randyjparker - Slashdot User

Best Man Rigs Newlyweds' Bed To Tweet During Sex 272

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday December 17, 2009 @09:40PM from the nice-feed dept.

When an UK man was asked to be the best man at a friend's wedding he agreed that he would not pull any pranks before or during the ceremony. Now the groom wishes he had extended the agreement to after the blessed occasion as well. The best man snuck into the newlyweds' house while they were away on their honeymoon and placed a pressure-sensitive device under their mattress. The device now automatically tweets when the couple have sex. The updates include the length of activity and how vigorous the act was on a scale of 1-10.

Comment No-Lag Performance Is Why We Buy Faster Computers (Score 1) 519

by randyjparker on Thursday April 30, 2009 @08:09AM (#27770963) Attached to: Bluetooth Versus Wireless Mice

Most of us spend money to get computers that don't "get in the way" of our work with irritating lag. We spend hundreds of dollars for faster CPUs and more memory to avoid breaking the flow.

Wireless mice and keyboards add annoying delays several times per hour. My anecdotal experience is that Bluetooth is significantly worse than proprietary RF. Is it the protocol, or the drivers? The original poster is right - there is no good survey of this problem, and no explanation from the vendors. I'd expect them to compete on reducing this problem, because it far exceeds the "break the flow" delays I suffer from any other part of my system (except for Comcast!)

I have a Microsoft 8000 Bluetooth keyboard / mouse on my Macbook Pro, and I'm pretty sure I'd be better off with a corded keyboard and Logitech proprietary wireless mouse.

My interest in wireless keys & mouse is eliminating some wire-plugging every time I move my laptop between home & office. Now I think a USB hub is a better solution.

Submission + - How Do I Protect 'Ground' From Lightening?

Submitted by randyjparker on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @11:16AM

randyjparker writes: Daily thunderstorms are typical in Atlanta this time of year. Last week, lightning struck a giant pine in my backyard, stripping bark for 80 feet. All my gear is on surge protectors and AVR UPS units, none of which even tripped, but I still lost a cable modem, router, two ethernet switches and a Shuttle computer motherboard. All my data was recovered from backup, but this is the third time in ten years I've lost equipment to lightning. My theory is that the billion-volt / 40,000 amp strike brought the voltage of 'ground' up enough to kill gear.

House electrical Ground is wired to my copper plumbing, which enters the house 10 yards from the strike. My Comcast coax cable is directly grounded to the plumbing in two places to eliminate TV ghosting from a couple of nearby broadcast towers. Both ends of the Comcast link were killed (the circuit board traces on the phone pole trunk tap, and the aforementioned cable modem), leading me to suspect the surge came over the coax grounding and then traveled over the ethernet. Is this theory plausible? If it is, what can be done? Some sort of capacitor? (I realize no surge protector can stop an actual strike to the cable, but what seems to have happened all three times is that a nearby lightning strike momentarily increased the voltage of a few hundred tons of wet surface dirt which contains my copper grounding.)

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