I’ve got a single access point for my wireless network layer at the house and unfortunately have at least one real “dead spot” in the house. As luck would have it that dead spot is at the couch… so for some time I’ve looked at ways to extend the wireless network range or other ways. One such possibility of course, is a repeater. These days, most wireless repeaters I see either only work with their brand access point. (So a linksys repeater would only work with certain models of linksys access point…) Or… the repeater would only repeat 802.11g *(the newer wireless) traffic. Given that everything I’ve got is still 802.11b I didn’t really want to do a new round of hardware for ALL the wireless devices (the access point still works….) So… looking for a repeater I went.
Category: Hardware
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Small Ethernet Print Server
The Hawking Technology Print Server (HPS1P) is a nice little parallel port to ethernet print server that can be configured to make a single printer available to multiple machines on a LAN (local area network). It supports a number of different protocols and can be configured through a web interface, or with a Windows based control application. There are disadvantages with hooking a printer up to a pc to share over a network. First, the pc that shares the printer has to be up and reliable. Second, that pc has to be in a convenient location to the printer.
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Dell recalling 35,000 notebook batteries
Ouch, Dell is recalling 35,000 notebook batteries that were shipped between October 5rd and 13th of this year. They were made in China or Japan and “pose a risk of fire.” There is a web-site setup by Dell on the issue… here.
They also suggest
“Batteries subject to recall should not be used while awaiting a replacement battery pack from Dell, it says.”
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Tools of the trade…. USB network adapter
For a long time I really disliked seeing USB network adapters. The main reason is the performance. USB 1 can only do ~ 12Mbps which compared to a 10/100 ethernet controller “significantly limits your ability to do more than 10…” Even USB 2 supports 480 Mbps which should give you the ability to get full throughput of up to 200mbps with full duplexing. However, I still cringed at USB network adapters….
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Microsoft in “need” of old DVD drives for testing
It sounds like Microsoft Windows Vista will not support old DVD drives when it ships. By old, I’m talking about drives that don’t support the region selection limits that newer drives have. (In other words, they won’t support old drives that are effectively region free.) Supposedly this is because they lack the older drives to test.
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Tools of the trade…. External USB drive adapter
This is the first of a few articles that will highlight some of the tools/gadgets/gizmos that I find useful. I’m starting off with one that’s almost essential. External USB hard drive adapter. Recently, I’ve been looking for something a bit leaner than your typical usb -> hard drive converter. Yes, I’ve carried something like this for large (3.5″) hard drives to appointments. The idea is if you need to transfer data from an old pc to a new one, put the old drive in an external adapter and copy away.
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Frontier Labs – nexblack
I know it’s not an ipod… but I’m looking forward to hearing some word when Fronteir Labs releases their “Nexblack”. For background…. the nexblack is priced at around $89 (at the frontier labs store), but I’ve found $69 here. It’s a portable mp3/wma/wma with drm/ogg player (according to the spec sheet.) It uses AA batteries (2), has built-in recording, uses compactflash cards and according to the spec sheet will have a line-in (line-in recording as well). It also will have fm radio functions.
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Multiseat X under linux
Think about it: one pc, 3 monitors, 3 keyboards, 3 mice, 3 users all on the same machine at the same time doing different things. Ah yes, some of you are saying terminal clients, been there… Think of a standard whitebox pc powering it and a full graphical user interface and you have what’s known as multiseat X. There’s a mini-howto up at blog.chris.tylers.info on setting this up with XR11 v. R6.9/7.0
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Another entry on DBAN (boot disk to securely wipe a hard drive)
This kind of get’s glommed into hardware, software and security categories all…. I’ve mentioned DBAN a couple times already (Darik’s Boot and Nuke). I had a chance to sit down this afternoon to nuke a few disks I’ve collected over the last little while and thought I’d pass along some points on the DBAN for securely wiping the contents of hard drives. First, no matter what you do to a drive, there may be a data recovery center that can get something from it. I’m talking clean rooms, 1000’s of dollars and some good forensic recovery techniques. Why?
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PCworld top 100 products of 2005
Although some of the linked reviews are old, PCWorld has released their list of top 100 products of 2005. It’s nice to see a number of familiar products in the list, several Google offerings are listed (main search engine, desktop, and GMail at #2). Ubuntu makes #26 which is noteworthy. I notice Wikipedia is in there as well. Many of the items on the list of course, have been out a bit longer than a year so it’s not 100 top NEW products, just 100 top products. Mozilla Firefox tops the list at #1.