Categories
Fun Stuff Hardware

Bad Marketing from Cisco

I was in Best Buy the other day browsing some wi-fi access points and came across the WRT54G2 which seemed to suit my purposes. On the back of the box I encountered this interesting piece of marketing material:

wrt54g2

Now seriously, what the hell? They’re using a fading scale to indicate the uses? So I suppose “Multiple Computers” is vaguely recommended? And “Streaming Music” seems to be slightly recommended? I suppose the usage icon on the far right is downright not recommended, but can’t we just get an honest do or don’t from the usage guide?

And then the marketing team seems to have their own rating system which is not explained anywhere and is completely unhelpful. Ok, so “High Performance” is rated N++! Are you kidding me? What the hell is a “N”, and what does a plus sign indicate? What would “N–” mean?

The back of the box should be a case study in a marketing class on what not to do!

A quick tech tip… there are actually TWO WRT54G2 models floating around on shelves. DO NOT buy the one that has this silly thing on the back of the box, it actually has less onboard memory than the other model. But they both cost the same.

Categories
Windows

Vista is Bad for Window Media Player

I was running into ALL kinds of problems with WMP on Vista (64, but I hear 32 is bad also) where it was not ripping my CDs into MP3s, getting errors when trying to even play my CDs, and generally confusing the hell out of me. It was NOT a codec problem, everything was normal on my system. In fact, it would play about 30 seconds of a song and then throw an error.

But I just upgraded to Windows 7, and now my WMP is working fine!

So now I have Microsoft’s new tagline for their advertisements they are plastering all over hell and back: “Windows 7: You can play music now!”

Categories
Unix

SSHD on Fedora11

Quick tip on getting sshd to accept authorized connections on Fedora 11… I did all the main things but still had problems, those things are:

1. check permissions on your .ssh directory and authorized_keys file

2. make sure /etc/ssh/sshd_config allows authorized_key connections, although this is almost always on by default

And still no luck; it turns out I had to upgrade my key from RSA to DSA!

So, use “ssh-keygen -r dsa” and use the key it provides, that did the trick for me.