Double Parity

> Did you know with the double-click of your mouse, you could make the Task Manager look like a nice desktop gadget for monitoring your cpu usage and cpu usage history or your network activity.

I didn’t, but I do now.

Every time I delve into the Windows Registry I’m appalled by the amount of cruft that I find.

Interesting detective work on the implementation of Google’s voice recognition functionality. And the comment stream is full of great details.

Impressive.

This article goes into more detail than most people will find necessary, myself included. However, I was surprised to see that the actual power efficiencies of the three test systems were [over 80% at both idle and peak load][1]. I was expecting at least one end of the spectrum to have poor efficiency.

Ultimately, though, if you want to save energy costs, *turn off your devices!* If your devices are plugged into a surge protector, then pull it out of the wall socket after you’ve powered everything down. I plugged my surge protector into a [Kill A Watt][2] and was shocked to see how much energy was still being drawn by my ostensibly off computers and peripherals.

Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor (Amazon)

[1]: http://anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3458&p=3
[2]: http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html

Excellent step-by-step instructions for installing [Boxee][1] (and also [XBMC][2]) on the AppleTV. The process is surprisingly simple and doesn’t remove any functionality from the AppleTV. Instead, Boxee is installed as another entry on the AppleTV’s menu.

One thing to note is that [ATV USB Creator][3] at the time of this post only has an option for AppleTV software version 2.1. However, I was able to install onto my version 2.2 unit with no problems.

[1]: http://www.boxee.tv
[2]: http://xbmc.org
[3]: http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

Crazy. He did this in a tightly contested game with opponents chasing him down, so it’s not like he could take his time and gather himself. And the most ridiculous part is that he dunked with authority, getting to the rim with enough clearance to add a little extra flourish.

Awesome.

> When the phone booted it started up a command shell as root and sent every keystroke you ever typed on the keyboard from then on to that shell. Thus every word you typed, in addition to going to the foreground application would be silently and invisibly interpreted as a command and executed with superuser privileges.

Comical and apparently trivial to fix once identified, but still completely shocking that this kind of bug made it through three QA departments (Google, HTC and T-Mobile).

Vista’s Reliability and Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) is a nice way to monitor active connections to your local network and the Internet, but it also provides a wealth of other information. The Reliability Monitor pane in particular is a great source of diagnostic data.