Overall, I can’t say I can really complain with Newsdemon. I pay $6/month for their secure unlimited plan, and it works fine. I’ve ended up comboing it with Astraweb and Usenet-news. This is due to the incompletes I experience with Highwinds.

If you see the blackfriday deal for newsdemon, it’s a good deal, and probably about as good as you’re going to do. Since Newsdemon is just a reseller, like many others, you can pretty much only rate them based on support, and Newsdemon is “ok” in that area.

However, if you want the most “complete” usenet experience like me, you’ll want to combine Highwinds, Astraweb, and Readnews.

A better place to get an unlimited account is Usenetserver. They only charge $10/month. The other option is to use block accounts from Newsgroupdirect. They have specials on terabytes now and then, along with decent deals on 500gb. So, combine an unlimited Usenetserver account + Astraweb block account + Usenet-server block account (Readnews) and you get something that’s about as stable as possible.

With that type of combo I can safely grab 1,000+ day old posts. For more info on usenet, check out my other posts.

Their billing is simple and straight forward, and I’ve never had issues with them in the past. Putting it to the “test” their retention is very close to what they say it is. Speeds are great, and prices couldn’t be better.

If you go with Astraweb know that you’re going with a high quality usenet provider. They do, however have issues. The 300 day mark has some missing posts and their speeds can vary. If you want the best experience on usenet the best option is to combine usenetserver and astraweb. Astraweb has the content but not the speed, and sometimes things are missing for no reason. With usenetserver the stuff that’s missing is mostly because they removed it.

For a full tutorial on binary usenet refer to my tutorial here.

Anyway, I’ve had it for a couple months and pounded it pretty hard with plenty of keystrokes. This thing is a dream to type on compared to regular dome keyboards, there’s no doubt about that. As far as games go, I’ve found it has a better response time than the dome keyboards as well. I can always tell when I press a key, and strokes are never missed like they are on dome keyboards.

The only drawback to mechanical keyboards MIGHT be the noise, but I really enjoy it because I know when I press a key. Throughout all my punishment, the thing still types like it’s brand new instead of slowly degrading like my dome keyboards have done every single time. The only thing I’ve noticed is that the WASD keys I use for FPS games have faded a bit, same with the homerow but this is a problem I’ve had with every keyboard I’ve owned. The hardest hit letters fade.

As far as this keyboard goes, I have no complaints. Some people have noticed poor quality control on razer’s part with misaligned keys and such, but mine has been rock solid. I’m so happy with this keyboard that in the future I think I’ll pick up a Das Keyboard when/if this keyboard dies. This was sort of a trial to see if I’d actually like having a mechanical keyboard – and the answer is YES. I don’t want anything else now.

Another big difference from the dome keyboards is that mechanical keyboards are very heavy in comparison.

The main thing is – mechanical keyboards are for people that type A LOT. If you don’t type a ton – you can probably just stick with a cheap Microsoft keyboard, it really won’t be much difference for you. However, for those of us that type like mad or game like mad, and destroy keyboards left and right – mechanical keyboards are for you.

While doing all this, EyeFinity was not the priority. The priority was more screen space to work with. However, since I had the whole setup basically, why not mess with EyeFinity?

I had to set all of them at 1680X1050 since that’s the lowest resolution out of the bunch. That gives me 5040X1050 – which looks horrible out of games. I was pretty much expecting everything to be horrible since like I said, all 3 are different monitors, and the LG screen has these horridly big bezels. So, by far not the best setup for something like EyeFinity.

After getting in game however, everything looks good. I’m shocked. The bezels don’t bother me -  I’m shocked. I was able to get the other 2 to line up with my 24″  – I’m shocked. My games are more immersive and I’m enjoying myself a lot – yet again pure shock.

So what does all this tell me? You don’t have to have the perfect setup to get EyeFinity enjoyable or working right. I’ve looked and I’ve looked – but I have yet to find anyone running EyeFinity with different monitors and resolutions like me. I am thinking about switching the 22″ and 24″ screen out for 2 more 23″ IPS Dell panels, but that is far into the future. At that point, I’ll have something to compare against and see if it’s really that much better than my current setup.

