It’s about time for another hardware review as it reflects what’s on my mind these days. I know that a lot of people just go for anything they are recommended, but if your income depends on the performance and reliability of your computer at home (= home office), you’ll maybe pay extra attention to this and I know a lot of geeks who are much more demanding when it comes to their computer.
Searching for reviews on the HP 6930p – which is supposed to substitute my beloved HP nx8220 – I came across this video:
Would you try that with your MacBookPro? ….eh?
Ever wondered what an opened 2.5″ hard disk drive looks like?
Now you know.
This is what happens when you trust that buying a used 60GB 2.5″ HDD will “be enough” to secure your important data.
It failed to work after a year, gave me some headache the other day (managed to recover 99,5% of my data) and has now received its final treatment.
I never thought this would actually work. But it does.
We currently share a room in this row/town house, right under the roof. The DSL modem that connects this house to the internet is in the basement, and I have in the past used this Edimax router as a repeater for the wireless signal (not WDS-mode!) so that we could also enjoy the connectivity to the internet with our computers upstairs (see fig.01):
There are two floors in between the basement and our “penthouse” flat and the wireless signal would often fail to work, even though the data rate was quite good on the repeater. I think there is a microwave somewhere near our repeater and the base station in the neighbouring house which just jams the signal quality. Both the DSL modem-router-wlan-ap and the repeater upstairs had been tuned with 4dB antennas.
Wireless networks unfortunately tend to have the nasty habbit of interfering each other, especially if there isn’t enough “space” on the frequency range. And then, also, most of these conventional (= IEEE 802.11) wireless networks are still to fragile to deliver consistent data rates. By the time I set this network up in late 2007, most of our neighbours still didn’t have their own WLANetwork, but today most of them have do so it was about time for a change.
I had read about these “HomePlugs” – the “industry trade group for power line communication” which is a technology that connects LAN devices to each other through the power lines in a home. The manufacturers of these devices claim that it will only work on the same (electrical) phase, and since this house also has an electrical heating system and a second fuse box under the roof (next to the one in the basement), I initially thought it wouldn’t work. But it does!
Fig.02 shows the current setup using two HomePlugs I’ve bought earlier this week. There are different manufacturers selling kits with two such plugs – mine was relatively cheap – an “MSI ePower 85 Kit Version II“. MSI claims this device to deliver up to 85 Mbps in optimal conditions but the actual rate is around 30 Mbps which is perfectly fine with me as our DSLine currently is around 8Mbps only. It’s also said to have 56bit DES encryption and you can also give it its own network name. The best part is the installation: Just open the box, take a plug and connect a LAN cable to it and the other end of the cable into your LAN device (here: the DSL modem router) and plug it into the next socket (I’ve even used an extension cable which shouldn’t be done but it still works). I then plugged in the other plug to a wall socket upstairs and connected it to an 8-port 10/100 switch which distributes the signal to all four computers as well as a VoIP phone and an HP OfficeJet 7210 network printer. This MSI ePower Kit comes with utility software to set extra parameters such as a network name or the password (which unfortunately only runs on Windows systems), but you won’t have to adjust anything. Just plug it in and you’re done!
I was a bit sceptical if this would work out due to the additional power network in this house + possible intereferences that would spoil the reception of shortware radio (many radio hams actually hate this technology), but it just works like a charm and even my radioscanner hasn’t complained yet.
For anyone who’s been having problems with a wireless network – if the voltage is more or less stable (= probably not in Kenya?), I’d recommend these HomePlug/powerline devices as the perfect alternative to having (longer) LAN cables from one room to the other or even an unstable wireless connection.
AOB: I’ve once again changed the Feedburner link to my RSS-feed which should now be: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/kikuyumoja . To subscribe to my feed, pls use this new link by either saving it on your RSS reader, or alternatively click on the “subscribe me, baby!” on the top row of this page. Thank you. (thx, @Czed !)
I don’t know if something like the following already exists out there, but I was just going through my feeds on Google Reader as I had recently developed an interest in Japan-related blogs (Gaijin blogs, as I’d call them – much more interesting than traveller blogs) and thought about a website that lists sites in the way humans sort them.
