 I've used various powerline adapters for several years. They now can go up to 500 megabits per second, but 85 or 200 will be cheaper. I currently use TrendNet Powerline routers. Why not use wifi? The bands are becoming crowded. You can try to use 5Ghz N routers, and they help, but if all your other devices - your phone, iPod, Kindle all have to use the 2.4GHz wifi, it can get congested. Wireless USB peripherals and Bluetooth also use the same band. Not everything supports the 5GHz band, so your laptop might not Powerline adapters need passwords, but they are between the adapters and you only have to use the setup utility once. They are basically ethernet bridges. I have my cable router plugged in where the cable comes in and the signal is best, then have my wifi and powerline adapters plugged into that router (it has 4 ports). I've not had any problem streaming or even sending files between computers. I have several 200Mb/s refurbished models and they work well for that, but I have gigabit switches at my central computer "nerve center". The powerline adapters also make printers a lot easier to setup. I have a Brother printer that is finicky about Wifi: it can attach USB, Ethernet, or Wifi, but even after typing in the correct information when attached with one of these other methods it often "fails to associate". Instead, I just use the powerline adapter, and instantly it is on ethernet with no headaches. Well, there is one. A powerline adapter uses up an electrical socket, which is where the "Liberator" comes in. Basically, a 3 pronged pass-through extension cord. The short plug-depth seems to play well with the powerline adapter, and the extension is hefty enough for my laser printer. The Liberators also work well with power strips or even to go sideways when space is at a premium. There are a few rare cases where powerline adapters have problems. One is if there is something extremely electrically noisy on the same branch (and if it isn't noisy you need the passwords to prevent your neighbors from snooping). This usually involves some huge motor, arc welding, or other industrial process involving intermittent high current. Another thing is if there are any ground loops or ifhot and ground get swapped by adapters or bad wiring. Also it helps to avoid circuits with dimmers and microwaves, though I've only had the problem when some part of the house wiring was wrong enough to show bars on my old CRT TV when the microwave was on. The powerline signal cannot pass through the large (utility pole) transformers. There is a length limit, but I haven't been in a position to see how fast the signal goes at hundreds or thousands of feet. If wifi works and the total cost of adapters and such is low, it might be a be a better solution, but for reasonable distances where there is lots of interference or if you only have ethernet, nothing beats powerline adapters. -- Thomas ZTRENDnet 200 Mbps Powerline AV Adapter Kit Available from Amazon TRENDnet 500 Mbps Powerline AV Adapter Kit Available from Amazon Power Strip Liberators Available from Amazon Manufactured by TRENDnet Sample Excerpts:
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Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Friday
Powerline Ethernet Adapters and Powerstrip Liberators
Wednesday
Applecore Cable Manager
 I have really been enjoying these simple rubber cores that cheaply and effectively organize cords of all sorts. They make it easy to wrap a cord around due to the shape (like an apple core...duh) with slits on both ends to thread cord through. I find the hardness of the rubber just right; firm enough to hold the cord, but soft enough to be easy to bend open to insert cords. There are three sizes: small for something like earbud cords, medium for a phone/ipod etc. charger-size cord, and large for computer charges or appliances. I haven't tried the largest size yet, but love the ones I have. They come in a variety of bright colors which helps when it comes to finding and organizing cords. -- David Rosenfeld Applecore Cable Manager Small, Medium, Large $2, $3, $5 Available from and manufactured by Applecore |
Applecore Cable Manager
I have really been enjoying these simple rubber cores that cheaply and effectively organize cords of all sorts. They make it easy to wrap a cord around due to the shape (like an apple core...duh) with slits on both ends to thread cord through. I find the hardness of the rubber just right; firm enough to hold the cord, but soft enough to be easy to bend open to insert cords. There are three sizes: small for something like earbud cords, medium for a phone/ipod etc. charger-size cord, and large for computer charges or appliances. I haven't tried the largest size yet, but love the ones I have. They come in a variety of bright colors which helps when it comes to finding and organizing cords. Applecore Cable Manager Available from and manufactured by Applecore (image via GearDiary) |
Friday
Amnesty International!
Review of another successful event for CDI College...
Wednesday
Calgarians helping Albertans...
Let's see more Generosity of Spirit, eh? :)
Review more about CDI College...
Leaked video of how the Blackberry Storm 3 (code named Monaco) may function...
Click image for video.
By the way, Dale Bennett got me interested in these, originally.
This sexy device has yet to be officially announced.
(Sad sauce.)
Leaked video of how the Blackberry Storm 3 (code named Monaco) may function...
Click image for video.
By the way, Dale Bennett got me interested in these, originally.
This sexy device has yet to be officially announced.
(Sad sauce.)
Saturday
Thursday
Marketing Presentations
Our teams analyzed the marketing efforts of the following businesses:
- Guess Clothing,
- Home Depot retail stores,
- Westside Leisure Centre,
- and Calgary Transit.
