Archive for January, 2010
Using a Broadband card to serve a network.
Jan 5th
I often find myself in situations where I wished I could share out my internet with other users. I have tried programs that turn my Touch Pro into a hot spot but it not only kills my phone’s battery but it also slows it down to a crawl. I could tether my laptop to my phone and share that out but why should I when I found a nifty little device called a travel router. When I paired this up with a mobile internet card I had a match made in heave!
The Cradlepoint CTR350 Cellular Travel Router has found a new home in my laptop bag. Using this router with a Verizon Sierra Mobile Broadband Card (EVDO) I can have an instant network setup… Um anywhere I can rig up power.
Simply insert the card into the router. Log into the router and configure firewall, routing and even dynamic name resolution.
This means at your next outdoor event you can not only provide internet to your geeky pals but you could be running a web server that is resolving to a domain name.
I was not only impressed by it’s simplicity but also by how cheap it is. I found the mobile router online for under $150. Cradlepoint CTR-350 Mobile Router
Do any of you use mobile internet for something interesting? We would love to hear about it in the comments!
10 things your IT guy would like you to know
Jan 4th
I didn’t write this. I got it from a site, who got it from a site that no longer exists. Although the tone is a bit whiny, it is essentially true. It is all about the 10 things your IT guy would like you to know. This will make everyone’s lives easier for real! Take a minute to read through this and see if your IT guy thinks you are an idiot or a normal user :)
1. If you ask me technical questions please don’t argue with me because you don’t like my answer. If you think you know more about the topic, why ask? And if I’m arguing with you…it’s because I am positive that I am correct, otherwise I’d just say “I don’t know” or give you some tips on where to look it up, I don’t have the time to just argue for the sake of it.
2. Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you; all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me; you don’t want to start a call that way.
3. I am OK with you making mistakes, fixing them is my job. I am not OK with you lying to me about a mistake you made. It makes it much harder to resolve and thus makes my job more difficult. Be honest and we can get the problem resolved and continue on with our business.
4. There is no magic “Fix it” button. Everything takes some amount of work to fix, and not everything is worth fixing or even possible to fix. If I say that you just need to re-do a document that you accidentally deleted 2 months ago, please don’t get mad at me. I’m not ignoring your problem, and it’s not that I don’t like you, I just can’t always fix everything.
5. Not everything you ask me to do is “urgent”. In fact, by marking things as “urgent” every time, you almost ensure that I treat none of it as a priority.
6. You are not the only one who needs help, and you usually don’t have the most urgent issue. Give me some time to get to your problem, it will get fixed.
7. Emailing me several times about the same issue in the same day is not only unnecessary, it’s highly annoying. Emails will stay until I delete them. I won’t delete them until I’m done with them. I will typically respond as soon as I have a useful update. If it is an urgent issue, let me know (see number 5).
8. Yes, I prefer email over telephone calls. It has nothing to do with being friendly, it’s about efficiency. It is much faster and easier for me to list out a set of questions that I need you to answer than it is for me to call and ask you them one by one. You can find the answers at your leisure and while I’m waiting I can work on other problems.
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Is it possible to have TOO MUCH RAM?
Jan 3rd
You know the saying, “You can’t have too much RAM or too much storage.”
Well, there is at least one case where a lot of RAM can cause problems.
My current desktop had 1 Gig of RAM and I recently bought an additional 2 Gigs since the price was so low. (And of course I used The AdmiN’s link to give a little back to AtA)
Wow, 3 Gigs of RAM what could possibly be bad about that? Well one night, I went to put the system into hibernate and it beeped and a balloon popped up from the system tray that said “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API.” After that, the system would only go into standby, not into hibernate. In fact the hibernate tab of the Power Options settings was completely gone.
It turns out this is a known issue and Microsoft has a patch for it. The KB article describes the exact problem I was having and states “This problem typically occurs when the computer uses 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM.“
My favorite part of the article is
“This problem occurs because the Windows kernel power manager cannot obtain the memory resources that are required to prepare the computer to hibernate.“
So basically, you have so much memory that we cannot obtain enough memory! The system had no problem obtaining enough memory resources when there was only 1 Gig of RAM, but with 3 Gigs there isn’t enough.
I applied the patch offered in the article and haven’t had any problem putting the system into hibernate since.
Who knew, it IS possible to have too much RAM!
