I was really close to being in the hospital last week because I was using my cell phone and was way to close to being in a really bad accident that would have surly landed me in the hospital. It was the close call I’ve needed to do something about my bad habit of driving and talking on my cell. I’m not sure which direction I want to go yet. I am considering a number of products right now. I would love your feed back if you have any experience with any of these products.

The first hands free set I’m considering is the Aliph Jawbone 2. When the first version of this headset came out in 06 it was considered one of the best bluetooth headsets on the market. The Jawbone 2 came out last year and has had some mixed reviews. It is known for it’s great ability to cancel out noise. My good pal Zack had the Jawbone and loved and decided he would upgrade to the latest model and was not impressed with it. He ended going onto ebay to get the older version that has me a little concerned especially when having to choke up so much money for this little bluetooth device.

You may be surprised to hear that I am actually considering an As Seen On TV product. The Jupiter Jack is a device made specifically for your car. You plug your cell phone into the Jupiter Jack and then then the device transmits your phone conversation through the speakers in your car through the radio. I am a little suspect about how well this device could work. I had a similar thing for my Ipod and it seemed like that when you got near a big city the other stations would bleed into the station you were playing your music through. The really attractive part about the Jupiter Jack is the price. You can buy 2 for 1 right now for twenty bucks plus that stupid ass shipping charge. I figure for the price it might almost be worth it. I like the idea of not having to wear an ear thingy and that I don’t have worry about draining my cell phone battery using the bluetooth. I wonder about Jupiter Jacks claim that it can go for fifty hours of talk time on it’s battery. If anyone has had any luck with this product I’d love to know.

Those were the two main options I am considering. If anyone has any suggestions on other hands free accessories I should be considering I would love to hear from you. I need to move on this ASAP though because I really need to not drive and talk on my phone anymore. It’s probably my worst habit, a habit that could wind me up in the hospital or even worse.

My firefox extension called “Request Access” has been hosted in www.download.com and www.softpedia.com sites. I have not submitted this open source extension for hosting. I am happy to note that it is found useful to some one. You can find more details and download from Download.com and Softpedia.com.

I had installed Yoper 3.0 on my PC, without additional software installation option. After installation, I try to add CDROM as channel through smart GUI tool. While selecting CDROM/DVD option in channel selection dialog, it was showing “no local media found!” message. It was applicable for command line smart also. Note: I checked the media, it was perfect with checksum. I attempted the CD with both CD Driver and DVD Combo drive. No use.

To my surprise, “system:/media/hdb” on location bar on konqueror was showing the content of installation media CD. But there was no such directory (/mnt/hdb) available. I confirmed the same with shell. Then I created /media/hdb manually and mounted the CD. that is it! all problems solved. I have installed ykde-standard from CD. Thanks a lot for the wonderful support from Musikolo in Yoper forum!

Today’s The Hindu report on IT Trends talks about 3D Printing. You can make 3D plastic objects at home as per your design. This printer makes you to capture the existing object like cell phone casing, boxes, plastic casing for fragile materials which are more common in households. Though this technology is used in Industry for prototyping, it has become available to lay man also with the cost around $5000 from http://www.desktopfactory.com/ .

Dr. Adrian Bowyer who is behind this technology has promised to release the technology under GNU license. That’s great! This price tag will come down to $400 since other manufacturers too start manufacturing the 3d Printer based on open sourced technology.

Courtesy: The Hindu

Read more: http://www.desktopfactory.com/ . http://fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

I keep upgrading my Home PC with better peripherals to make it to breathe better for long time. The recent one is a nVidia Graphics card of model 6200A – 256MB – 8X from Zebronics. I got it from ebay for Rs.2000 ($47) which is 7 months old. Now my PC configuration is

Intel PIII/850MHz, Intel 82815 Chipset, PC133 450MB, nVidia 6200A 256MB, 20+10 GB HDD

I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) for home productive purpose. Here is the steps I did to install this Graphics card in Ubuntu.

1. Plugged-in the Graphics card in AGP Slot of motherboard. (This card is AGP 8X speed, though my motherboard (Intel 82815) supports upto 4X AGP only. Since nvidia cards are backward compatible, it fits perfect with my motherboard) Connected the monitor to D-SUB connector of this card.

2. Booted the machine. Bios automatically detected the AGP Card and switched over the default display to this card.

3. No GUI desktop login manager. X windows failed due to mismatch between current display hardware and existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf. xorg.conf has entries for Intel i810 driver which is built-in graphics chip.

4. Looking into the xorg.conf, I came to know the following command to reconfigure the X server.

5. $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

6. $ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

7. Just logged into my gnome desktop. At this stage this card is driven by open source driver called “nv”.

8. I wanted to check the power of this card. So clicked System->Preferences->Desktop Effects. I was offered to enable and install proprietory nvidia driver to get better performance. I said yes. It installed “nvidia-glx” driver from restricted repository.Then it prompted for reboot.

9. Upon reboot, it is performing wonderful. I checked both compiz and beryl window managers, both work well.

Note: If Ubuntu is able to detect the newly plugged-in graphics card and configure the xorg.conf accordingly, it would be wonderful. Hope in the future version we can expect it.