There was a good deal on black friday for this netbook which just weighs 2.13 lb s.
I bought it and it has Linux pre-installed :-) .
I  bought this primarily for my mom in India so that she can voice chat with my family and watch us on webcam.
This is a very decent computer for that purpose .It is very light-weight and packs all the needed hardware like Wi-Fi/Webcam etc on such a small form factor.

Pros

• Very light weight
• Nice shiny/glossy screen
• Does what it says :-).
• Good quality parts.
• Wi-Fi works out of the box(major boon for Linux users)

Cons

• Very difficult to Upgrade memory or Hard drive.No way to do it without voiding the warranty.
• SSD on this is extremely slow.
• Cant use it for a lot of typing on the smaller keyboard

Overall, I like this laptop.

posted at: 18:39 | category: /reviews | permanent link to this entry

A few months ago I  bought this router when there was an ongoing deal for refurbs.More details about the deaal @ http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/865548?highlight_key=y&keyword1=WNR834B&lastpage=1
My main reason for buying this router was so that I could put open source firmware DD-wrt on it.Now that I have it for couple of months , Im overall happy with it.
Putting DD-WRT on it was very easy and it did unclock quite a few new features which the stock firmware lacked.Overall the router with DD-WRT is quite stable considering that I do a lot of legal bittorrenting .
I have to admit that I really could not get the QOS working on this correctly.Overall the symptoms were that for anything that I put with the Bulk priority in it it would just use 1/10th of the badnwidth when all the other bandwidth was available.So I feel maybe there is a bug somewhere or maybe something is wrong with my configuration.For the timebeing I don't use QOS on this router.

posted at: 18:32 | category: /reviews | permanent link to this entry

Cars seem to be the most disconnected from computers and I always had the urge to connect my laptop to my car to see what it is doing and also to see if  I could get any meaningful information out of it.Starting from 1996 in all cars there is a mandatory port called the OBD-II which allows you to read the code generated by your car.
There are two ways to communicate via this port

1. Via a handheld scanner which can only spit out the codes.
2. Connecting via a USB cable to a computer and then analysing the data.

If you are looking for option 1> then there is a hot deal currently going on @ http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/895940/ , you can get this scanner and clearer for $23.90.Keep in mind the latest new model cars cannot use this because they need a newer technology called CAN reader.

I have chosen to go with option 2> and have bought a USB cable interface from ebay , you can search for "CAN-BUS OBD OBDII Code Scanner Reader  USB" and there are many available in $20-30 range including shipping.This reader is CAN compliant and will work with the latest car models  also.

The next time when  you get an "Engine Check" light on , on your car you don't have to fork out about $65 per engine check at your car maintenance shop.I'm amazed by how much they rip us off for such a trivial task which can be done by us.

posted at: 18:21 | category: /general | permanent link to this entry