Modern Home Control Systems: Effective, Inexpensive, Easy to Install
If you ever saw a “Home of the Future” exhibit and thought you’d never be able to enjoy such awesome levels of home automation, well, your wait is over. With equipment available right now, you can assemble a do-it-yourself home-control system capable of managing everything from your lighting and ceiling fans to your heating, air conditioning, door locks, security cameras, and even your garage-door opener.
The Challenger (ThermalTake’s entry into the gaming keyboard market) is the kind of keyboard that’s looking to set itself apart. It does this most noticeably with a tiny fan that can be plugged in on either side of the keyboard to blow cool air across your hard-working hands and a set of custom, red keycaps that can be swapped in for the WASD and arrow keys. Do either of those features sound like something you can’t live without?
The Anansi is Razer’s MMO keyboard, a companion to the company’s Naga MMO gaming mouse. Functionally, it’s very similar to the BlackWidow Ultimate—both have fully rebindable keys, with five additional macro keys along the left, backlighting, and on-the-fly macro recording. Unlike the BlackWidow, the Anansi does not have mechanical keys, instead opting for more traditional dome-style keys. They’re not as responsive as mechanical keys, but are definitely at the high end of the dome-spectrum, with a satisfying amount of resistance and travel.
The Das Keyboard has two things going for it. One, it’s awesome. It has no labels on the keys. When you type on it, you look like a ninja. That’s awesome.
Keeping a list of complex hacker-vexing passwords is an absolute must for every computer user’s security plan. It’s also a royal pain in the neck. As we visit more and more sites, we consequently collect more login credentials, making for a motley collection of username and password combinations. In a bid to save their sanity, some PC owners opt to use the same login information for every site they frequent. Others resort to recording all of their login information on a piece of paper or pasting it into a Word document. With insecure stop-gap measures like these for keeping track of the keys to your digital kingdom, you may as well send hackers your personal information via email and be done with it.
A lot of PC enthusiasts leave their computers on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. After all, you never know when you’ll need to get a quick task done, and it’s a pain to have to wait for your computer to wake up from sleep mode, or (worse!) to boot.
It’s recently become popular for major PC game releases to be accompanied by their own line of branded peripherals, custom designed by big-name peripheral makers like Razer and SteelSeries. Frequently, these products are no more than a reskinning of a popular model, as is the case with the Call of Duty: Black Ops Stealth Mouse, which is essentially a rebranded Cyborg R.A.T. Other times, the tie-in is more substantial, as with the SteelSeries WoW mice, which feature unique, game-inspired designs as well as features and software intended to help you play the game better.
Microsoft Word. The name's practically synonymous with "productivity app." If you're reading this article at work (shame on you!) there's a pretty decent chance you've got a Word doc open right now, and you probably think you've got a good handle on Microsoft's word processor. We'll bet you don't know as much as you think you do.
Often, a budget build means buying parts that are a little past their prime—and don’t get us wrong, you can find great deals there. But for this month’s build, I knew I wanted to explore Intel’s hot new Sandy Bridge architecture—and, if I could swing it, one of AMD’s new Radeon 6800 series GPUs—while keeping my total budget under $1,000.
