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,...
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...
Wifi in my car: proof of concept • 19 Nov 2013
Some drivers love fancy chrome wheel rims, some add a huge wing spoiler on their car, or fuzzy dice hanging from their rear-view mirror. Me, when I bought my new car, I decided that I wanted a Wifi network in...
Fax 2.0: because fax won’t die in the internet age • 02 Jan 2010
In one corner of my apartment: my fixed telephone line. In another my printer/scanner/fax device. Challenge: run a wire from one to the other, every time you rearrange the furniture.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...