This is a listing of recommended chemicals and cleaning products for heatsinks, processors, RAM chips and GPUs. Please note, these chemicals can potentially harm the product you are attempting to clean, damage paint, rugs, walls, your skin or eyes or other surfaces. They can potentially result in bodily harm to you and others around you. Please make sure you use all products safely. Read their instructions and use any needed personal protective equipment like protective goggles or gloves. be careful of fumes and make sure you are working in a well ventilated area.

Yuck, with that out of the way, here's the listing. :)

One of the biggest projects going on right now is the digitization of millions of older books, newspapers and other documents. Obviously, any significant document is already available electronically but what about the millions of smaller and less significant books? These still contain very valuable information, history and other perspectives. Maintaining that resource and making it more widely available is a tremendous way to deepen the knowledge that humanity possesses.

The best way to accomplish this is to scan the texts and let a computer automatically recognize the characters and words. Unfortunately this is extremely difficult to do accurately on some older texts since the paper is degraded, the ink bleed or simply the font used to too hard to read for a modern OCR system. How can this be fixed?

A project lead by the Carnegie Mellon University has worked with one of its professors, Luis von Ahn, to solve this problem. Luis von Ahn developed the CAPTCHA engine which if you are a member of this site you've already used. Its a simple tool which display random number or letters on a colored background. You are supposed to decifer that code and enter it into the website to help prevent spam. Its a tremendously useful tool and is highly effective. But, Luis von Ahn looked at all the work being done on those random letters and numbers and decded that a more useful work could be performed.

He and his team have developed a system which extracts those impossible to recognize words from older texts and displays those to users. In turn, those users are helping to fight spam AND process the backlog of millions of books and other texts that need to be recognized and made available online.

You can see how the millions of daily users of the CAPTCHA system can now become a boost to the online development and display of these valuable texts. I believe in this project and so this site has been converted to use the new and improved reCAPTCHA system immediately. There's a few links here you are welcome to explore if you'd like more information. If you are not yet a member of this site just register and you'll be able to help the book project  and join a great community at the same time. 

As you probably know we're working with some new features on the site we think you'll be really excited about. The user profile page has been substantially upgraded. For example, you can now host photo galleries here and leave posts for others on their photos. You can create a friends list, post profile pictures and create social groups with anyone you want. Make sure you start clicking on the usernames of your friends here on the site, its a great way to get to know a little more about them and let them know what you think about them. :)

 Also, the photo galleries are going to be a big feature, I'm sure. There's quite a few ways to have fun, you can post multiple albums and show off some of your best builds. Then, just wait to hear from your friends as they post their thoughts on your profile page.

The profile pages are now significanly customizeable so you can change the color, font, background image and much more. Take a look, I think you'll be impressed.

We're working with some new and improved software on the forums. One of the cool features is a tagging feature allowing you to specify what the key words of a thread are. Plus, if you don't like the key words someone else put on a thread you can add your own. Its a great way to really improve the accuracy of searches and find just what you are looking for.

 You'll see a small tag field at the end of every thread and also when you are posting a new thread. Feel free to enter whatever key words you think fit. Up to 25 key words can be added to each thread allowing quite a bit of detail. Most threads will probably have only 2 - 5 though. If you'd like to see the most popular tags or search tags here's the main tag page . Now, make sure you tag your posts!

I'm am pretty upset about this. A Florida based personal information brokerage company appealed to the state Supreme Court for the personal data of drivers accross the state.  Their claim was based upon the fact that public information is covered by a 1997 federal law that required the release of personal information to duly constituted authorites AND THEIR CONTRACTORS.

 They won.

I just thought I'd post about a product I find tremendously useful. ClarkConnect is a free, closed source Linux distribution. Its focus is on being one of the best SOHO or Small Business Router and Firewall appliance. It can be setup in about 15 minutes and offers the features of routers costing many thousands of dollars. Add in the magic word 'FREE' and some solid support and its a winner in my book.

Here's a feature list:

At least according to PC World. Its an interesting point they make. But, I will say that I'm quite happy with the scurity of my Vista systems. Heck, I've been happy with Windows since SP2 and IE7 came out for XP.  Here's the link on Digg .