Lots and lots of people think EyeFinity is just a gimmick – well I really have to disagree there. After going EyeFinity – I don’t want to go back. I don’t think you can say anything until you’ve experienced it first hand for more than a few days. As you can see, I was very skeptical of the technology and thought it would completely suck. I was wrong.

Sure, it’s a somewhat costly setup, but if you need the monitors for productivity anyway, you can’t go wrong. Let me tell you, 2 monitors is 100x better than 1 and 3 seems like the sweet spot for me.  Sure, spaces are cool, but if you need to see a bunch of things at once you can’t do that with spaces. (also remember that one panel must be DisplayPort or you need an active display port adapter for the 3rd monitor)

Conclusion

After having this setup for awhile – I can safely say that EyeFinity is awesome. Game play is just so much more immersive – and fun. It’s really really hard to form an opinion without experiencing it first hand which is going to be a drawback for this technology to spread. Also, yes I know that Matrox has had this technology for quite awhile – but you have to buy a $300 device on top of the $300 video card which makes it even less accessible to the mainstream audience. So ATI has done something magical – introducing videocards capable of driving 3 displays (FINALLY) and combining 3 monitors into 1 display – all wrapped into a highly powerful graphics card. I won’t be switching to nVidia unless they implement similar technology.

Picture taken before all monitors were lined up correctly..

]]> http://technologyinsanity.com/technology-reviews-guides/ati-eyefinity-review-different-monitors-sizes-and-resolutions/feed/ 0 http://technologyinsanity.com/uncategorized/knoll-life-chair-review/ http://technologyinsanity.com/uncategorized/knoll-life-chair-review/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:47:17 +0000 admin http://technologyinsanity.com/?p=1077 I’ve only been sitting on this thing for 5 or 6 hours, but so far I notice it’s about 9000x more comfortable than my old chair. Comfort may not actually be the “right” word for the chair. It’s more like I can sit in it and not have my back screaming in agony. I work from home so I spend many many hours in my computer chair. For the first time in a long time, I’m not hunched over looking at my computer screen. I’m actually sitting upright. That’s what these ergonomic chairs are made for, to make you feel comfortable with good posture, and not hunch over everything and feel like crap.

I really have NO idea why I didn’t get an ergonomic chair earlier. I’ve been on the computer for extended periods of time since I was about 10 years old. Always using crappy wal-mart chairs, that were NOT designed for what I was doing. Even when I did have money, all of it went to processors, video cards, speakers, monitors, and nothing went to my chair. The chair remained a POS from wal-mart at all times.

Now that I’m 19, I’m starting to feel some back issues develop. Those 9 years on wal-mart chairs for countless hours are starting to take hold. However, I think with this chair those problems may go away completely. (Only very slight pain from leaning over all the time has developed)

Anyway, the best way to describe the feeling of sitting on the Knoll Life Chair is “good”. Mine has adjustable arms that go up and down and side to side, which I would recommend. I think these are “High Performance” arms. Adjusting the height of the arms along with forward/backward and side to side really comes in handy depending on how you’re sitting or want to sit in the chair.

The seat moves forward slightly depending on how you sit on it, and you can slide it forward or backward as much as needed. You can of course lean back in the chair as well, and adjust the tension.

Overall, I have to say I’m super happy with this chair, it’s the first time I’ve felt comfortable sitting at my desk in years (No joke.) Even though I did not pay retail for this chair and bought it at an eBay auction, I think it’s actually worth the retail price of $808.

I was actually very scared of ordering a chair online without trying it out in person, and the only reason I got the knoll life chair was because of the auction and I didn’t want to pay more than $400 for my chair. Unfortunately, there really aren’t any shops nearby that sell “performance” task chairs. I was going to get the steelcase leap, but so far I’m glad I didn’t. This chair seems perfect for me. I really like the breathable back, and steelcase doesn’t have that.

