A few months ago I purchased the Hoover Mach 5 vacuum cleaner from Walmart for around $160 at Walmart. I was looking for a replacement for our Hoover Fold Away. The Fold Away did not have much suction power, and the filter clogged quickly.

I originally sought out to buy a Hoover Fusion, which has Dyson-like cyclonic filtering technology. I discovered that the Fusion had been discontinued and replaced with the Mach 3. The Mach 3 has a cyclonic main filter and a washable pre-filter. It comes with a turbo brush tool, dusting brush, 2 extension wands, and a crevice tool. The turbo brush excels at removing pet hair, but I have found that it needs servicing once in a while. The pet hair tends to wrap around the ends of the brush where it rotates, eventually preventing it from rotating. It can be cleaned by disassembling it with a Phillips screwdriver.

The Mach 5 improves on the Mach 3 by adding a HEPA filter, a dual chamber cyclonic filter, a retractable power cord, an adjustable handle, and a brush roll control. Cord rewind is a nice feature that reels in the cord at the press of a button. No more rolling up the power cord. Another nice feature is that the brush roll automatically turns off when the Mach 5 is in upright position.

The Mach 5 offers many of the same features as a Dyson much less money. There are no filters to replace, and no loss of suction.

Mines better than yours!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Nay Nay

About a month ago I bought 2 Holmes air purifiers. I had been sneezing a lot, and the last air purifier I had helped with that. For the bedroom, I bought a Holmes HAP412. It is a small tower unit with 3 speeds and an ionizer. It uses one HEPA filter, and has no filter change indicator. You have to look at the filter to determine if you need to change it. This unit seems to clean the air in the bedroom reasonably well, but I have no method to tell for sure. At night we leave it on high, and use it for white noise. When it was new it was almost inaudible at the low speed, but now it is louder. It's not a big deal for me.

For the living room we got a Holmes Harmony HAP1625. It is a rectangular unit that is designed to be placed against a wall. The air intake is on the front, the exaust is on the top. It's supposed to circulate the air in the room in a circular motion. It has simple digital display that displays speed 1-4. Speed 1 is almost inaudible. 4 is a little loud. It is recommended to leave it on 2 or 3. It can be programmed to turn itself after a preset number of hours.

The HAP1625 uses the same type of filter as the HAP412, but it uses two of them. It also has 2 non-washable carbon prefilters that are treated with baking soda. The HEPA filters are treated with Microban antibacterial coating. They are supposed to last about a year.

Since purchasing these air purifiers I haven't been sneezing very much, and I don't wake up with a stuffy nose. I'm happy with these purifiers, I'd recommened them to anyone to wants to breathe cleaner air.

Question: I bought a Holmes HAP412 for my son's bedroom. He lost the manual and I'm not sure when the ionizer is on or how to use the ionizer with or without the HEPA filtering. I went to the Holmes web site, but it's a mess. No Manuals for their rproducts, they only want to sell filters and machines. Do you know how to operate the ionizer?

Thanks.

I just read my monthly DreamHost newsletter, and I was suprised to see that all accounts would be given 4 times the disk space and 8 times the bandwidth, no additional cost. They also increased the weekly disk space and bandwidth quotas accordingly.

I have the basic level plan, which is as low as 7.95 per month. I now have about 21GB disk space and over 1TB of bandwidth to play with. Every week my disk space grows by 160MB and my bandwidth grows by 8GB.

If you operate one or more websites, I strongly recommend switching to DreamHost, they are phenomenal value.

http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?sproutworks

Dani and I were shopping at Albertsons, and outside the store, they had a display of 3 pack compact fluorescent light bulbs. They were priced at 10 for $10, but you can buy them a pack at a time and still get the same deal. This means a single compact fluorescent bulb only costs 33 cents. This price is made possible by a subsidy from San Diego Gas & Electric.

The blubs are manufactured by Lights of America, and they are called mini twisters, because they have a spiral shape. They are equivalent to 100W incandecent bulbs, but only use 26W. The package says each bulb lasts up to 5 years and can save up to $213.

This is a wonderful innovation for the environment. I read somewhere that in America, only 5% of households use compact fluorescent bulbs. I have never seen a television ad for these bulbs, and I think this country needs to be educated about smart energy choices. Perhaps more power companies could offer subsidies. In San Diego, there are many stores selling subsidized bulbs for about $1.

Today I am writing about the marvel of technology that I wear on my wrist. It's my Casio Atomic Solar G-shock watch. It is my third G-shock watch. This watch contains two major features not found in most watches, atomic timekeeping, and a solar cell.

