(H)elix1 asks: "Without using an inverter, what is the good cheap way to power an ATX motherboard from a DC source? I have a mini-itx based computer I'm looking to use in the car and house. I'm looking for something like a laptop uses, with an AC-to-DC brick that feeds a DC-DC internal connector. Linitx.com has one, but it is a bit pricey after shipping to this side of the pond, googling turned up even more expensive industrial PSU's. Am I missing a simple hack? I have a soldering iron and am not afraid to use it..."

Omega1045 asks: "It is a fact that our perception is based on the information given to us. I find tha Slashdot readers offer a wealth of knowledge though the various sites they reference. I ask Slashdot, where do you surf to on a daily basis? What is your daily pattern of information retrieval? This is of particular interest to me as the Internet has made us all publishers. There are many sources of information, all with their own slant on the day's news, many non-traditional. Where do my fellow peers go on a daily basis?"

leftist writes "I'm looking for an entry level digital 4 or 8 track digital recorder to experiment with in the $500 range. Any product recommendations or warnings out there in the geek crowd? Something that uses mp2/mp3 natively a plus!" Krow: What, you wanted content with your story?

TheTheologian writes "In his InfoWorld column, Chad Dickerson says 'there is a level of quiet discomfort between the "scripting" versus "programming" factions in some corporate development environments in which I have participated. In some instances, executive-level technology management has held scripting languages in disdain as not being "real" languages for day-to-day problem solving, which has discouraged highly talented scripters on staff from practicing their craft. In such an environment, scripters are relegated to the lower ranks ... ' He goes on to say that some companies will assign Java and C++ programmers tasks that take them weeks but could be done by Perl or Python programmers in a few hours. Is it true that some companies are so overcome with code bias they'd assign weeks of unnecessary work rather than give it to the scripting untouchables?"

dotpl asks: "Recently I acquired a number of books in text format from Project Gutenberg and archived them for later reading. When I came to read, I realised how hard it is to read text files on the computer screen, so I thought about developing a 'reader' that you can read text files with, selecting the fonts and colors you like, and which has a bookmarking feature - a la Vim - so you know where you were reading before. Then I realised that a software of the sort must already exist. How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?" While a browser may go a long way to providing the necessary functionality, most browsers bookmarking facilities are sorely lacking for this type of work, since they don't mark the position in the page, just the page, itself. Has anything like this been written?

urbazewski asks: "If you could send a message back to your nerdy unpopular 12 year old self, what would you say? I've been asking this one for several years, and the replies sound suspiciously like the lame advice I got from adults at that age ('just be yourself, dear'). The most creative answer was from an American-born Buddhist monk, who didn't think his 12 year old self would listen to a message along the lines of 'Hey, what you're doing is kind of making things suck for me right now' --- he would send a message to himself by adding extra lyrics to a song he really liked when he was in junior high school. I got the best replies from a large class at UC Santa Cruz. The modal answer was 'Buy Microsoft.' About 7% of the class said 'Enjoy yourself in high school because college is really hard.' Another 7% said "Study harder in high school because college is really hard.' (The best variant on that theme: 'Try to figure out what "studying" is'). In the hindsight-is-20/20 dept. there was a girl who said 'Do not date the following people...' and then listed six names and a guy who said 'You know how you're thinking about trying to drive your dad's car? Don't!.' My personal favorite: 'You're a dork now, but don't worry, you'll be cool when you're in college.'"

PDubNYC asks: "Just thought this was a good place to ask about telescopes. My father is turning 70 shortly, and I thought a telescope would be a good gift as he was an air force navigator back in the day, and loves viewing nature's beauty (bird watching, safaris etc...). So, any ideas what to look for in a home telescope, from $500-$1000 (split by 6 kids) that would enable him to punch in coordinates and have the motor turn, give a great view of nearby celestial bodies (maybe Saturn's rings), and it'd be great to hook up to a laptop (a Mac would be even better, but far from necessary). Any advice would be great." PDubNYC is also on a budget, so please refrain from suggesting the ultra expensive $1500 scopes.

pHaze asks: "I am about to take a long drive across the USA with my girlfriend to try and find a state to live in. We are both professional geeks and plan to settle and start a business. We were wondering if slashdotters could offer some advice on which state is the best to start an e-commerce business in. Which has the most e-commerce friendly/unfriendly laws (taxation, copyright, spam, privacy), the highest availability of broadband (and bandwidth in general) and is the most cost effective for a business."

