Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Sapphire is shipping the Silent HD 2600 XT which is a passively cooled video card that is a candidate for the media-center box up against the NVidia 8600GTS from Gigabyte. I would love to see some benchmark comparisons between these two cards. No word yet on pricing for the Sapphire card.

One advantage of the Sapphire- apparently its available in a 512MB version which for high resolution displays (like the 24″ and 30″ LCDs I use rather than conventional TVs) might turn out to be useful.

Part of the main motivation for writing a blog is to help myself remember all those key things for sometime later. Like that list of critical utilities it takes to keep Vista happy running on a MacBook. The bad news is I blew it and now I’m rebuilding my MacBook drive and I can’t remember some of the key stuff I had installed.

One key utility is SharpKeys. SharpKeys lets you remap keys on your keyboard in Windows. So for example the Mac doesn’t have the equivalent of the Windows “del” key- its delete is like the Windows backspace key. So I’ve used SharpKeys to map the enter key that I don’t use much to Del.

The other utility is Apple Mouse Utility. Apple Mouse lets you use the control key to right click when running Windows to get around the lack of a two-button mouse on the MacBook.

I’ll try to document more here as I go along.

While visiting the Verizon store to get my phone fixed the other day I noticed a little sign about the Motorola T605 Automotive system. As far as I can tell this is something I would install in my car that would let me do hands-free phone calls + play music from my phone in my car through the car speakers. This could be just about perfect. Apparently you can only get it from Circuit City and it wasn’t listing anywhere on the Circuit City web-site so its not clear if its out yet.