is maybe best left to the edges of the page.

This is a very good lecture from 1987 by Alan Kay... who was centrally important in developing the first graphical apple macintosh computer - which was the dawn of "windows" based computers. Here, he discusses a bit of history, and also describes the research that went into the idea for providing a mouse and a series of open windows on the screen.

One of the most fascinating things to me, was that it was research with how children wanted to use computers, that led to the development of that graphic layout.

One of the most annoying things when I first started using windows Vista were these constant nags which told me that "Program x needs my permission to continue." I have learned that it isn't wise to let myself be nagged constantly - whether it be by antivirus software, or by this kind of permission scheme. It slows your work day down significantly, and raises the stress level to where one is actually more prone to do something which will harm the computer.

These nags are one of the biggest complaints that new microsoft windows Vista users have, so I have offered a simple tutorial here which will help folks turn off these nags.

Go through this gateway to get to the tutorial

This short presentation is a wee bit technical... and might go over most folks' heads. Here, one of the people I look up to and admire most - Lawrence Lessig - is talking about an initiative which I've been looking out for, for a long time.

Over the last several years, there has been a nasty spate of consolidation of control over the internet as people move from narrow band (dialup) internet to broad band speeds. A lot of small internet companies have been bought out by larger ones, and some smaller companies simply closed their doors and boarded the windows.

In order to live robustly and breathe freely, the internet - because of it's nature - has to be decentralized. It cannot be subject to the whims and controls of those who run the pipes along which information travels. With the telephone companies, we have laws guaranteeing that they would be "common carriers" - which means that people can use their telephone service for any purpose whatsoever. People can talk to anyone in the world, and say what they want, and use whatever fax machines or other kinds of new equipment might be invented which can use the telephone lines. There is no such guarantee with the provision of broadband internet. For the most part, companies do this, and in some cases the FCC has stepped in to prevent discrimination. But it seems to me, that it is impractical to regulate large companies who conduct all the traffic through the net. It seems eminently more practical in the long run to encourage competition from many small businesses and small providers who also want to provide internet access.

The answer to this little quandry is materializing. There is a movement afoot to encourage the government to set aside the spaces which the television channels are leaving in the vhf spectrum when they switch over to digital broadcasts - so it can be used as freely as coffee shops and others currently use the spectrum devoted to such things as wifi service.

Because of how radio waves act, the vhf television frequencies are far better for things like citywide wireless internet access, or "wimax" as it is called.

So here is Lawrence Lessig talking about this next hope and dream.

Do you know that there's a new computer "brand" that will probably eclipse Microsoft and Apple over the next ten years? It's called Linux. And it actually isn't a brand, it's a project where amateur and professional computer programmers from around the world contribute their work for free. Because no one is on a salary, the end product is also free of both cost, and restrictions. Programmers like Linux in the same way that auto mechanics love old chevrolet and ford cars - they can open it up, look under the hood and see how it runs.

If you're curious about it, and you have a high speed internet connection, and you know how to write a disc image (.iso) to a compact disc, and you know how to set your computer to "boot from" the cd/dvd rom drive, I would recommend that you try out one particularly fun version. This is a version of Linux called "Puppy Linux" - and this particular release comes with very cool animations and transparencies that are even better than what Windows Vista gives you. You'll see it's still a bit unstable... kind of like Windows '98 was... but it's fun to take a look at anyway.

(This compact disc gives you a chance to "test drive" linux. Booting it up certainly won't change anything on your computer, so it's completely safe. The maker of puppy linux - Barry Kauler - actually recommends that you run it either from the cd, or from a usb memory stick - if you have a spare one of those around, you can install it to that, and it will run very quickly)