infrastructure – Page 8 – Graves On SOHO Technology

Ensuring Productivity In My Home Office

I-Have-A-Bean-SingleMugDarkImage I’d like to pose a simple question. What’s the single most important piece of technology in my home office? Don’t dwell on it. What comes immediately to mind?

Those of you who have been paying attention for a while will know that the correct answer is the coffee machine. You may have a different opinion, but as the question was specifically about my home office, I assure you that this is definitely the case.

Like so many people coffee plays an important part in my day, illuminating the foggy crevices of morning, accelerating my migration into the productive portion of the day. I have been heard to refer to coffee as, “that marvelous brown fluid that gives rise to intelligence before noon-time.”

I am admittedly an addict. So be it.

The Belkin Conserve Valet: Dishonorably Discharged?

valet-charge-smart In recent years the number of devices that we need to charge daily has constantly grown. Initially it was just our two cell phones. Since they each had unique power connectors each had its own AC adapter that lived near the appropriate night stand. Simple enough. Tidy even.

My Blackberry Bold 9700 was the first cell phone I used the featured the newly common micro-USB power connector. Shortly thereafter we added a Barnes & Noble Color Nook. Both of those devices require high-current chargers, where “high-current” means more than the 500 mA that is actually part of the USB standard.

That’s when things started getting more complicated. We may have achieved standardization of connectors, but still required dedicated chargers for some devices.

Here’s Proof That SOPA Is Simply Idiocy

December 19, 2011
Michael Graves
infrastructure

Earlier today Dan York posted a lovely and very simple explanation of how to completely circumvent the DNS based filtering scheme that’s been put forward in the Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill, known generically as SOPA, has been the focus of the senate judiciary committee for the past while.

The bill is being promoted by Big Media in all it’s facets. I would have thought that a decade’s worth of debacles with digital rights management (DRM) would have taught the industry something. There is no technological solution that cannot be overcome. This I understand to be a universal truth.

Streaming vs Screaming Media: USB 3.0 Tries My Patience

November 2, 2011
Michael Graves
HDTV, infrastructure, Uncategorized, Video

Clarity Monitor-220 Preface: This is a wee bit off topic, but I haven’t ranted in a while, and you may find it worthwhile in the end.

For many months I’ve been toying with the idea of using streaming video as an alternative to some of the training and demonstration activities that haunt me in my working life. Historically, sending staff and gear to some distant location was the primary means of selling the gear, or post-sale, conducting end-user training.

In the past year one of our more experienced sales staff has found that demonstration given by remote means can be very effective. Initially this was merely his response to having limited access to my time, but it’s also become a way for him to get ad hoc demo’s accomplished on very short notice.

Revisiting Steve Song & The Village Telco

November 1, 2011
Michael Graves
infrastructure

You may recall that some time ago we had Steve Song appear as a guest on a VUC call. At that time he was working for the Shuttleworth Foundation coordinating the Village Telco project.

The Village Telco project developed a low-cost hardware device intended to help deploy telephony to underserved parts of Africa. This device, called a Mesh Potato, is essentially a wifi access point with a built-in analog terminal adapter. Groups of Mesh Potatoes form a wifi mesh network. This supports the sharing of voice & internet resources at extremely low-cost compared to commercial solutions.