Gadget nerds, praise the gods of content for your wishes have been answered. Before this site came along, you could waste half a day trying to keep up with the PDA office chatter and figuring out which manufacturer had added a megapixel or two to its latest camera. Now, simply peruse this site, then strut around with that knowledgeable look in your eye. Just dare somebody to ask you about plasma screens, Pocket PC phones or the merits of a 750-megabyte Zip drive. You'll be ready.

A Vegas tale

Wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas.html

I'm still not sure where the drama ends and the reality begins with this story. But like every good read, it hooks you on the first page and keeps you until the end. It's a tale of high stakes gambling, super smart students beating the system, huge amounts of cash and intimidating, burly men in ill-fitting suits. It's a six-page clickfest, so you might want to go for the print version.

How the mighty have fallen

www.uFAQ.org/

www.Mozilla.org/

What a sorry state of affairs browser software is in. The last straw for me was watching Netscape 7 dispense with the killer feature of Mozilla, its browser cousin: the popup ad blocker. So, if you must use Netscape products, you'll need this site. It shows you how to add this feature back and has other tips, tricks and tune-up hints as well. You might be better off with Mozilla, free of charge and free of ad crud.

What's old is new (inside)

www.RetroSystem.com/

I've never bought anything from this online store, but I love the concept. It provides kits to take old clunkers such as the Amiga 1000, Atari 2600 and the Nintendo NES and place reasonably modern PC computer hardware within. It's for Dremel devils and tinkerers only, because you'll get the bare minimum of hardware and "you are here" type of instructions.

A news junkie's dream

Ranchero.com/software/netnewswire/

www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/

I crave news that is relevant to my life. I want tech news, opinionated blogs, stuff from the far left and far right just to see what each is thinking. I want to behold the seedy underbelly of real, unexpurgated views from sources that haven't been homogenized, sanitized and filtered for the lowest common denominator. And NetNewsWire is my sword to slice through the rubbish and fill my brain with up-to-the-second knowledge. I'm wildly happy with it, but it's Mac OS X only. Perhaps Disobey's cross platform program might change your news reading habits on Windows, too.

Note to readers

The screensaver at ElectricSheep.org mentioned in last week's column works only on the Macintosh and Linux operating systems. No Windows version exists.

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