Need a Wireless Adapter? Call for a Panda

Panda 300Mbps Wireless-N USB Adapter

All good things - mediocre things, too - must come to an end, and that’s what happened to the old Belkin wireless adapter we’d had for five or six years. The house isn’t wired for Ethernet, and there I was, sitting at a bad-ass desktop machine: superfast (500-GB solid-state drive) and with memory out the wazoo, but no onboard wireless card. No problem: just buy a replacement…

I ended up with a Panda Adapter, which came from some little company in China (they all do – I looked). I wanted fast, and this is about what you get at a price point of around fifteen bucks. The listing at Amazon had a dozen different compatibilities listed, and the one I needed – Windows 7 – was in there. So I bit.

The little clamshell package showed up two days later (Thanks, Amazon Prime!). It included the wireless adapter, a printed user’s manual (about 4-point type) and a mini CD-ROM with the installer.

Your Fan has a Remote? Whatever Gives You a Chill

Seville Classics Ultra Slimline Tower Fan

Whether from old age or indignities suffered at the hands of movers, our old tower fan had begun rattling like a '77 Chevette accidentally fueled with diesel. We wanted our fan to be quiet, though, because we used it in the master bedroom to augment  the A/C's somewhat anemic circulation at night.  It wasn't, so “ new tower fan" went down on our shopping list.

We found this Seville Classics Ultra Slimline Tower Fan bundled in a twofer at our local Costco, packaged with a the sixteen-inch "personal" fan that the Ms keeps on the kitchen counter now. The big one includes a remote control (the necessary pair of AAA batteries included) that you can  hook onto the rear of the unit for storage. Seville's package blurbs boast that their fan is "ultra-quiet" and features "ECO SPEED." The bit about quiet is important, and  mostly true. The "ECO" business is the same sort of gimmick as "natural" supposedly meaning "coming from (somewhere) in nature"; hoping people will confuse it with “organic” (whatever that means).

Are You Ready to Cut the Cable? Entering the World of Streaming

I don't know about you, but one of the most irritating things about cable television is the "package." When we signed up for AT&T's U-verse service, we had to sign up for their U200 package to get the channels we wanted - SyFy, to be exact. We never signed up for HD, never watched anything on demand, and never added premium channels like Showtime and HBO. Yet after five years, our cable bill - not including internet - had crept up to well over $100 per month. Even more irritating, we were getting 300-plus channels, of which we never watched 275 and only glanced at 10 others a couple of times a year. Small wonder I'm in favor of a la carte pricing, since I got tired of subsidizing dozens of religious channels, fifteen flavors of ESPN, the golf channel, and the like. 

So we cut the cable three months ago: it's as simple as that - and you can cut the cable (or shoot down the satellite) yourself. It will require a little upfront investment, and probably requires rethinking the way you watch television as well, but I think it's worth it to never have to interface with the u-verse telephone support app again! 

Are You a Candidate for Cable-Cutting?

The way I see it, the people who are least likely to cut the cable are big-time sports fans and people addicted to shows on the premium networks. Anyone else can probably adjust, but a lot of real-time sports programming just isn't available to stream. 

SanDisk Cruzer Edge: A Flimsy Design Belies Decent Specifications

SanDisk Cruzer Edge

As someone who's famous for finding lost objects, I know that a portable technology has spread to the masses when I find one in the street out walking, or cycling. First CD? Lafayette, Louisiana, 1992. First cell phone? Tyler, Texas, 1995. And first flash drive: Urbana, Illinois, 2005.

It's most unlikely that my first was a gigabyte drive; it was probably a 128- or 256-megabyte device -- those were the days when 250-GB hard drives were considered huge. We've come a long way: a quick search of my desk and laptop bag turned up six flash drives, ranging from 1 to 32 gigabytes. My most recent acquisition is a brand new 8GB SanDisk Cruzer Edge I picked up for maybe five bucks. I'm not sure, though, that it was worth the fin.