If you are a fan of 3D programs, including Google Earth and Google SketchUp, you know how frustrating it can be to navigate using a computer mouse. Fortunately, a company called “3DConnexion”:1 (now owned by Logitech) makes an affordable six degrees-of-freedom controller called the SpaceNavigator — Amazon currently has it listed for about “56 bucks”:2.

I’ve been using it for about a month now and find it to be far, far superior to the mouse. It’s a bit complicated to explain how it works, so a demo is in order. A couple minutes of searching on YouTube comes up with a bunch of SpaceNavigator/Google Earth demos. Here’s one of the better ones…

And here’s a video of how the device works…

[2(SpaceNavigator on Amazon)]http://www.amazon.com/3Dconnexion-SpaceNavigator-3D-Navigation-3DX-700029/dp/B000LB41BM/
[1(3DConnexion homepage)]http://www.3dconnexion.com/

Nice of Microsoft to screw up the sleep/hibernation feature when they released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. However, it’s even nicer of them not to fix it… that is unless you manual do it yourself.

So, if you’ve been having trouble getting your computer to wake up from sleep and/or hibernation, check “this”:1 fix out over at the Microsoft support site. Symptoms of this problem are:

bq.. Your Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)-based computer may unexpectedly stop responding or experience random memory corruption when you resume from standby or from hibernation.

p. Of course, both of my Windows XP boxes suffer from these symptoms. I’ve downloaded the fix on one of my machines, and it seems to have done the trick.

Of course, the bigger fix is Vista… or perhaps the more permanent fix of “OS X”:2.

[2(Fix your Windows problems)]http://www.apple.com/macosx/

[1(Get your hibernation working again)]http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889673

I’ve been wanting to purchase a new laptop for quite a while now. However, I was so disappointed with my last one (a Compaq Presario 1501CL) that it’s almost turned me off on the whole idea of owning a laptop. The Compaq’s battery life sucked, the add-on WiFi card had problems, the power supply blew up, it sucked power while in hibernate mode, etc. etc.

Well, today Apple announced a piece of software called “Boot Camp”:1 that will allow you to dual boot Intel-based Apple’s to either OSX or Windows XP. Now I have another choice in laptops that I probably won’t buy.

[1(Apple announces Boot Camp)]http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/apr/05bootcamp.html

It ain’t pretty, but it works…

P.S. The last thing you want while gaming on a PC is to suck up CPU cycles to capture video. Obviously, this avoids that pitfall.

Even though I primarily use Firefox for web browsing, I also use Internet Explorer. I find that it’s nice to have two browsers running at once. For example, if you have a couple of Yahoo! accounts you can quickly access both of them by having a different set of Yahoo! cookies enabled in each browser.

Unfortunately, one of the bad things about using IE 6 is that… well, it’s IE 6. Since Microsoft acquired a monopoly in web browsing after it killed Netscape, Microsoft did what all good monopolies do — they didn’t innovate. Ironically, this left an opening for products like Firefox, so thanks to Microsoft’s laziness, we now live in a much better browsing universe. And today that universe just got even better.

Today Microsoft released the beta 2 preview of “IE 7″:1. I’ve been using it for just a bit, but I like the new, cleaner interface, tabbed browsing, RSS integration (which kicks Firefox’s default RSS-integration’s butt), much better printing ability, multiple homepages (which you can set to load all at once) and better standards compliance/rendering. Try it out if you’re not afraid of beta 2 preview software (the new, new term for beta??).

Zoinger says, it’s about time.

P.S. Ok, I guess I’m a day behind, since the preview for IE 7 was actually released yesterday.

[1(IE 7 download home)]http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.mspx