So I've been keeping questions written down for another question thread. As usual, these are sort of minor questions that I can't find answer for through my own research, and I hate to load up the Off Topic forum with these questions. So without further ado:

1) My parent's home has, nearly since our family first moved in over 22 years ago, been excellent at killing small electronics. We have killed hair dryers, toasters, at least seven dust busters of various quality, etc. One day we'll just pick up the device and it won't work. What would do that?

2) My fiancee's father bought an outdoor fireplace last year to put on his deck and make it possible to sit outside in the winter. The only problem? Smoke! It's too smoky to sit close to it, and if you sit far enough away to avoid that, you're sitting in the cold. Doesn't some wood produce less smoke than others? What kinds?

3) I'm a Redskins fan. For a team that thrives on merchandising, they have some of the ugliest hats ever made. Here's what I want: a maroon cap, fitted (size 18), deep (most baseball caps look like beanies on me), with nothing other than the classic Redskins logo on it. Does anyone know of any services that will build a hat for you?

4) Does anyone have preferred software for encoding in H.264 on Windows? I'm thinking of encoding home movies in that format, so that in the future I can set up my parents with the iTV (I'm going to back up the uncompressed videos to spare hard drives that I'll store somewhere).

5) Does anyone here use a start/home page service? I've been using Protopage for months now, and they recently "upgraded" it to version 3. It's worse. There are bugs that I'm sure will get ironed out, but they've moved their RSS reading features in a direction that I'm not happy with at all. I'm testing out Netvibes right now, and it's okay, but not great, plus it oddly has no way of adding links to your page, which makes no sense to me as a start page. So can anyone suggest a completely customizeable start/home/portal site?