My favorite laptop sleeve is made by WaterField Designs. It’s the most important accessory for my laptop and I’ve had mine since 2001. Back then I had an Apple iBook and I ordered the sleeve with a Vertigo bag from WaterField and I still use them today. Best of all both the sleeve and bag still look brand new, like I had purchased them yesterday. Thats because they are so well made, all of WaterField’s stuff is hand made in San Francisco. I just ordered another sleeve for Nat’s new laptop and thought I should post about how good their products are. [Link]

I’ve always wanted a Dremel rotary tool but I never had a reason to get one until last night. Awhile back one of my external hard drives died so yesterday I decided instead of getting another external drive I would just swap the damaged drive from inside the case with a new one. I passed by Hawalli, picked up a 500GB SATA drive for KD34 and when I came back and tried installing it into the case I realized I had a problem. The hard drive I got used a different power adapter than the hard drive I was replacing which I was able to solve by using an adapter, problem is the adapter was too big to fit into the case. I needed to cut away some of the plastic to be able to fit the drive so I saw this as an opportunity to finally get a Dremel tool.

I passed by the Dremel dealer today and got myself a Dremel 300 Series Multi Tool and Flexshaft. It came with 55 accessories which will allow me to use the Dremel to engrave, carve, sharpen, grind, clean, polish, cut and sand. I paid KD22 after discount for this set, there was a cheaper set without the Flexshaft and only 25 accessories for KD16 but I figured I might as well get the better one while I am at it.

Once I got back home I used the Dremel tool on the plastic hard drive case and it worked like a charm. I was able to cut through the thick plastic with very very little trouble. Now my drive is working perfectly although I have a hole in the side. If you are interested in a Dremel tool they sell them at Ace Hardware but the prices at the dealer are cheaper. The dealer is located in Shuwaikh and their phone number is 4810844.

I got some pictures of the hard drive case mod which you can check by clicking on continue.

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Best Buy Kuwait, the fake Best Buy in Hawalli have the tiny Asus Eee laptops for sale and they are being sold for KD159 which is KD50 more expensive than Amazon. Its really sad how they’ve blatantly copied Best Buy’s logo and name. If it was a crappy shop I could care less but they do actually have a decent collection of stuff so they should also put the effort in coming up with a better name for the place.

As promised, here is the breakdown of current DSL speeds/prices (as of InfoConnect 2008):

If you are looking speeds of 2mb or higher .. you can’t beat Qnets pricing (infoconnect special). And in addition to a free wireless router you also get a scratch (instant prize) and raffle (Mini) coupons for every 20kd spent. I upgraded my connection to 4mb and ‘won’ a extra couple of weeks on my subscription through the scratch coupons.

For those interested in speeds of 1mb or lower; Zajil is the clear choice with their aggressive pricing structure with 1mb at 300 KWD (almost 1/3 the price of last year).

Apparently, there is a new DSL company called Wasel, which has recently been placing advertisements in the newspapers. And while they might be advertising offering DSL, they don’t have a booth at InfoConnect or even a website; We don’t have much information on their offers.

-Posted by K.

*Prices listed are collected from Brochures, Official Websites and Sales Representatives .. prices displayed are for yearly subscriptions.

I have an old PIII 500 with 256MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive lying around which I wanted to give to someone. I didn’t want to install Windows on it since the person isn’t very good with computers and always ends up getting viruses and trojans installed on his system. The computer was going to be used for Internet browsing, chatting on MSN and Yahoo and copying and view pictures from his digital camera. I decided to install a Linux OS.

The first Linux OS I installed was the latest version of gOS which was released two days ago. From the screen shots it looked like a really friendly and easy to us version of Linux and thats what I was looking for. After installing it I realized that the operating system was running very sluggishly on this really old computer, it wasn’t going to work.

I then remember I had bookmarked a website from Digg which had a list of Linux distros that were meant to be run on really old computers. I went through the list, did some research and in the end decided to try two different ones, TinyFlux and Wolvix.

I tried TinyFlux first and although it ran really well the user interface wasn’t very friendly. I then decided to try Wolvix and not only did it perform really well but the interface was fairly friendly looking with a Mac like dock at the bottom and large friendly icons everywhere. I decided to stick with Wolvix and after playing with it for an hour I think its pretty impressive for an OS thats under 250MB in size. It has Firefox, a music player, video player, photo viewer, and a whole bunch of other softwares all included and there is a ton more I can download all for free.

This is actually the best part of Linux, its free and the majority of the software for it is free. Another good thing is you can try out the OS without installing it, you just run it straight from the CD and if you like it you can install it if not you just eject the cd, reboot and you are back to your old operating system.

If you want to check out the list of Linux distros for old computer click [Here]
For gOS click [Here]
and for Wolvix click [Here]

ZDistrict came to my office a while back and sat behind my desk and asked

Where is your computer
I dont have one I replied.
He had the look of bewilderment.
I am here to think, not to work.
More confusion from ZDistrict (He was actually speechless).

Dilbert

The Windows Gaming Championship should have started on May 10th (yesterday) but the custom PC’s the organizers had ordered were not cleared by the Kuwait customs. The event has now been postponed till May 17th and 18th. Here is a message from the organizer:

Dear All, Please accept our sincere apologies but due to a technical problem, we haveto postpone the Windows Gaming Championship Kuwait event until next week. The event will take place on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th May, on the ground floor of Sharq Market Mall, near Zara and Next from 1pm – 10pm on both days.

With many thanks and best regards,
Louise Hickman

For more information visit the official tournament website. [Link]
Here is the website of the Gulf Gamers. [Link]

Thanks Yousef

Marzouq posted the other day about how slow Aramex has been lately. Well I wanted to share my experience with USWS which for some reason I thought would also be slow. On Friday morning my package arrived in my US mailbox. Late Friday night I get an SMS telling me my package shipped. Today morning I arrived to find my package on my desk. Turned out it was delivered to my office yesterday after I left work. It took 3 days from the US to Kuwait. Thats fast.

My item was a Western Digital 500GB hard drive. Its my first USB 2.0 drive (other then my passport drive). All my main external drives are firewire but since I ran out of firewire ports and the USB 2.0 version is much cheaper I decided to get it. The drive cost me $170 from Amazon and Marzouq has a review on it. The drive arrived just in time because I only had 4GB of space left. Now the total of my hard drives add up to 1.7TB.

I was in Hawalli yesterday when I decided to pass by the store Best Buy Kuwait (not official Best Buy just a copy). Turns out they had the Sony UMPC on display. I had only seen it before online so it was cool seeing it in person. Its super tiny and I really wish Apple would come up with something like it. They were selling it for KD699. [Link]

Busynow gave me this link for another online computer store in Kuwait. This one though seems to have much better prices and a more usable interface. You can also pay by Knet or Visa. [Link]

note: it seems the site just launched today