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Leave it to our old friend Steve Jobs to walk out on stage and tell everyone what they wanted to hear... almost. Everyone was expecting some new iPods, and Jobs and Co. are releasing three new models for the holiday season, plus some new colors for Shuffle. On top of that, new features and some price moves were announced... all good, but no doubt it's going to irritate those that have just bought iPhones.

I found this out a few months ago—how to enter special characters into a document. I was using a form program called "PureEdge," and I needed to insert an em dash (—). Since I had Adobe InDesign handy, I just used the glyph menu and copied one from InDesign and pasted it into PureEdge. Sure, that worked for me, but not everyone has InDesign handy, and it takes much longer that way. A little Googling yielded the answer—ALT+0151 on the numeric keypad. As I found out, ALT+four digits on the keypad is how any special characters are entered (without some sort of character menu). Here is a list of all of them.

I hadn't heard of this device until recently, so I bought one to try it out—the Logitech Xbox Play Link. It is a discontinued item, but it can be easily found [new] on eBay (got mine for under $30 shipped). Setup is painless—connect one module to a router (or modem) and the other to the ethernet device you want to extend. It is rated at 1.5Mb, but in performance tests I got about half that. Note that it uses RF and not Wi-Fi, so there is absolutely no configuration required. This device will work with an Xbox (go figure), a computer, Vonage box, or whatever.