S asks: "In my opinion, one of X11's most underrated features is the ability to export the display of an [X] application to an X-Server that can be physically separated from the application's host (use a remote display). I have used this countless times to dramatically increase my ability to 'get stuff done' from a distance. Recently I discovered Cygwin's ability to run XFree86 in rootless mode (startx -- -rootless) where there is no main X root window, and imported displays get their own 'native-looking' window on the Microsoft Windows platform. This also has saved me much headache when working from a Windows machine to do Linux-type things. My question is: Is there some way to export the display of Microsoft Windows windows to a remote X-Server? I'm not talking VNC/RFB here, and terminal services (via rdesktop) ALMOST fits the bill, but I don't want a root window. I want to simply export the display of (say... photoshop) to my X workstation. Googling is not an easy task; 'windows' is too much of a generic term to get usable results. What I have found, however, suggests Wine as a buffer between native Windows GUI calls and the X protocol, but offers no actual solution. Does anyone know of software that allows allows Windows to export the display of its windows to an X server (ie, an X-Client wrapper for Windows)?"

EAJoe asks: "I have small problem with one Celeron 2GHz machine. Linux kernel 2.4.18-24.7 doesn't seem to switch L2 cache on! This CPU apparently _has_ 128K of L2. There is nothing about L2 in the logs, and /proc/cpuinfo shows an L1D size of 8K instead. Of course I have enabled L2 in BIOS settings (the motherboard is an ASUS P4S533-E, by the way). The CPU overclocks easily up to 3.5 GHz, running stable at 3 - it seems that cache is really switched off. At 3 GHz g++ compilation times are similar to Athlon XP 1800+ machine. I don't have windows on this computer to check this out, but Intel DOS utility shows a Celeron 2000 w/128k L2, also there is '128K' written on the CPU's die. Any suggestions?"

michaelr asks: "I run several email-based discussion lists. While only members of the lists are allowed to post, I've lately had problems with viruses as they often impersonate the members (or the members themselves are infected). I've identified two solutions: either build a Linux box running SMTP-based antivirus software, or purchase something like the Symantec Gateway Security which includes AV among lots of other things. The street price makes it a little more expensive that a Linux box + AV software, but it seems to be zero maintenance. The problem: the Symantec device is new, and before I place my trust in it, I'd like to know: has anyone had any experience with it, or should I just build the equivalent myself?"

bridgeland asks: "What is the best way to create a standards team? Who should be included? How should it be governed? I have been asked by a vendor Cokinetic Systems to start an independent standards body for their presentation layer description language I3ML. I am interested, but I don't want to repeat mistakes already made by others. Any relevant experience?"

Master Spy asks: "Here's something that the Slashdot community might be able to help with. If you receive a message in code how do you take the first step? Back in the days of WWII it was easier. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park already knew that the messages were encoded using an Enigma machine so all they had to do was work out the positions of the rotors using brain power, the Bombe or later the Colossus machine. American codebreakers also knew the basic details about the methods the Japanese used but now however things are more complicated. Suppose you are listening to a transmission and you receive the following: 'sdjek dYqkP 1Nt$% GGl9) MHrYD +++' How do you know how the message has been encrypted? It could be an Enigma machine, it could have been XOR'd with a second message or a one-time pad or it could use some form of software encryption such as Blowfish or DES. Before you start ripping the message apart for decoding how do codebreakers find out what method has been used to encode the message?"

chowbok asks: "My grandmother recently had a stroke, which left her with the inability to speak or move the right half of her body. It also seriously impaired her motor skills on the half she can move, so she can't write. She does understand what is said to her, but she has no way to communicate. I'd like to set something up for her so that she can write notes. What I have in mind is a keyboard with rather large keys (perhaps 2" square) and a screen or monitor of some sort. I'm sure they make such stuff specifically for stroke victims, but anything labeled 'medical' will undoubtedly be astronomically expensive, even if it is a rather simple device like what I have in mind. I thought it would be easier to build one or find something similar (perhaps a toy or some such). I thought Slashdot readers might have some good suggestions along these lines. I'm not totally against doing it with a computer with a modified keyboard, but that seems like overkill when all I want is really a 'video typewriter'. Has anyone seen anything that might work for my purposes, or might serve as a good starting point?"

