Quick Review, Tips & Tricks: Logitech K400+ Keyboard/Touchpad

Recently picked up a couple of these babies from Best Buy with an Amazon pricematch.  Not intended to be comprehensive, just a running list of some product notes.

Review

Great board.

Step into my Office

This is my spiffy "new" office,

Upgraded, really, from my living room corner.

And this is what it affords me:

Thinkpad W500 two-finger-scrollable touchpad

So this beautiful 1900x1200-resolution machine, the last of it's kind I believe, can get pretty stubborn with its touchpad.  The official Synaptics ultraNAV driver from Lenovo doesn't offer this highly-productive feature for this model (maybe too old/discontinued).  Slapping on a Linux distribution doesn't help either (Ubuntu's 12.04 and 16.04 attempts only).

Also the last of it's kind.  The knob-textured upgrade of the W510+ would wear away; throwing the touchpad sensitivity out of whack. This baby, by contrast, lives forever.

Remote Codes

Finally had a little time to set up the TV & the legion of remotes on the coffee table.  Wasn't able to find anything online, so I figure I'll do a quick blurb.

The Sony RM-ADP021 doesn't seem to have any three-digit codes for Haier TVs, or newer brands (Visio, Hisense, etc.).  As they mention in one of their FAQ entries, you can go trial-and-error 'til you find one that works.

Memory and Storage Upgrades on Acer Aspire One D257 (-1907)

Alright, the first batch of pics were taken in mid-2012.  Finally have some time to put some words by the pictures, so here we go!

Picked this little netbook up from bestbuy for a one-month backpacking trip that required some photo storage, emails and quick web surfing.  Even back then, there were better options for each of those goals.  But to balance them all, along with the all-important tenet of backpacking mobility (weight & packability), on top of budget, meant this laptop baby was going to Chile & Peru!

Upon return, the single gig of RAM wasn't tolerated for very long.  And these days with all the storage/IT re-routing happening at home, the hdd chamber needed some accessing, too.  Was able to find some relevant & helpful videos online, among the haystack of vids for the slew of Aspire One variants (like this); but having to sit through an entire vid, or trying to cherry-pick the exact moment to fast-forward/back-track to, wasn't terribly convenient.  So that's where the idea for this came along.

OK!  Without further adieu:

Yet Another Passwordless SSH Post

Quick and dirty steps to getting remote ssh access setup.  Obviously, not meant to be comprehensive; those can be found elsewhere on the interweb.  More of a mental bookmark to be found online; to augment this.

1. run ssh-keygen on the remote user
2. copy the contents of the remote id_rsa.pub file (i.e your public key) that was just generated, and append it to the local ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.
   
   Note: basically the steps scripted by ssh-copy-id
   
   Note2: make sure your file permissions are kosher.
3. DONE! ssh <host> -l <username> away to your heart's content.  Flip the steps if you need access in the other direction

tpfancontrol quick hack & best practices

Quick Hacks

Some quick notes, after installing tpfancontrol, since I found Smart Mode 2 more useful than Smart Mode 1, and couldn't find a good way to get it to default without this hack.  This is Windows 7, btw, differences may exist with other OSes.

But basically we're just looking to swap the settings in a configuration file: