Recumbent bicycles 

I use mine a lot. Get informed at Bent Rider Online
In German, check out Liegeradforum

A techie social aspect

reissued 1997:  How much Internet is too much?
 

Clean the engine

Distilled water works wonders. I got this tip from Eagle research. My 10 year old car has 70,000 km and the engine sounds like new after internal "steam cleaning" . 

In 1997, I wrote: The Force works. My car has 23,000 km and in the past 3 months I have run through two Formula 1 cleaning packs. Now more than a month on the Formula 2. I noticed better engine response and 400km of highway at 120 km/h now compare to the best values ever at 100-110 km/h: 14.3 km/liter, more than 33 mpg. Like most fuel-injected engines, the 2 liter Toyota used to have a little soot in the tailpipe - it is almost gone now! I keep all gas receipts and consumption in a 1-2-3 spreadsheet. If I find how to easily import the data and graph, I'll post my data here.
 

PDA, personal digital assistant

HP200LX.  Did you notice how the price of this little marvel did not drop for years when prices of all the other PCs regularly went down? Even now that newer handhelds are out, the HP200 is still a great machine. My mentor in this field bought the newer HP320LX which runs Diet Windows (Win CE). Disappointed, he sold it again within a month or two. Despite a 44MHz 32-bit processor, the unit is too slow. He prefers the HP200 and gets a RAM and speed upgrade instead. I may do the same to my own unit.  I dropped it 4 times, twice out of the shirt pocket when picking up something else. No damage. Only the latch of the cover gave up from fatigue of the plastic spring. A rather cosmetic flaw.
 

Musical Surround Sound from only 2 Speakers

Did you notice even excellent HiFi equipment usually fails to render the depth (space) in the music that is present when you hear music live?  Just a little bit closer to the original than flat stereo, I enjoy the astounding rendering of space by SRS 3D with only 2 speakers. The Nureality demo CD sounds excellent, just a bit overdone in the treble. The large SRS home theater unit I bought from them works as promised, it renders a kind of space that is normally lost when recording with microphones. The sound gets closer to what artificial head microphones reproduce. However, the Nureality unit adds a little roughness to the sound and reduces the low bass. Manufacturer skimped on the components.
 

Print to fax without paying a phone company

A $5 adapter for printing by modem to any fax without paying for a phone line. It effectively simulates the public exchange circuit. Briefing for the techie: take a 9V battery, a 1.5 kOhm resistor (1.1 kOhm and 2.2 kOhm won’t work, I tried it) and wire these two in series across the center two terminals of a female-female phone jack connector. Connect your computer and fax modem with this power plug. Set PC to send direct and then the fax to receive direct.