Bill Gates' lunchbox on eBay

By Tech Digest → More by this author

9 Nov 2005 08:51

Get your MS powered sandwich container

Tech Digest Certified gadget obsessives Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny scour Gizmoville for the oddest digital goodies, Bayraider keeps tabs on the best and worst of eBay and Propellerhead answers your PC queries.

Bill Gates’ lunchbox on eBay

Bill Gates Lunchbox Over on eBay US, 'Foodbankny' has 17 lunchboxes designed by mostly American stars, which are being auctioned in aid of childrens lunch programmes in New York and South Africa. You can put your lunch treats in boxes designed by Joaquin Phoenix (his box looks like he put slightly less effort into it than one would need to pronounce his name) or a beautiful, feminine, albeit slightly putrid-orange design by The King's daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. But the rose among the thorns is without a doubt Microsoft's Bill Gates, who looks like he passed the task onto one of his very talented software designers. Check ‘em out here.

T-Mobile brings Sidekick II to UK

We hear through the old mobile phone grapevine that T-Mobile is going to bring the Sidekick II, aka the Hiptop version two, to the UK. Now we have had a run in with the Sidekick before and kind of liked its kooky design, A1 messaging facilities and not at all bad web browser. But it was a nightmare using it as a phone and is there any point in bringing out a youth-ish mobile these days which doesn’t have an MP3 player? And as for its VGA camera that's sooo 2004. Anyhow we’ll be intrigued to see what, if any, tweaking T-Mobile has done to the device to get it ready for the UK. We suspect it may be taking version two to prepare the ground for version three which should arrive early next year.

PC tip of the day from Propellerhead

Make Word easier on the eye

The bright white text area of most word processors can become a quite tiring on the eyes after a few hours. You can of course jiggle the brightness and contrast settings on your monitor but a far better solution is to give your blank pages a light grey tint. In Windows XP open Display Properties by right-clicking an empty area of the desktop and select Properties or go to Display in Control Panel. Select the Appearance tab and click the Advanced button then Select the Appearance tab and click into the area marked Window Text. Next click on the Color box and choose the Other option. This will bring up a colour palette, select grey or white from the block of colour options and use the slider to the right of the multi-colour panel to adjust the level.

When you are happy with it click Add to Custom Colors then keep clicking OK to exit the dialogue boxes and XP will reset the colours. If you are using Windows 9x (95/98/ME/SE) it’s actually a little easier. Open your word processor and load a page of text, so you can judge the effect. Next, from the Start button select Settings, Control Panel and the Display icon. Select the Appearance tab and click into the area marked Window Text. Next click on the Color box and choose the Other option. This will bring up a colour palette, select grey or white from the block of colour options and use the slider to the right of the multi-colour panel to adjust the level. Click OK and if necessary re-adjust until you are satisfied with it. The tint only applies to the display and will not affect the way documents look when they are printed