Technology for Traveling
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@KOOLER said:
- I'd add external recharge batteries!
A must for the full time traveller, there are some really slick LiPo packs on ebay these days.
I'm working on a project to build my own, but I prefer 18650's as I get them for free.
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Batteries are tough for us because of the continuous issues with weight. It's not just that we don't want to carry any more, which we don't, but also that we are loaded right to the airline weight restrictions every time.
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It might be worth it to add one extra bag that you have to pay for to allow you 50 extra lbs of stuff. Since you're flights are limited (so it seems) to 2-4 times a year, that extra expense seems worth it to me.
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@Dashrender If @scottalanmiller isn't paying for extra bags already then I'm impressed as heck. He's literally moving his whole house and family around!
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@Dashrender said:
It might be worth it to add one extra bag that you have to pay for to allow you 50 extra lbs of stuff. Since you're flights are limited (so it seems) to 2-4 times a year, that extra expense seems worth it to me.
I wish it was that limited. Seems to always be a bit more than that. If it was only paying for an extra bad that was needed, that would be a no brainer. But our luggage size is EXACTLY what can fit into an average taxi or rental car. So if we add anything we risk not being able to leave teh airport with it. In Nicaragua we were so close that we really thought that we were going to have to leave bags behind AND they had already brought a bigger than average vehicle!
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@MattSpeller said:
@Dashrender If @scottalanmiller isn't paying for extra bags already then I'm impressed as heck. He's literally moving his whole house and family around!
We don't... we have to carry a scale with us and carefully rebalance luggage to make it "just make it." Each bag is measured right to 49.5-49.9 pounds to make it work.
We got screwed yesterday because we flew a different airlines where only 40lbs not 50lbs per bag was allowed. So we had to squeeze as much as we could into three and get one down below 40lbs and only pay penalties on three. $90 of penalties because of that small change.
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It wouldn't be good for gaming, but for general use, you should check out a Lenovo ideacentre Stick 300 Computer
http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ideacentre-Stick-Computer-90F20000US/dp/B014644NPI/
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@anonymous said:
It wouldn't be good for gaming, but for general use, you should check out a Lenovo ideacentre Stick 300 Computer
http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ideacentre-Stick-Computer-90F20000US/dp/B014644NPI/
Definitely not getting anything from Lenovo.
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We ended up in Texas sooner than we had planned and since we are here for a while have some time to test some things out. We got an Amazon Fire TV Gaming Edition and a FireTV Stick with voice remote - the latter was on sale so basically we got a free stick for the cost of the extra remote. We are going to be testing these out in our Galveston condo for the next month. The gaming unit has already arrived and got hooked up in the living room last night. So far so good. The stick should arrive around Tuesday and we are going to hook that up in our bedroom. Hopefully these will cover a lot of bases for us. They were cheap and while they are pretty limited, they seem to do a lot of what we want around being able to watch shows.
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@scottalanmiller if you go to a restaurant and have a bad experience do you never go back?
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@scottalanmiller also what problems did you have with Lenovo?
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller if you go to a restaurant and have a bad experience do you never go back?
Depends on what causes the bad experience. I don't connect bad customer behaviour with the restaurant, that's unrelated. If a bad experience is accidental I normally would go back, although it depends if there is a reason to go back, of course. In Texas there are so many restaurants that you are always choosing to go one place and skip another that you want to try so if a restaurant only gives you a bad experience and has no compelling reason to return it isn't that it is shunned it is simply that it would never "bubble back up to the top of the rotation" again.
If a bad experience is endemic - like the food just isn't good or the atmosphere is just not enjoyable, I would not go back. That would make no sense.
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller also what problems did you have with Lenovo?
How have you missed all of the threads of both 1) issues with our Lenovo gear and far worse 2) Lenovo putting malware onto hardware twice this year and making themselves the pariah of the industry.
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@anonymous said:
@scottalanmiller also what problems did you have with Lenovo?
Lenovo broke the public trust by not once, not twice, but three times doing things to inject adware into their computers.
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Network driver had built in shim to allow ads, etc to be injected. This driver could not be replaced because the hardware was setup to require something specific in the driver in order to work. Generic drivers would not function.
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SuperFish - Lenovo included crapware without vetting it on behalf of their customers. This crapware left your machine open to all kinds of badness on the internet
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BIOS reinstalls Lenovo tools - Lenovo used a BIOS hack if required or a new MS allowable configuration to reinstall Lenovo tools on your computer after you installed a Clean version of Windows.
*This one is not really so egregious as the first two, but many people were upset about it and Lenovo didn't have any documentation about it, nor a way to disable it by default.
These things show that Lenovo does not have your privacy in mind when selling you their equipment. They only care about the all mighty dollar.
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The Levono issues had to be the biggest IT news items this year. All over the media outlets plus lots of threads in any given community. It gets brought up every two weeks or so for one reason or another.
Here is one of your threads where we were talking about it:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/
http://mangolassi.it/topic/2787/can-t-join-lenovo-yoga-2-pro-with-windows-10-pro-to-active-directory <-- issue that we had that turned out to be Superfish breaking the machine
http://mangolassi.it/topic/2761/new-lenovo-laptop-won-t-allow-posting-to-mango-lassi <-- another technical issue where Superfish broke the networking
http://mangolassi.it/topic/2721/lenovo-runs-scam-contest-at-spiceworld <-- pre-Superfish legal issues with Lenovo
http://mangolassi.it/topic/5767/lenovo-sales-down-50-layoffs-begin
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Wait a second - I thought you (@scottalanmiller) showed Lenovo was installing a shim'ed driver that was outside the SuperFish thing? i.e. you completely reinstall windows from scratch (deleted old partitions/data first, then reinstalled Windows)?
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@Dashrender said:
Wait a second - I thought you (@scottalanmiller) showed Lenovo was installing a shim'ed driver that was outside the SuperFish thing? i.e. you completely reinstall windows from scratch (deleted old partitions/data first, then reinstalled Windows)?
No, I've been saying over and over again that the Superfish stuff was done as a network shim. That's what it was. It was because Superfish was a broken shim that we discovered it. It was implemented in the driver, so even doing a fresh install reinstalled it because the only drivers for the native OS were ones with the shim in it.
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We HAD to go to Windows 10 rather than Windows 8.1 to get away from the lack of non-shimmed drivers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Wait a second - I thought you (@scottalanmiller) showed Lenovo was installing a shim'ed driver that was outside the SuperFish thing? i.e. you completely reinstall windows from scratch (deleted old partitions/data first, then reinstalled Windows)?
No, I've been saying over and over again that the Superfish stuff was done as a network shim. That's what it was. It was because Superfish was a broken shim that we discovered it. It was implemented in the driver, so even doing a fresh install reinstalled it because the only drivers for the native OS were ones with the shim in it.
Now I'm really lost - so there are two versions of Superfish? 1) where it was implemented in the driver and no other software required, and 2) software that installed a network shim that had nothing to do with the driver?
I thought people had this Superfish problem who didn't have the driver issue? But maybe I'm reading to much into it.
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@Dashrender said:
I thought people had this Superfish problem who didn't have the driver issue? But maybe I'm reading to much into it.
Many people didn't notice the shim and just thought that sites and stuff didn't work. Normal end users don't know what shims look like. You are mixing technical and non-technical reports together and getting confused.
