Headworx

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a LAN (Local Area Network) connection wherever there are power sockets around the house? Most of today's "connected" gear is mains - powered. A plug in a socket on a wall. Nowadays Ethernet should be there as well... But unfortunately there is not... How many times have I had a need to connect a device to the home network and simply there was no network socket around... Of course there is WiFi (Wireless Ethernet). But there are several cons of using wireless... WiFi is hackable. Last week during a lazy day I was browsing logs on my home router (the DFL-800 by DLink , highly recommended) and I discovered there was a "guest" MAC address hanging around... Something pretty unusual, as I was using WPA security settings. It took me a while to get rid of the "guest", and to increase security I moved the bar up a notch to the WPA2 level. Since then my Vista X61 WiFi card is losing connection once - twice a day and Windows r...

Prices of personal computers are going down. Nothing special about it you should say... Well... in the 1990s I used to say a PC was costing around $1000 - the same price in 1990 and in 2000. Of course in 2000 the machine was a lot more powerful compared to the 1990 one, but basically the things you were able to do with it were pretty much the same... I was an active programmer at that time and all the time I was using a $1000 PC to get the job done. Today I am a C-level email worker, getting paid to read and write emails and do a little Web browsing... My latest email machine is a dual core, 2GB RAM, 200GB hard drive. Oh yes I could live with a smaller drive but I simply like to have all the stuff with me - music, pictures, and of course documents. And yes I could live with 200MB of RAM, but unfortunately my Vista OS could not... I was living in 200MB RAM space for 5 years on the Windows XP street, but after moving to the Vista street, I had to opt for 10x more. Dual core? Sure, one co...

Two weeks ago a friend of mine handed me a pendrive with a LinuxMCE demo video. After watching this video I had a jawdrop I have not fully recovered from till now.... Technically LinuxMCE is an add-on to Kubuntu. It is centered around media entertainment and covers an entire variety of smart home scenarios. And definitely seems to have the most complete vision of a smart home. LinuxMCE focuses on easy and consistent user interface. So there is an always on, always full - screen media (movies, slideshow) with very clever three button remote control, reflected by a very subtle UI blended on top of the payed media. The buttons are [Media] to control WHAT you are watching (channels, recordings, chapters, cue / rev, ...), [Ambience] to control HOW you are watching (volume, brightness,... up / down) and [Menu] for advanced functions. In addition to the three buttons there are two standard [OK] and [Cancel] and the remote controller is motion sensitive (gyro remote, a'la Wii). LinuxMCE...

Last week I promised to continue the Vista story, focusing on speed. I must admit the speed I have been able to squeeze out of the Lenovo X61 is very satisfying now, with a few exceptions. So let me try to describe the actions I applied (relevant to both hardware and software), step by step. Software: As I pointed out in my first real rant on Vista, the first problem you face when buying a new computer nowadays is the enormous amount of bloatware that bogs down the system. So the first step is to clean up the system. Really the best way would be to perform a clean system install from original Microsoft media, without any demos / trials / other teasers eating your CPU, battery and RAM. The second step is to get rid of unnecessary native Vista services. There is a good guide at http://www.speedyvista.com/services.html . I cannot point to anything specific, as what you may or may not need depends on what you use the computer for. The third step is to watch CPU consumption when adding new...

Yes, Vista is the hot topic again. It has been almost three months now and I feel a little bit better with the OS that initially ruined my life. Things are settling down a bit and I can even point to some features I like in Vista :) How about that? I have got used to the new Windows Explorer features. Still have a feeling they do not behave the way I want them to - I keep changing the view too often, they keep reverting to some defaults with those big folder icons. They must be looking good on a 1080p, 50 inch TV, but my laptop is only 12 inch, so I definitely prefer a more compacted view. And it freezes less frequently. Observing the behavior of the system I nailed down the blue screens and freezes to one certain kind of application - a virtual CD/DVD drive. My Thinkpad X61 does not have a CD/DVD drive, so Lenovo shipped an Intervideo Virtual Drive application to allow making an "image" of a disk on the hard drive. I do not watch DVDs on my laptop (if I did, I would have bou...