A year ago, we had a nice turnout for the first WordCamp in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. That event was announced about 8 months in advanced, and dew in quite a few speakers from throughout the United States. We had 5 tracks spanning from 9:00AM to 7:00PM. Actual attendance numbers were never released, but somewhere between 250 and 400 people is a good estimate.
What do you do when you are trying to keep symmetry in your device, but only have 2 speakers and a volume rocker to fill the spaces? If you’re HP, you’ll hide the serial number barcode on a popout tab in this fourth space.
Naturally, they could have done something useful with the space. Placing a SD (or micro SD) card slot in this location comes to mind. Possibly, this was going to hold the SIM for the 3G version that was never released. Regardless, it is still odd.
-John Havlik
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A few Sunday mornings back, I was woken up by the dog, who was in a quite agitated state. The media center had been trying to come out of hibernation to check TV schedules and do the other miscellaneous stuff that brings it out of sleep. However, it kept rebooting instantly out of the BIOS. Every time the memory check passed, it would beep, annoying the dog, who passed the annoyance onto me.
Unplugging the Cisco Valet Connector allowed the media center to boot properly. Cool, well not really, as a WiFi adapter should not keep a computer from booting. The fact that the Valet Connector shows up as a USB flash drive before becoming a WiFi adapter seemed odd to be before. And, I’m placing part of the blame on that behavior for this constant rebooting. To resolve the issue, I removed USB flash drives from the boot list in the motherboard’s BIOS.
When the media center finally booted, I noticed another issue. The Valet forgot that it was supposed to be in WiFi adapter mode. This one was my fault. If you do not complete the device setup using the included easy setup software, the device may not remember its state after reboot. Awesome, right? After completing the setup within the included easy setup software I have not had either issue reappear for a week now.
-John Havlik
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It seems like whenever Woot is selling a very cheap, or somewhat decent USB WiFi adapter I’ll end up picking one up. In the past I’ve picked up two Netgear WPN111 USB WiFi adapters, and a Netgear WG111t. I’ve never been a fan of either model, but they did the job and were super cheap. A few weeks back, Woot had the CISCO valet connector (Model No: AM10), in new condition, for a decent price (almost went for 2).
This past spring, I took an interesting class as part of my master’s degree program titled ‘Circuits, Computation and Biology’. One of the many topics in the course was conditional permutations.