Tag Archives: Windows

Enable Wake On Lan to remotely boot your HTPC

When the house I currently live in was under construction, my family decided that they wanted our living room area to have a very clean appearance. In our previous house, the entertainment area was a complete mess due to a combination of poor cable management as well as clutter created by equipment such as the home theater receiver, HTPC, smart tv box as well as the Blue-ray player. To eliminate the presence of such devices from the living room, HDMI, USB, ethernet as well as coaxial cables were installed behind the TV mount during the framing stages of the house. These in-wall rated cables ran to the basement where a specific area was allocated for all the Audio/Video equipment in the house. Unfortunately, fixing the “clutter” gave rise to another problem; how would we control the equipment in the basement without physically going to the basement each time we wanted to alter a setting? For devices such as the Blue-ray player which featured an Infrared input (IR) the solution was to purchase and setup an Infrared blaster (or RF universal remote). However, this was not possible for the HTPC which featured no IR ports. In turn, Wake on LAN as well as a 2.4Ghz Keyboard/Mice was used.

TED Talk: The Internet & Viruses

In this week’s article we will take a brief look at something that has probably affected every one of us at one point or another, viruses! As you may have already noticed by the categorical classification of this post, we are not discussing the biological vessels which contain harmful genetic material. Rather, the topic of interest for this article are the viruses affecting your computer.

Fixing a Corrupt USB thumb drive

Although flash based storage is very reliable, like everything in life things always tend to go wrong. Today I plugged my USB thumb-drive into a school computer to access my project files, only to find later on that something (Probably a Trojan Horse or a Virus) had corrupted my drive to a point where I could not access the drive and retrieve any file. This was pretty damn scary as projects I had spent endless hours on were all on the thumb drive and I had not made any backups! (Lesson one: Always have backups) Fortunately enough I managed to extract the data from the drive and had to format it in order for it to function again