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Leisure Time!
Dec. 31st, 2011 10:18 pmThe past week has been relatively light on work so I've been able to indulge in some personal projects.
I've started looking into online storage for my electronic files. I've been backing up large quantities of files to external USB drives as well as keeping key personal files on a 16GB flash drive I carry with me everywhere. With some international travel in my near future, I'd like to store key files online somewhere in case my laptop and/or flash drive are lost or damaged. I'd also like to have 35GB of photos archived offsite.
A number of people have suggested various online options but I think I'm just going to go with Google Docs' online storage. At $20 for 80GB of space, it's the cheapest space available. I don't need auto-archiving software or the like, just cheap space.
Last night, I finally made time to upgrade my trusty Android-based Viewsonic gTablet from "Froyo" to "Honeycomb" (android version 2.2 up to 3.0). I always worry about accidentally bricking my toys, but after doing some research and ensuring I had a means of unbricking any unfortunate results, I gave it a try.
The upgrade worked perfectly on my first effort, and I'm delighted with the results. There were several apps which I love on my version 2.3.4 android telephone which wouldn't work with the older tablet operating system: these are now functional. The user interface is much prettier. I can finally reach the Android Market website --the older version restricted me to an older marketplace knock-off. Best of all, the built-in contact and calendar app integrate directly with Google's web offerings just like my phone so I now have automatically synced contact & calendar data.
The upgrade process basically wiped everything that was in memory so I needed several hours today to install & upgrade my prefer apps, restore my data and my ebook library (thank-you, Air Droid!)
On the downside, the camera doesn't work for lack of device drivers but since I didn't use it anyway, that's no loss. I haven't tried the sound functions yet to see how it deals with music but again that's not a feature I commonly use.
The campground where we have our trailer in West Virginia has open wifi but our trailer is about 50 feet beyond the range of the access point located at the dining hall. This evening, I assembled a home-brew Windsurfer wifi antenna using cardboard and tin foil. My experiments show a signal gain of 6-8 dB. At the moment, I have no idea if that's enough to pull in a signal to our trailer using a repeater I have in inventory, but we'll know in April when we return.
Oh, and happy new year.
I've started looking into online storage for my electronic files. I've been backing up large quantities of files to external USB drives as well as keeping key personal files on a 16GB flash drive I carry with me everywhere. With some international travel in my near future, I'd like to store key files online somewhere in case my laptop and/or flash drive are lost or damaged. I'd also like to have 35GB of photos archived offsite.
A number of people have suggested various online options but I think I'm just going to go with Google Docs' online storage. At $20 for 80GB of space, it's the cheapest space available. I don't need auto-archiving software or the like, just cheap space.
Last night, I finally made time to upgrade my trusty Android-based Viewsonic gTablet from "Froyo" to "Honeycomb" (android version 2.2 up to 3.0). I always worry about accidentally bricking my toys, but after doing some research and ensuring I had a means of unbricking any unfortunate results, I gave it a try.
The upgrade worked perfectly on my first effort, and I'm delighted with the results. There were several apps which I love on my version 2.3.4 android telephone which wouldn't work with the older tablet operating system: these are now functional. The user interface is much prettier. I can finally reach the Android Market website --the older version restricted me to an older marketplace knock-off. Best of all, the built-in contact and calendar app integrate directly with Google's web offerings just like my phone so I now have automatically synced contact & calendar data.
The upgrade process basically wiped everything that was in memory so I needed several hours today to install & upgrade my prefer apps, restore my data and my ebook library (thank-you, Air Droid!)
On the downside, the camera doesn't work for lack of device drivers but since I didn't use it anyway, that's no loss. I haven't tried the sound functions yet to see how it deals with music but again that's not a feature I commonly use.
The campground where we have our trailer in West Virginia has open wifi but our trailer is about 50 feet beyond the range of the access point located at the dining hall. This evening, I assembled a home-brew Windsurfer wifi antenna using cardboard and tin foil. My experiments show a signal gain of 6-8 dB. At the moment, I have no idea if that's enough to pull in a signal to our trailer using a repeater I have in inventory, but we'll know in April when we return.
Oh, and happy new year.
