You need a better couch. OK I'm kinda kidding insofar as what you need, But I bought both my last and current couch with it's suitability as a mousepad in mind. They've both worked fine.

I never noticed lag issues with (non BT) wireless KB/M setups. for me it was always range when voltage dropped with rechargeable batteries. With a fresh set of batteries that (range) was fine. but youd get missed keypresses within a couple of days. A USB KB/M setup gets flakey beyond 6ft w/o a powered hub in the middle. Meanwhile medieval PS/2 with a pair of long ass extension cables always worked fine.

But my modern BT keyboard and mouse work fine. They're rechargeable from across the room.

I always considered trackballs better for fine movement when I used a 2-3 button PS2 mouse, back then I used both. But a modern gaming mouse is incredibly precise and all the buttons stay under your fingers during that movement. With a decent mouse you can even hotkey the speed of your cursor movement. I don't see the advantage of trackballs anymore.

She should still have her own account. I believe you are restricted to the same degree she is with the single licence. If you want to share access to the account, have her sit on your lap working the keyboard while you handle the "mouse."

Valve already stated that SteamOS is a Linux Distro. GNU? Not sure. Is SteamOS going to run on proprietary driver blobs from NV and AMD by default? Then I'd think not. But it's intended to run on a variety of hardware including a HTPC that could be sitting in your living room right now. At least from what I read on the Valve FAQ. I really have a difficult time wrapping my head around a Linux system with a variety of hardware that won't require some access to a command line and something to edit configs. but if they can pull that off, kudos to them.

My take is that a Steambox will be a Linux PC in a console like enclosure with a gameconsole like interface, sold by third parties, and likely including some level of remote support with the price of admission.

Nah, they said it would not be HL3. We all figured it would be the controller they kept referring to. A living room game system needs a livingroom game controller.

I suspect strongly that HL3 will require a MS Windows based OS at launch and quite surprised and pleased if it even runs locally on any version of a steambox or a computer running SteamOS..Valve has stated that the Steambox will stream more hardware intensive games from your beefier Windows system.

Great, now I want curry and all the delivery places are closed.

The goat kinda replaces the pig and the cow for much of the people that would be the target of cricket flour. And the goat is a source of milk and cheese for protein, not just meat.

Speaking of taboos, cultures with religions that keep Halal might have a problem with eating bugs if they are improperly killed. So smashing them to death would make them haraam (as bad as eating pork). Just roasting insects alive would not make the food halal but it wouldn't be expressly forbidden to eat if you had no other choice. And to make insects halal I think you'd need to have muslim slicing off cricket heads with an exacto knife while praising Allah.

Of course bugs are also strictly non-kosher (as is lobster, etc...)

Not only that, but you'd probably choke to death trying to swallow a huntsman.

Bitcoin mining with your own GPU is almost over.

What if you aren't paying for the hardware or the electricity bill on a thousand machines?.

But he's still on Youtube.

I'm not sure about the weakness of next gen consoles. They may look like a low spec-ed PC but the code will be for the hardware. Remember the original Xbox was also just a very very weak PC. It had a 733MHz CPU and its GPU was in the GF2MX range. I think it even only had 64MB of memory. PC ports of Xbox games required quite a bit more than that.

Still I'd expect 1080P gaming to be the target of this next generation of consoles and you can build a pretty damn cheap machine that games well at 1080P.

Right and if you upgraded the C2D to a ~3GHz C2Q you'd be right back in the game.

Yes I takes more than a day. It always has. Unless you use one of the build a PC guides that, these days, only get updated about every six months. They pretty much tell you what to buy for the money but go obsolete pretty quick. Even so, guides usually have a comments section that often list better builds for the money or cheaper builds with better performance.

Today there's a model number for each pricepoint from 100 to 1000 bucks for CPUs and Video cards. Manufacturers use the numbers to obscure the value of the component so a 760 might mean faster slower or the same as 660 of the previous generation. You have to research it.

It's certainly more complicated than it was 13 years ago when Athlons and P3 were sold by their frequency and were almost identical in performance. Though even then it was easy to buy the wrong component.

Forums are still probably the best place to quickly catch up on the art of building a capable sub$1000 box.

I plan on giving SteamOS a go on my HTPC, which is basically just an old workstation laptop in a dock. However it has an old crusty ATi X1600 256MB on the mobo, and that has kept it stuck as a WinXP-Pro machine all these years. I don't expect SteamOS to support the card's legacy Linux drivers anybetter than the other distros do...