The atomic timekeeping means that the watch will attempt to set itself every day. There is a radio transmitter in the middle of the US, that is constantly broadcasting time signals that are synchronized with an atomic clock. Every day, in the wee hours of the morning, the watch will listen to these signals 3 times, an hour apart. If it can get a good enough signal, it will set itself to the time carried in the signal. The manual says to leave the watch so it can "see" out a window when it tries to set itself. I never do that, so it usually sets itself every few days. Even so, it is always within a second of the correct time. A graph on the dislay indicates the last signal level receiced, and pressing the receive button shows when the last synchronization took place.

My watch also charges itself in sunlight, so I don't need to worry about changing the battery (the manual says that it may need a new battery in 5 years, however). There is a charge level indicator with high, med, and low. When I bought the watch, it was at medium. It has been at high ever since, except when I was using the auto backlight. The auto backlight turns the backlight on when you turn your wrist at an angle that makes it think you are looking at it. Perhaps it should disable auto backlight if the solar cell indicates you are in bright light.

My watch also has a world time mode, which I never use, and a mode that takes recording of times. I never use that either. It also has 4 alarms, a snooze alarm, and a stopwatch. It doesn't have a countdown timer, like my previous g-shock had, which I miss. I liked to use the countdown timer when I was cooking stuff.

My watch is model GW300A-1V, which carries a suggested retail price of $99.00. I got it for $60 at Costco. I am very happy with it, and I can't wait to see what new things Casio will add to their watches next.

http://gshock.com/

I figured this would happen sooner or later. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has begun testing an Italian license plate scanner system to find stolen cars. This technology has it roots in the optical scanning of postal mail in Italy. Now it has been adapted to read license plates. The system uses four cameras in a teardrop shaped unit about a foot long. It is mounted on the front brackets of police cars.

This system can scan 500 license plates in an hour, and check with a police database for stolen cars. In one night of testing, it has scanned 12,000 plates, 7 of which belonged to stolen cars. 3 Arrests were made based on the findings.

If this goes into widespread use, it could make it a lot harder on car theives. Imagine if these cameras were installed in intersections, and simply driving a stolen car through an intersection would summon police. There are lots of "big brother" aspects to consider as well. What if they use this to detect cars on the road with expired tags?

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,67864,00.html?tw=rss.TEK

On Wednesday, SBC Communications announced a deal on their SBC Yahoo! Express DSL package. New customers who also buy SBC local phone service can get DSL service for only $14.95. This puts DSL in the same price range as the cheaper dial up options, such as NetZero, Netscape, and PeoplePC. This is a great deal considering that this DSL package is roughly 25 times faster than dial up.

If you are using AOL right now, you should ask yourself why you are paying so much for such a slow connection. Is it really worth waiting 10-20 seconds or more just for a page to load? Don't be fooled by AOL Top Speed or NetZero Hi Speed. These gimmicks do nothing to speed up images, videos, music, or other downloads.

E3 is going on in Los Angeles, and the world's video game makers are showing off some very cool stuff. I watched a few videos from E3, and some of the things that have been created are mind-blowing.

Microsoft has been promoting their Xbox 360. It is supposed to take online gaming to a new level, with integrated online storefront, content creation, video chat, voice chat, wireless, and more.

I think enabling people to sell content they've created will open up a huge portal to the creative efforts of a diverse collection of gamers. This sort of thing has been done on PCs for a while, and it's nice to see it happen on a console.

The Xbox 360 can play music and video streamed from your PC, wirelessly. That is breaking new ground for a console system.

The graphics I saw were incredible. I am very eager to play games with full dynamic lighting and physics. I even have dreams about being inside a game, and the kind of graphics my dreaming brain produces are starting to become able to be rendered by a machine in real time, albeit not at quite the same resolution (how many pixels can someone imagine anyway?)

MicroSoft has said they are aiming for a billion people to use their new online network. That is an insanely powerful idea, it's like an Internet inside the Internet, with more of a human touch. I hope they reach their goal, but it seems unrealistic.

The Playstation 3 was also very amazing. Sony has revealed that the PS3 Cell Processor has 8 cores, each running at 3.2ghz. That is a lot more power than most computers have, which are just starting to come in dual core flavors. Imagine that a game system about the size of a DVD player can do more computing than the full blown computer you are using now. That is a testament of the game industry's power to innovate.

I hope IBM/Sony make cell processors available to PC manufacturers, which would seriously upset the AMD/Intel battle. It would be a great advancement to mankind, bringing powerful tools of creation, communication, and entertainment into homes around the world.

I bought a pack of 10 LEDs from Fry's Electronics the other day. I intend to build battery powered devices with them. I used to play with these as a kid, and I want to build more complex devices now.

According to this site http://www.arunet.co.uk/tkboyd/ele1pp2.htm

, I need to add a resistor to my circuit (around 400 to 650 ohms) to make the LED work. When I used to play with LEDs I didn't need any resistors to make them work, so I figure the modern LEDs operate differently.

The aforementioned site explains how to connect LEDs to a computer's parralel port. That is of great interest to me because I can write software to control the LEDs.