What is the difference between Hibernate and Standby in Windows XP?

Standby and hibernate are 2 extremely useful functions that you can use because of the time it saves you from booting up your computer. Once you’re done with your work session, and need to leave your desk, simply choose standby or hibernate. These two sleep modes are fantastic for laptops as well.

But what’s the difference? Hibernate saves an image of your current session with all open applications and files. Then it powers down your computer (exactly as if you had turned it off). When you next switch your computer on, you will see exactly the same applications and files open as you had left them. In this state, your computer is exactly as though it’s turned off — no power is needed in hibernate mode.

Standby is a sleep mode that reduces the power that your computer uses to almost nothing. The keyword is “almost”. When you use standby mode, your computer cuts the power to your screen, hard drive, peripheral devices…in fact, anything except your computer’s memory (RAM) is cut. This is because the RAM will maintain a copy of your working session.

I’ve had people tell me that moving your notebook around while it’s in standby mode will shake up the harddrive when it’s spinning and cause hard disk problems. Utter rubbish. The hard drive is powered down during standby, much less in hibernate mode.

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Logitech Ultraslim Keyboard Dark Pearl (with Soft Touch Technology) Review

Urgh. I wanted to get a new keyboard for myself because I’m using a 17″ LCD monitor to extend my desktop from my Thinkpad notebook, so an external keyboard and mouse makes things easier to use.

I thought keyboards were all the same, and the only difference was the touch or feeling of the keys. Well, I thought wrong.

Logitech has an ultraslim keyboard that has really nice Soft Touch keys — they’re soft of like the keys that notebooks use, so it’s really comfortable and easy to type.

What I didn’t count on what that the key layout was totally different. It’s not like the full 104 key keyboards where the arrow keys live in an isolated area of their own, as with the numpad keys and the group of Page Down, Page Up, Insert, etc keys.

In this logitech keyboard, the keys were all squeezed together. That’s right — there’s no gap at all between any group of keys, arrow keys, numpad, or otherwise. That makes this keyboard really hard to use. It’s fine if you type without mistakes or require very little editing because the main group of keys are FANTASTIC to type on. It’s still by far the most comfortable keyboard I’ve used.

It’s just that the key layout really annoys me. This surfaces when I try to use the keyboard to navigate around (with the arrow keys) or perform editing operations (shift-home, shift-end, delete, backspace, etc). Normally I can do it without even looking at the keyboard, but with this particular Logitech keyboard, I have to actually look down and make sure I’m pressing on the right key. I’ve tried not looking, but I’m always hitting on the wrong key. That makes it really slow and awkward for me.

It got to a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and pried out the less-important keys so that I could regain some of my productivity back. You can see from the picture above that I took out the Insert key and the Numpad 0 key. Things are slightly better this way, but it’s still a temporary measure.

Verdict? I’m going to sell off this keyboard, and get a better keyboard. One which is full-sized, so all the keys are where they should be, but also with the Soft Touch technology, which makes typing such a joy.

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Found the Funniest T-Shirts on Earth

Recently I’ve been seeing ads for this company called BustedTees, so I popped over to check them out. Well, I thought I’d seen every kind of funny t-shirts around, but I was proven so wrong after I took a look at BustedTees’ catalogue. They have some seriously funny and witty tshirts. Check these out:

I particularly like the one that says “you’re handsome” in reverse! I couldn’t figure it out at first, then I realised it. The person wearing this tee would have to look in a mirror to see the message the right way! Heh. That got me for a second. A nicely designed site, a smooth and very intuitive, customer-friendly checkout process, and great prices make BustedTees one of my favourite online stores.

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WeeMee Cute, Fun and Free Social Networking Site

After Friendster, Facebook and MySpace, WeeWorld has come along with a really refreshing concept — no more real mugs of yourself! WeeMee operates on an avatar system at its core, so you can design how your avatar (called a WeeMee) looks. This makes monetisation an almost natural process for WeeWorld, as they can sell products such as T-shirts, cups, notebooks, with your own cutesy WeeMee on it.

The viral aspect is pretty neat too, as I think people are more open and less reserved to sharing their avatars than a real photo of themselves. This could see WeeWorld users freely embedding and using their WeeMees everywhere they go. WeeWorld has already capitalised on this by providing an “embedding” feature so its users can embed their very own WeeMee anywhere they like (with of course more exposure for WeeWorld and more linkbacks as well).

See WeeWorld here.

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ReCAPTCHA Stops Spam and Preserves World’s Literature

You’ve seen all the CAPTCHA images around - you know, those images that have numbers or letters in them that you have to type in correctly before you’re allowed to make a post or submit a form. Well, reCAPTCHA is a free project (reCAPTCHA website) by the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and it aims to stop spam and preserve literature at the same time.

What it does is to get regular web users like you and I to help in the process of digitizing the text of books. ReCAPTCHA takes scanned words that optical character recognition software have been unable to read, and presents them for humans to decipher as CAPTCHA words.

ReCAPTCHA operates based on a critical assumption though. Since the word is a one which a OCR software has been unable to read, you’ll be presented with another word which has already been identified. If you correctly recognise the identified word, ReCAPTCHA assumes that you are also correct about the new word.

What I’m unsure about is — how about users who correctly recognise the identified word, but reads the other word wrongly?

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