Do I want this or this?

I'm guessing this is paranoia, but I don't have the time right now to look into it.

AND NOW THE MANCHURIAN MICROCHIP

All computers on the market today — be they Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Apple or especially IBM — are assembled with components manufactured inside the PRC. Each component produced by the Chinese, according to a reliable source within the intelligence community, is secretly equipped with a hidden microchip that can be activated any time by China’s military intelligence services, the PLA.

If you read the whole thing, it sounds like what the Cylons did to disable the Colonial defense computers, except this is a hardware thing....

eta: And supposedly it's geared just to collecting data.

No definite disproof -- it's an amusing meme to watch, though. About a month ago, it made the rounds (copied nearly verbatim, of course, except that nobody can decide if the guy is FBI, CIA, retired FBI...) of a bunch of the right-wing conspiracy sites (freepers, militia types, anti-chinese, anti-foreigners in general), and then disappeared until yesterday, when it's resurfaced on geek blogs.

That in itself makes me a little suspicious, but again, no debunkers yet. Wait a few hours.

Tom, my preference would be for the multi-purpose printer, but then I print out pages for home use all the time, and desk space is always at a premium.

Do I want this or this?

If you like the Epson, you can get it for less direct from epson.com: $230 and free shipping.

I've got the HP 7680 and 7780 and both of them have been wonderful printers. They aren't cheap, but they deliver. Looks like the HP you linked to is a stripped down version of that product line.

As you might recall, the work laptop was having wi-fi issues. I brought it to the Genius Bar, and they re-installed the OS on top (I think that's how they phrased it), so not wiping the drive, and leaving the applications and documents, just reinstalling the system. They said it could cause havoc with some applications.

Two of the apps I have been having trouble with just would not open. Not even into the splash screen. Last night, on a whim of boredom in tech rehearsal, I opened Vectorworks, and it actually opened! So then I try ProTools, and it too is working again!

Um. does OS-X have some kind of self-healing thing? Has it gone Borg or Wraith on me? If so. Totally cool. If not, I'm wondering if it's going to STOP working again on me.

I'm looking for library software, something where I can enter case files (PDFs), contacts, log calls and flag for follow-up...and be able to export into excel to play with data.

Any recs?

funny thing here at work. OK, so we are using a little model airplane remote to control a chair on stage. It moves left right forward back kind of thing (Marley proving he is real, scoops up Scrooge and shuffles him around the room). So the crew is charging up the transmitters battery, and notice the wall wart has two LED's, one labeled TX, the other RX. Only the TX is lit. So they call me over:

We dunno what the TX and RX stands for. I guessed the TX was lit because it knew we were in Texas. And the RX is for prescription because we work in theater. But Travis doubts that's the reasons.

Of course, the charger is used for both the remote control (TX) and the airplane receiver (RX). Since we are only using the remote control, only that LED is lit. Still, it was kinda funny. As if a little wall wart knew what state it was in, and had a light just for Texas.

I'm in the process of transferring programs and files from my ancient XP desktop to my new Vista (blech) laptop. I've successfully managed to network the two computers and the printer, but when I print from the laptop to the printer, it prints gibberish--and sometimes pages and pages and pages of gibberish.

I've been working on it for an hour and my head hurts, so I'm taking a break, but I thought I'd check here to see if anyone has any advice before I try again. My next step will be connecting the printer directly to the laptop to see if it's a networking or Vista problem.