An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a small company who is looking to get a multihomed Internet connection for redundancy. The logical conclusion would be to get another internet connection to another provider. However, in the case of a primary connection failure, we need to be running BGP to have our internally-hosted sites still accessible to the Internet via the 2nd connection. The problem is that we only have a /28 (16 IPs), which is too small to make it past most route filters, and would then mean that we still couldn't be reached if the primary T1 is down. So, what's our options? (and no, lying and getting a /24 isn't a valid choice)"

fraser_joat asks: "The other day I finally took the time to watch Starship Exeter, previously reported on Slashdot. Coincidentally, I also revisited the BBC's excellent radio adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, following the hype caused by the recent movies. The two of these got me thinking: while _Exeter_ was clearly a huge effort, it looks like they had a lot of fun making it. In many ways they are scratching the same sort of itch that generates free software. So what about audio drama? The technology needed to produce it is freely available, things like Ardour and Csound. So is it possible to produce an audio drama based on free texts such as those from Project Gutenberg in a distributed fashion, with contributers from all across the Net, just like with software? Would they even be useful as an introduction to classic fiction or just as pure entertainment?"

tileMe asks: "The US National Park Service's Digital Maps department's website claims the following: 'To print maps larger than your printer's paper size using page tiling, you must have the full retail version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0. The oversize map is divided into tiles or sections, each of which is printed on one page. You can then manually cut and tape these sections together.' I need to do this EXACT thing but can't purchase anything. What Open Source or Freeware software can I use and how do I do this? The only requirements are the software must run on a 300MHz PC with Win9x or Linux."

Chromose asks: "Being a system administrator by day, and coder/artist/gamer by night, my hands and wrists get their fair share of exercise around the clock. I've had lumps on the back of my hands off and on for a couple years now and just recently discovered they are ganglion cysts. And although pain and stress has been minimum up to now, I worry of what continuing everyday keyboard and mouse stress will lead to. Introducing FingerWorks. I stumbled across their iGesture Pad on ThinkGeek the other day and started digging for reviews. What reviews I have found exclaim how remarkable the products work, but not many reviews could be found. It sounds like the answer to my search for relief, and it sounds too good to be true. So I'm asking, who out there has used these things and are they truly a revolution in the making?" Yes, ThinkGeek is part of the Sinister VA Software Kieretsu, but if you aren't worried about it, then neither am I.

rcthompson asks: "I host a web site with information about fraudulent career marketing companies, but over the past year it has been repeatedly deleted by a series of hosting companies after they received a threatening letter from the lawyer for one of the companies listed on the web site. Are there any hosting companies out there who are involved or interested in consumer advocacy and will not delete a web site just because they receive a threatening letter? Is it better to use overseas hosting companies? Is there any way to completely hide who your hosting company is so that the bad guys cannot figure out who to send the threatening letter to? One could host the web site on one's own server and use one's own nameservers, but the IP address will reveal your ISP who could possibly shut down your site. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks."

JZ_o8 asks: "I work for an online education company that needs to be able to accommodate students who, in some cases, are several grades behind in their reading level. We are investigating screen reading technologies that might serve as a supplement for these students. We have considered technologies such as AT&T Natural Voices Text-to-Speech Engine but the process is time-intensive and cumbersome. Development requires a desktop application which encodes text into a web audio format such as MP3. This of course raises issues about page updates and dynamic content which would render any accompanying speech files, obsolete. It seems like the best solution would be browser support, perhaps via a plug-in, that would give the user Text to Speech capabilities. Something like selecting a passage of text with the mouse and right-click to select 'Speak'. Or maybe a server-side solution that would dynamically generate media files for pages on the fly? Or just when they're changed? Does anyone have any suggestions - solutions that I am overlooking. This seems like a useful and logical piece of technology....if it doesn't exist I wonder why not."