Wednesday
Roombots: autonomous, mobile, evolutionary self-assembling furniture
Roombots are autonomous, roving furniture segments that cruise around your house, looking for each other and spontaneously organizing themselves into furnishings that evolve based on how you use them. It's a project from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. This project intends to design and control modular robots, called Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves, self-assembles, self-reconfigures, and self-repairs. Modular robots are robots made of multiple simple robotic modules that can attach and detach (Wikipedia: Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics).
Connectors between units allow the creation of arbitrary and changing structures depending on the task to be solved. Compared to "monolithic" robots, modular robots offer higher versatility and robustness against failure, as well as the possibility of self-reconfiguration. The type of scenario that we envision for the Rolex Learning Center is a group of Roombots that autonomously connect to each other to form different types of furniture, e.g. stools, chairs, sofas and tables, depending on user requirements. This furniture will change shape over time (e.g. a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa) as well as move using actuated joints to different locations depending on the users needs. When not needed, the group of modules can create a static structure such as a wall or a box.
Roombots: Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organizing furniture (via Beyond the Beyond)
Long-exposure photo of Roomba coverage
Concept for swarming "display blocks"
What happens to junk left behind in foreclosed homes?
Roombots: Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organizing furniture (via Beyond the Beyond)
Long-exposure photo of Roomba coverage
Concept for swarming "display blocks"
What happens to junk left behind in foreclosed homes?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8bYK2xityP4/roombots-autonomous.html
Roombots: autonomous, mobile, evolutionary self-assembling furniture
Roombots are autonomous, roving furniture segments that cruise around your house, looking for each other and spontaneously organizing themselves into furnishings that evolve based on how you use them. It's a project from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. This project intends to design and control modular robots, called Roombots, to be used as building blocks for furniture that moves, self-assembles, self-reconfigures, and self-repairs. Modular robots are robots made of multiple simple robotic modules that can attach and detach (Wikipedia: Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics).
Connectors between units allow the creation of arbitrary and changing structures depending on the task to be solved. Compared to "monolithic" robots, modular robots offer higher versatility and robustness against failure, as well as the possibility of self-reconfiguration. The type of scenario that we envision for the Rolex Learning Center is a group of Roombots that autonomously connect to each other to form different types of furniture, e.g. stools, chairs, sofas and tables, depending on user requirements. This furniture will change shape over time (e.g. a stool becoming a chair, a set of chairs becoming a sofa) as well as move using actuated joints to different locations depending on the users needs. When not needed, the group of modules can create a static structure such as a wall or a box.
Roombots: Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organizing furniture (via Beyond the Beyond)
Long-exposure photo of Roomba coverage
Concept for swarming "display blocks"
What happens to junk left behind in foreclosed homes?
Roombots: Modular robotics for adaptive and self-organizing furniture (via Beyond the Beyond)
Long-exposure photo of Roomba coverage
Concept for swarming "display blocks"
What happens to junk left behind in foreclosed homes?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/8bYK2xityP4/roombots-autonomous.html
TWORK...TWITTER TWEETS AT WORK
HOW I TWEET:
HOW I FIND NEWS:
HOW TO GET RELEVANT FOLLOWERS
LIVE AND SHARE IDEAS THAT WORK
- Answer the question "What is INTERESTING?" rather than "What are you doing?"
- Use your Follow Friends to filter the most relevant Tweets for your interests.
- Retweet so that anyone Following me can use me as a filter for interesting news.
Once your Twitter account has "hundreds" of Followers, it's interesting that more and more Followers start Following you non-stop after a certain point, eh?
HOW I FIND NEWS:
My Friends' Tweets have acted like a springboard to a wealth of informative sites.
Hashtags can be used like bookmarks when I Retweet these informative sites, and I can go back through and connect these to my own work;
if I'm lucky, by the time I go back to the hashtag, others have added similar Tweets under the same hashtag.
HOW TO GET RELEVANT FOLLOWERS
If you are promoting your business, you don't really want "anyone" to Follow your business' Twitter activity. You want relevant Followers that are actually interested in becoming a customer someday, right?
For marketing purposes, Tweets need to be sent in volleys of three to eight at a time, as close to each other as possible (you might consider using 3-8 multiple Tabs in your browser to achieve this).
One pattern that still seems to attract new Followers to you:
Tweet 1: interesting business news
Tweet 2: relevant information that is Trending at the moment
Tweet 3: your advertisement, promotion, or marketing
Tweet 4: interesting news
Tweet 5: relevant information that is Trending with a Hashtag at the moment
Tweet 6: your coupon (ala Dell)
Tweet 7: personal insight
Tweet 8: interesting business news
RESULTS: This model is used by people that perform SEO and SEM, and using it will give you at least the same number of interested Followers as the number of your Tweets...
IMPORTANT: Most of your Tweets ought to include links for full articles or for marketing links.
Marketing links need to go to "painless" actions...
think email subscriptions, automatic enrollments, satisfaction guarantees, and discounted payment pages with items already "in the cart."
LIVE AND SHARE IDEAS THAT WORK
TWORK...TWITTER TWEETS AT WORK
HOW I TWEET:
HOW I FIND NEWS:
HOW TO GET RELEVANT FOLLOWERS
LIVE AND SHARE IDEAS THAT WORK
- Answer the question "What is INTERESTING?" rather than "What are you doing?"
