The sorry state of keyboard layout management • 15 Feb 2018
How is it possible that today, in 2018, it is still up to the end-user to detect/guess what the layout of the computer keyboard is he has in front of him/her? In any Belgian office with more than 10 computers, you might encounter a mix of “Belgian French”, “Belgian ISO”, “Belgian Period”, “French French” keyboards. They’re all AZERTY keyboards, but they mix up characters like the “@”, the “.” or the “,”. No one, except for the odd OCD sysops guy, knows what the differences exactly are. You only know that, if you pick the wrong one, you’re going to...
Speed test of Samsung external SSDs: T1, T3 and T5 • 07 Nov 2017
I just bought my 4th external USB3 SSD for my MacBookPro. I obviously don’t use all of them together, I just was just constructing my latest external Sockle storage bay. This time it’s a 1TB SSD and it’s a generation T5. So this was a good moment to compare it to my previous T1 and T3 SSD drives. I use the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app to get realistic read and write data transfer rates. I will round them off to the nearest multiple of 10MB/s.
AC adaptors: standardize, please • 25 Apr 2009
I was just cleaning up around my computer and I got annoyed again because of the utter lack of common sense hardware vendors seem to have in their choice of AC adapters (I’m not the only one, Douglas Adams wrote about it before). I made a list of all the devices in a radius of 3m around me:
Netgear ReadyNAS: NAS done right • 30 Apr 2008
One of the most popular pages on this blog is about a storage device that has a lot of enemies and few defenders, the SC101. It’s Windows-only, uses a proprietary filesystem and when (not if) it starts crashing, just say bye-bye to your data. The product didn’t do much good for Netgear’s reputation. So when Netgear offered me the opportunity to test a real NAS solution, I agreed. So they sent me the ReadyNAS NV+.
WD My Book is not really ’Pro’ storage • 07 Jan 2008
After having Lacie, Maxtor, Iomega and most recently Netgear StorageCentral external storage fail on me, I am now the proud owner of a broken Western Digital My Book Pro II 1TB. I bought it less than a year ago and used it as a mirrored 500GB drive for my music, movies and images. It first failed 3 months ago (broken mirror) but after a full night of rebuilding it worked again. But now one of the drives has fallen victim to the infamous ‘click-of-death‘ and the drive would not show up anymore via USB nor Firewire. I disconnected the broken (SATA)...
TomTom One: beauty with short breath • 27 Oct 2007
The TomTom One (the ‘old’ model) is my first ever GPS. Overall, an excellent design. I never had to open the manual because it is a very intuitive device. The route calculation is quite fast and accurate, and with the Spanish “Norma” voice installed, it is even a pleasure to be told where to go (“despues de ocho cientos metros, gire a la derecha“).
Logitech online store: haunted • 18 Oct 2007
I have wanted to buy a keyboard with Bulgarian layout for a while, and as you can imagine, you don’t find these in the local FNAC or Vandenborre. So when I saw that the Logitech site allowed purchasing online, of such exotic items like a Bulgarian keyboard, I quickly ordered one. However, the experience has been unsatisfactory:
LG KU-800: have low expectations • 06 Jul 2007
Because the posts on disappointing hardware are very popular on my blog (e.g. Netgear storage and Lexmark printer), I’d like to write about a device that also should be avoided: the LG KU800 GSM. The KU800 is the Vodafone version of the KG800, which is sold in Belgium by Proximus (239€).
Pimp your laptop: Apple vs Dell • 20 Jun 2007
Imagine you can walk up to your favourite hardware store and tell the guy: “Give me the biggest, fastest, meanest laptop you have. Money is no issue”.
Paypal-ready shops in Benelux? • 23 Jan 2007
Imagine one would have a certain amount of money on one’s Paypal account, and one would like to spend that on hardware or other physical goods. Let’s now limit that to shops active in Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg. What are your options? Well, not a lot, it appears.
Netgear SC101: crappy storage • 10 Jul 2006
UPDATE: also read my post about testing the Netgear ReadyNAS (it doesn’t suck)
Double Wifi: municipal wifi with protection • 13 Apr 2006
I have written about FON before (they provide a business model for sharing one’s bandwidth through Wifi). They use a custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G routers. I have the feeling that current Wifi routers (or access points) cannot offer a good balance of security/flexibility. Opening your own network for everyone is currently too dangerous. There’s Wifi trolls that gobble up your bandwidth and there’s hackers that scan your ports for vulnerabilities. My idea is that now you would need 2 Wifi zones, one behind the other, each having different security and different policies. With access points costing as little...
User-generated media is Intel’s wet dream • 14 Feb 2006
Since the CISC processors were invented some decades ago, companies like Intel and AMD have tried to follow some form of Moore’s Law: double the number of transistors on a chip – or the corresponding CPU clock speed – every 2 years or 18 months (there’s more than 1 version of the law).
A Pentium 4 is not necessarily a Pentium 4 • 06 May 2004
I was throwing my DAW system together, first time I actually ‘built’ my own PC, and I thought it went kind of smooth. But my PC did not want to boot every other time. It just started beeping ee-oo-ee-oo, which indicated a CPU problem. I upgraded to the newest BIOS posted on the Aopen site, and then I got the real culprit:
How is it possible that today, in 2018, it is still up to the end-user to detect/guess what the layout of the computer keyboard is he has in front of him/her? In any Belgian office with more than 10 computers, you might encounter a mix of “Belgian French”, “Belgian ISO”, “Belgian Period”, “French French” keyboards. They’re all AZERTY keyboards, but they mix up characters like the “@”, the “.” or the “,”. No one, except for the odd OCD sysops guy, knows what the differences exactly are. You only know that, if you pick the wrong one, you’re going to...
I just bought my 4th external USB3 SSD for my MacBookPro. I obviously don’t use all of them together, I just was just constructing my latest external Sockle storage bay. This time it’s a 1TB SSD and it’s a generation T5. So this was a good moment to compare it to my previous T1 and T3 SSD drives. I use the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app to get realistic read and write data transfer rates. I will round them off to the nearest multiple of 10MB/s.