For instance, I grouped/tagged all Africa-related sites as “afrosphere” and European sites with no particular topic as “Eurosphere” on my Google Reader. It may not be the smartest solution, but it helps me to quickly identify where something belongs to (again, according to my own understanding which may be different from yours).
You may also see from my folders that it’s sometimes difficult to caterogize one website into a unique folder. For instance, Steve often writes about the musical Golden Afrique on his blog – so I didn’t know where to save his feed: afrospehere or ngoma?
Google knows about this problem and consequently enabled users to save their feeds in more than one folder. In dubio pro reo – so I saved his blog in both folders.
I even read the wonderful “Everything is miscellaneous” by David Weinberger the other day and think that it makes sense to tag all content. However, it’s still my own tags/keywords – and sometimes I’d like to know what kind of classification others are using on their readers.
One fine way is to check out delicious.com – that social bookmarking service I’ve been using for quite some time now – and see the tags ppl have used on their saved bookmarks. The screenshot above is a search for “Kikuyumoja” – lists 35 search results.
So the idea is to come up with a service that takes bookmarks / links from various resources (e.g. social bookmarking sites, feedreaders, etc.), looks at their tags and combines these with a link:
Kikuyumoja.com – my blog – would probably create a tag cloud like:
Kenya Germany mobile_blogging cool twitter Africa social_media blog moblog water ecosan internet mobile gprs Safaricom umts Nokia WordPress eee imagineering …
…and so on.
Again, I don’t know if something like that already exists, but the idea behind such an approach is not to display my own categorisation (because otherwise I would just come up with a tag cloud on the sidebar of my blog) – but instead a user / reader generated tag cloud: I am not interested in my own stuff, but in yours.
In other words: in case you’ve saved my blog on your feedreader – how did you tag it?
Technically spoken, I imagine a Yahoo pipes app – but how do you access those private tags on feedreaders?
I recently purchased a refurbished DVB-T (TV) USB stick for use on the Asus eeePC 901. I also have another – much bigger and older – DVB-T stick (Yakumo Quickstick, modified) for use on the other laptop:
old vs. new // 8cm vs. 4cm
The new stick is based on the Siano SMS 1000 chipset which basically are these two (tiny) chips as seen on the pcb above.
Such chips are btw also used on mobile phones that come with an internal DVB-T receiver and are really small (especially if compared to the conventional DVB-T USB sticks which are often even larger than normal memory keys).
Oh, and this Siano 1000 device (sold as “Terratec Piranha” some time ago) is also capable of receiving DMB and DVB-H (not supported in Germany).
Some sources said it *may* not be compatible with GNU/Linux but I am yet to test that with MeTV (my fav app on Ubuntu for TV) and see if that’s really true. I mainly bought it because it was cheap (hey, refurbished! :-) and because of its tiny size. The initial plan was to mod my eeePC and install this thing inside the laptop but it would still require an external antenna (proper DVB-T reception really depends on a decent antenna) so I somehow gave up along the way and am now just using it as an external USB device because it’s already much smaller/shorter than the other DVB-T stick.
This way (with the antenna on the back side of the display) it is still portable enough – although I am still tempted to directly solder the antenna cord to the device, omitting the antenna connectors.
This TV stick currently receives 22 channels of which most are just crap. Maybe that’s why we never invested in a proper TV set?
Another sweet reason that justifies the recent purchase of a 2nd hand eee Asus 901 is the compact size and weight of the power supply.
An 8,9″ display at 1024x600px resolution combined with a rather tiny keyboard for sure isn’t as perfect as the ideal combination of these two worlds – which would probably be an advanced 11,1″ notebook @ 1280x800px and full CoreDuo CPU – but any kg I do not have to carry around is very much appreciated.
Netbooks are cool and if Apple and AMD do not agree on this, then it’s just because they haven’t come up with suitable alternatives. With the worldwide increase in netbook sales, it becomes obvious that many consumers actually like these low-cost computers.
My eeePC has a 6-cell battery that lasts for at least 6hrs (tested!) – which provides real mobile comfort so I could even leave this power supply at home.
I think that netbooks – which ideally also come with an internal 3G modem and a basic Linux OS – are the perfect computer for most average households, whether in Europe, the US or Africa.