Conclusion

Finally, a chair I WANT to sit on.

Update

6/16/10 – After sitting on this chair for a few months, I can form a more full opinion. My opinion hasn’t really changed – it’s still the best chair I’ve ever sat in. My back has not hurt since getting this chair. It makes the couch seem uncomfortable due to less ergonomic support Has also shown no noticeable wear, usually by now a $100 chair would have plenty of wear.

Definitely worth every penny.

So anyway, I think the investment is worth it if you have a reason for it. On with the review…

Compared to a “cheap electric” is there really a difference? You bet! The thing spins like crazy and you can feel the plaque being removed, the smart guide shows me which area of my teeth I should be working on, and how long I should brush my teeth. I have a feeling I was never brushing my teeth for 2 minutes before

After brushing I can definitely “feel” a difference. There’s no plaque anymore, it just tears it right off. That’s a HUGE thing right there. My cheap electric never did that nor did any manual toothbrushes I ever used.

If you’re thinking about whitening more than overall teeth health (Which I’m more worried about the health of my teeth rather than whitening) it does help to whiten your teeth. I had lots of stains from coffee/cigarettes and it does seem to help remove that stuff fairly easily. I struggled with it with my old electric and the stuff wouldn’t come off, however with this one it started to come off almost immediately. A lot of it was just tar that was stuck there so it probably just needed something powerful enough to take it off.

So, overall was it worth the investment? Yea, I really think it was. I mean I spend crazy amounts sometimes on computers and other “junk” that I really don’t need, it’s just a good thing to spend a little cash on personal hygiene sometimes

Up until this point, I thought the Razer Diamondback was the greatest mouse in the world. Today, that vision has been shattered.  Today I received my Logitech G9 laser mouse. When I first plugged it in, I wasn’t very impressed with the feel of the mouse. Never fear! The G9 comes with 2 grips! I just popped in the slimmer grip and instantly loved the feel.

New problem, I felt it was too light. What do we do about that? Well we just pop in a few weights of course! That’s right, the G9 allows you to customize the weight of the mouse to your liking. At first, I popped in 4 4G weights, but I thought that was a bit heavy. I removed 2 4G weights and it seemed like that was the sweet spot for me.

Gah, the LED light is red. I don’t want it to be red, I’d rather it be blue. Wait, the G9 allows you to customize the LED color! All I had to do was open up the Logitech SetPoint software and set the LED to be blue. Wallah.

Yet another problem! I didn’t like how slow the cursor moved across the screen. Yet again, the G9 has a solution for me. I can set the DPI on the fly, I found I liked the DPI just below 3200DPI. Of course, for gaming it will be a bit different and I can just set it to my liking in game.

Click click click click.. Bah, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just spin the wheel once for long page documents? Wow, the G9 thought of that too. You can switch to free spin mode by pressing a button under the mouse.

Some other features include horizontal scrolling via the scroll wheel and of course the back/forward buttons on the side of the mouse.

At this point, I’m feeling pretty proud of myself, or rather the mouse. It’s customized to the point where it’s everything I want, and more. You can customize further, like adding in macros and adjusting how much the scroll wheel scrolls, and plenty more. It’s all there in the SetPoint software.

There’s one thing that stops this from being a perfect mouse, and that is the fact it doesn’t have SmartShift. I would love if the scroll wheel automatically went from the regular click click mode to free spinning mode by itself. Unfortunately, only the MX-Revolution has this feature.

Still, I am very happy with my purchase, and if you’re in the market for a great mouse you should definitely check out the G9. You can buy it here: Logitech G9 Laser Mouse

So, what does MS do? It does all that stuff and more automatically. The keyword research module obviously investigates keywords, but it displays the number of searches in a much better way. It shows per day and the number of clicks you might expect if you were ranked #1 for that keyword. There’s actually so much more there as well, like OCI (worth of the keyword) and broad versus exact. In the SEO competition module it even color codes how bad the competition is with green, yellow, and red. There’s no need to EVER analyze the competition further down than the front page because searchers rarely go past the first page. The SEO competition module also analyzes the backlinks, showing anchor text and PR. Then you can go on to find content for that keyword that you can either republish or use as a source for your content. Then there’s a promotion module to help find places to create backlinks for your site. If that wasn’t enough, there’s also a module to track your rankings on various sites.

