Last year, after using a Huawei K3565 dongle from Vodafone, I purchased a Huawei E5832 wifi modem so that I can use it with other devices and share it with friends occasionally. I did not have any problems connecting it to my MacBook Pro on Snow Leopard. It worked flawlessly.

Last week, I acquired a new MacBook Air with OS X 10.7 Lion pre-installed and for the life of me, I could not get the modem to work via USB (still works as a wireless router of course). I sometimes connect the dongle directly via USB when the battery is going flat so I can keep using it regardless of the amount of charge left in the battery.

One suggestion in Whirlpool is to install the connect software from Three http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1751706 but cancelling it after it has installed drivers for the modem. I find this a little slack from both Huawei and Virgin to not have the USB connection issue resolved.

If you follow the suggestion to download the Three software, the post suggests that this method works.

The recent case of security breach at Gawker Media is a case in point. It proves that passwords get reused for other websites in quite a few cases and that people often choose really obvious and weak passwords.

However, until there is a replacement, the best case scenario is to use a strong password, but strong passwords are hard to remember. If one has a different password for every site that requires registration, then each person would have quite a few complex passwords to remember. This is why people choose weak passwords and reuse passwords across sites.

I guess rule number one is to not use your banking password for anything else. So, in a sense, one can have multiple tiers of security depending on the importance of the sites. This, however, is quite tricky to define since people place different levels of importance to different sites.

Let us hope that there is a new scheme around the corner to allow for better security all around.

The old server was happily serving pages running Mandrake 9.0 and Apache 1.3. The new server hardware is based on the Intel Atom architecture and is quite a bit snappier at 1.6Ghz with 4GB of RAM. Page views should be a little snappier from now on.

So in a little over an hour you go from full charge to nothing just by using the laptop the way it was intended to be used. So despite its small size, the 2133 was never really designed to be too far away from a charger for too long. It is almost like having a car like a Honda Jazz with a petrol tank the size of a coffee cup. “Yes it is frugal, sir, but it will only go for a half a kilometre no matter how you drive it.”

Recently I discovered the wonderful Linux Mint 8 (Helena), while searching for a desktop linux distro to install as a virtual machine on my MacBook Pro. Despite all the misgivings that I have had in the past for the various Linux distros, I must say that they have been improving all the time. The last time I tried to install Linux on the 2133 was when Ubuntu 9.10 came out. What a disaster that was. Wifi did not want to work, then I went back to 9.04 but found that I could just not get my Vodafone Prepaid Mobile Broadband stick to work (K3520). In the end, out of frustration and spite I decided to whack XP back on and because I needed a little mobile word processor.

Linux Mint seems to run with a little bit of lag sometimes, but overall the experience has made my faith in Linux desktop distro strong again. Using Helena I could use my Vodafone Prepaid Broadband to connect to the net and wifi worked right out of the box.

If you need a decent desktop distro that looks half decent (who like brown anyway?) and works well out of the box for your 2133, then I can recommend Linux Mint 8 (Helena).

Sure, I have had a few funny formatting issues that have cropped up every now and then when I upload and convert microsoft document formats such as PPS and DOCX, but they are minor issues compared to the convenience of having your documents accessible from anywhere and the ability to instantly edit and share them with people of your choice, think collaborators and people who might want to know what your thoughts are on a particular document.

The recent ability to upload any kind of file has added an extra level of convenience. I have been able to upload zipped packages containing documents and images for particular events and classes without having to convert them to Google Document format.

The convenience of editing your documents at home and then downloading and distributing them where you need them (such as lesson plans and tutorials for my students in the class room) has been the winning feature for me. It definitely beats even carrying them on USB sticks and HDDs wherever you go. If you have not yet been using Google Documents for managing your documents, then you definitely should!