So far I love my Dell Mini 9; it’s a great laptop. Though from the day I received it there’s been a problem. The space bar.
It’s a simple but vital key, and very frustrating when it ignores you. There seems to be a common issue on the early Mini’s with the space bar sometimes ignoring input. Depending on just where you hit the key, it likely won’t register.
Today I was finally fed up and contacted Dell support. After chatting with a technician for about five minutes he agreed to send me a replacement keyboard. Simple, painless, fast.
If you’ve got a Dell Mini, I’d advise getting the new keyboard – not only is the space bar issue corrected; but I’m hearing that a couple of keys have been moved to more useful positions.
Update: See my comment below for the latest updates.
Wow! It’s been over a year since this blog o’ mine has seen any activity, though I’ve certainly not forgot about it. A lot has happened in the last year, so I’ll use this post as a bit of an update (and a warm-up for my return to blogging).
I’m not going to promise you’ll see a new post daily as was once the case, though I’ll try to ensure something new is up at least once a week.
Productivity and efficiency have been passions of mine from a young age, I’m not sure why, but achieving as much as possible, as quickly and efficiently as possible has always driven much of my thoughts, actions, and plans. I was around 10 years old when I learned that there were people that specialised in worker productivity, which led me to researching process design, why restaurants are setup the way they are, the psychology of work and motivation, and a variety of other related topics.
Update: I’ve just spoken to AMI, and received some very important information; so here are the key points and clarifications:
To clarify, the ‘vendor’ I refer to is a customer of AMI; it is this customer’s public FTP server that exposed this information. Per AMI, the signing key included in the ‘Ivy Bridge’ archive is a default test key; AMI instructs customers to change the key before building for a production environment.
Some (though not all) Netgear products expose the administrator password to unauthorized users in a file named /cgi-bin/<model>.log – if the device is vulnerable, you’ll get something like this:
>curl http://<ip>/cgi-bin/WNR2000XT.log Admin login name admin Admin password <snip> Country Europe Wireless network name (SSID) wireless_ext Wireless channel 6 Security type WPA2-PSK(AES) Wireless passphrase <snip> The full list of devices that are vulnerable isn’t known; the issue was presented to Netgear, but no response was received.
When Intel and various industry partners started talking about “ultra-books” as competition against Apple and tablets, I was more than a little skeptical. Ultra-books are small and light weight – but not cheap (average price being around $1,000) and rather underpowered compared to what you can get for the same money with a more traditional laptop (they are basically MacBook Air knock-offs). I had written them off almost as soon as they were announced.