- Use your Follow Friends to filter the most relevant Tweets for your interests.
- Retweet so that anyone Following me can use me as a filter for interesting news.
Once your Twitter account has "hundreds" of Followers, it's interesting that more and more Followers start Following you non-stop after a certain point, eh?
HOW I FIND NEWS:
My Friends' Tweets have acted like a springboard to a wealth of informative sites.
Hashtags can be used like bookmarks when I Retweet these informative sites, and I can go back through and connect these to my own work;
if I'm lucky, by the time I go back to the hashtag, others have added similar Tweets under the same hashtag.
HOW TO GET RELEVANT FOLLOWERS
If you are promoting your business, you don't really want "anyone" to Follow your business' Twitter activity. You want relevant Followers that are actually interested in becoming a customer someday, right?
For marketing purposes, Tweets need to be sent in volleys of three to eight at a time, as close to each other as possible (you might consider using 3-8 multiple Tabs in your browser to achieve this).
One pattern that still seems to attract new Followers to you:
Tweet 1: interesting business news
Tweet 2: relevant information that is Trending at the moment
Tweet 3: your advertisement, promotion, or marketing
Tweet 4: interesting news
Tweet 5: relevant information that is Trending with a Hashtag at the moment
Tweet 6: your coupon (ala Dell)
Tweet 7: personal insight
Tweet 8: interesting business news
RESULTS: This model is used by people that perform SEO and SEM, and using it will give you at least the same number of interested Followers as the number of your Tweets...
IMPORTANT: Most of your Tweets ought to include links for full articles or for marketing links.
Marketing links need to go to "painless" actions...
think email subscriptions, automatic enrollments, satisfaction guarantees, and discounted payment pages with items already "in the cart."
LIVE AND SHARE IDEAS THAT WORK
Tuesday
What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
Okay, this is one of my new heroes because he authored a brilliant book...
...more ideas at Buzzmachine.com
...more ideas at Buzzmachine.com
Teach, market, and work the "Google" way for the next several years with some contemporary concepts!
Warning: some of the innovative and down-to-earth ideas might make some people cringe, perhaps because they are such a true depiction of how people learn nowadays.
Warning: some of the innovative and down-to-earth ideas might make some people cringe, perhaps because they are such a true depiction of how people learn nowadays.
This book is an "easy read," and the first half contains very keen insights about how to improve profits (across industries) today through Google.
After reading about the future of sales, I considered how experiential marketing, brand awareness, and advertising is becoming a more essential part of the Google world. I mean, how would anyone know what to type in the search box without marketing?The latter chapters have some proposed models for the way the world might work in the future, and I noted how formal training, education, and continuing education is already changing into a more self-taught "Google" paradigm. Today, education is still a hot commodity - I think it can be kept "hot" with some of the following ideas, for starters:
Oh, while you're at it, have a look at the Popular Search terms box on the top left of my blog. Pretty nifty, eh?
- integrating WWGD? advice for both learners and instructors
(like requiring less rote memorization per se) - motivating institutions to establish creative marketing partnerships,
especially with respect to helping companies to develop their staff effectively;
Continuing Education, anyone? - flexing the requirements for instructors when it comes to
tenure, research, and field experience
Go ahead! Type some brilliant words into the Google box, and you get millions of results for products to buy, topics to learn, and incredible new experiences.
Oh boy, I wonder if the library needs my copy back yet?
Oh boy, I wonder if the library needs my copy back yet?
What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
Okay, this is one of my new heroes because he authored a brilliant book...
...more ideas at Buzzmachine.com
...more ideas at Buzzmachine.com
Teach, market, and work the "Google" way for the next several years with some contemporary concepts!
Warning: some of the innovative and down-to-earth ideas might make some people cringe, perhaps because they are such a true depiction of how people learn nowadays.
Warning: some of the innovative and down-to-earth ideas might make some people cringe, perhaps because they are such a true depiction of how people learn nowadays.
This book is an "easy read," and the first half contains very keen insights about how to improve profits (across industries) today through Google.
After reading about the future of sales, I considered how experiential marketing, brand awareness, and advertising is becoming a more essential part of the Google world. I mean, how would anyone know what to type in the search box without marketing?The latter chapters have some proposed models for the way the world might work in the future, and I noted how formal training, education, and continuing education is already changing into a more self-taught "Google" paradigm. Today, education is still a hot commodity - I think it can be kept "hot" with some of the following ideas, for starters:
Oh, while you're at it, have a look at the Popular Search terms box on the top left of my blog. Pretty nifty, eh?
- integrating WWGD? advice for both learners and instructors
(like requiring less rote memorization per se) - motivating institutions to establish creative marketing partnerships,
especially with respect to helping companies to develop their staff effectively;
Continuing Education, anyone? - flexing the requirements for instructors when it comes to
tenure, research, and field experience
Go ahead! Type some brilliant words into the Google box, and you get millions of results for products to buy, topics to learn, and incredible new experiences.
Oh boy, I wonder if the library needs my copy back yet?
Oh boy, I wonder if the library needs my copy back yet?
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