This simplifies almost everything for me, I don’t have to do anything manually saving me tons of time and effort, getting the same task done in a fraction of the time. Is this tool a magic bullet to instantly getting good rankings and finding great keywords? No, you have to be able to understand the data presented to you, but if you’ve been doing SEO for any amount of time you should be familiar with most if not all of the data presented to you.

Is it worth it? Well, it depends. If you do a lot of SEO then yes I would say it’s worth every penny. If you only do a little here and there maybe you can just do keyword research the manual way. I only paid $97 for it since I got it while it was on sale. To be perfectly honest, I would’ve paid full price if I couldn’t get it at a discount. The more I use this tool, the more I love it. Guess what else? They’re not even finished with it yet and if you buy now you get updates for free. Publish content, monetization, and the adwords module have yet to be added.

There’s not much else I can say about this tool, if you’re serious about SEO this will save you a ton of time.

Rank Tracker

Then I moved on to NameCheap where I have ExtremeTechie and a few others. I thought that was a great deal, only about $10 for a domain and free whoisguard. I was pretty satisfied with it. Yet again, after more research I found there was an even cheaper domain service. I’m speaking of Internet.bs. My first order I bought 3 domains for only $15! Two .com’s and one .net. They all came with whois protection for free.

I will now be using Internet.bs as my main place to buy domains. Everything went really smooth, and it works just as well as namecheap or GoDaddy. I actually can’t stand GoDaddy anymore, I’ll never buy another domain from them. I may use NameCheap again though. They are a good domain provider, no doubt about it. Internet.bs just goes above only charging $5 or less sometimes for domains WITH whois protection. I don’t think any provider can really beat those prices.

You may wonder why I need so many domains, I need them for landing pages in my PPC campaigns.

What exactly does it do?

This program will order all your programs in the start menu, and keep them there. They will not move around. I always found this annoying, because I would go to look for a program, and I wouldn’t be able to find it right away, because the order changed.

This program also gives you a command and search option right on the start menu. The search function will try and find the program if you input it into the box. This is very helpful, I have been down a road where I couldn’t find a program I wanted to launch!

The start menu has also been made more friendly to using a keyboard 100% and not having to touch the mouse. For instance, I can hit the windows key and be presented with the programs menu. There are then different areas in the program list assigned letters. Once I hit that letter, some numbers for each program in that area show up. Then I can hit the number, and that program is selected. Then I can launch the program. This is very cool. In fact, I like this feature the most.

There are also tabs in place, so you can move to the quick start menu easily, and put in programs you use often.

New programs are highlighted, for quick reference. This is very helpful, because I would look around for a newly installed program for ages sometimes. If too many programs take up the screen, then they are scrolled through. I’ve never had this happen to me, but I suppose if it got to that point it would be useful.

I also really liked being able to re-size the menu and move it around wherever I wanted.

There’s a few different skins to choose from, such as Vista start menu classic, Windows classic, and Windows XP. Depending on what skin you’re using in windows, one of these skins will obviously blend better.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed using this software, I think everyone who runs windows should give it a shot. It really does make things easier to manage. It is basically the way the start menu *should* have been setup to begin with. I did not test the Pro version, but from their site it has some extended features like quick launch, quick uninstall, and menu customization. A lot of the complaints seem to be that you can’t customize the free version. However, the free version seems to have most of the features you would really want. In case you’re wondering, there was no spyware/adware attached to this program, and I’m actually surprised about that. It is very easy to uninstall if you don’t want it anymore, it doesn’t change any system settings.

You can check it out for yourself here: http://www.vistastartmenu.com/