Hardware Concept - One Stop Dock

Portable computing has come a long way in recent years. Where 6 years ago, our only option for portable computing was a heavy laptop computer, now we have devices that fit in our pockets that can do everything we need on the road.

However, this abundance of devices poses a possible problem. There's too many of them! I'll give an anecdote to explain further:

When I left for college, my family bought me a laptop computer, coincidentally the one I am still using today. Later during the HP fire sale, I bought a HP TouchPad tablet and flashed Android on it. I also have an Android smartphone.

Back home, I had a mid range desktop PC. While the specs are a bit dated, it still outperforms my laptop when it comes to things like 3D gaming or video editing. However, since my life at school needed portability, all of my programs, settings, and files were set up ideally on my laptop. When I came home, even in the presence of my more powerful gaming computer with the larger screen, I was still on my laptop most of the time. I only reluctantly turned my desktop on when I wanted to play a game. Talk about first world problems.

Now I propose a solution to this. One device with all settings, that can be "upgraded" at will. Basically you have your tablet or laptop computer with it's limited specs. However, since it's portable you have all of your settings on there. Sure, cloud helps to bridge this gap but it's still not really enough.

Now imagine you have the option to dock this in a setup with much higher specifications. When docked, the system would ignore the onboard specs (or combine them a la SLI or something) and gives you the full scale performance you expect from a larger more permanent computer. That would be amazing!

The dock could be configurable like a standard desktop. You would have all the ports and features you dont get from a smaller tablet or laptop. You could even do things like install stand alone drives in the computer that back up the entire OS using the built in hardware, while you use the dock's hardware to do your work / gaming.

Click to embiggen and read my musings.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine that dock now becomes a home mainframe device. You access content on your portable device from the living room TV via wifi or something. Suddenly you only need one device and some (hopefully standardized) accessories.

I know this gets kinda sketchy but, now lets go to the maximum of extravagance and wastefulness that makes America awesome. Imagine you take that main tablet with you and dock it when you get home. But WAIT! you want to watch movies on the couch and browse with it but you want to keep the tablet docked to charge / backup / someone else is using it/ etc.

There's a type of computer called a zero client device. Basically its a barebones computer that relies on a mainframe to run it's OS. Take that, apply it to a tablet (bare bones, low specs, basically running from the dock / main device combo). Now you can browse on the couch and not mess with anything else. The best part - these devices could come extremely cheap because they will be used for light activity and don't need onboard storage.

Anyways, this is what I see as the future of personal computing. It's not really Post-PC, but rather PC+. Because you know what? I LIKE a tactile keyboard and high power, and I won't be giving that up anytime soon.

Convoluted Network #2 - Yo Dawg...

Yo dawg, I heard you like networks, so we put Wi-Fi in yo Wi-Fi so you can connect while you connect.

No, but in all seriousness, I essentially daisychained routers for this one.

I picked up a Belkin N450DB router today and decided to make another proof of concept convoluted network. I set it up in the following way:

• Created a Wi-Fi hotspot on my Galaxy Nexus
• Connected my laptop to the hotspot via Wi-Fi
• Turned on Internet Connection Sharing in Microsoft Windows 7
• Bridged the connection between my laptop ethernet port and the Modem / WAN port on the N450
• Once the network was up and running (which it did on it's own - go Belkin!), connected my HP TouchPad (Android 4.0.x) to the network.
• Opened Chrome and proceeded to browse to a few websites.

Again, like with the first convoluted network, I didn't want to do too much stuff on the connection because I only get 2GB / month on my phone data plan. I just wanted to see if I could get this network up and running, which I did. I really gotta hand it to Belkin though. Their network setup didn't extend past "plug in the freaking cable and be happy!" It's very refreshing to see that kind of usability in technology.

Here's a pretty picture I drew with my awesome MS Paint skills to demonstrate the network. 

Check back periodically. I'll be posting more random ideas I come up with later. 

Convoluted Network #1 - Content Without Borders

So I recently picked up an awesome (albeit unpaid) internship at Belkin. While many people might just know them for their expensive surge protectors and lame iDevice cases, they have actually started making strides in the wireless arena. They have been making high end networking equipment for a while but that's starting to really take off and they're rapidly becoming a big player.

Well one of the perks of working there is that I on occasion can get some free stuff. As such, I'm going to try to do something cool with everything they give me as a way of saying "I'm incredibly thankful for this gift". I'm not plugging the company by any means, as I will admit they have their faults. I also want to make it CRYSTAL CLEAR that THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED ON THIS AN ALL OTHER WEBSITES ASSOCIATED WITH MY BEING IN NO WAY REFLECT THOSE OF BELKIN INTERNATIONAL, INC OR ITS AFFILIATES.

That being said, time to geek out.

So the first items I received from them were a ScreenCast AV4 and a Powerline AV Starter Kit. The Screencast is this really awesome product that serves as a wireless HDMI bridge. The Powerline is another nifty gadget that bridges ethernet connections through the electrical wiring in your home.

What I did was the following:

• Created a wireless hotspot on my Galaxy Nexus. 
• Connected my computer to the hotspot over Wi-Fi
• Turned on Internet Connection Sharing in Microsoft Windows 7
• Shared my internet connection via my ethernet port
• Plugged from the ethernet port on my laptop to the 1st powerline adapter in my bedroom. 
• Plugged the other powerline adapter in the next room over.
• Plugged the ethernet cable from the second powerline adapter in to an XBox 360. 
• Plugged the HDMI port of the XBox in to the ScreenCast Transmitter
• Plugged the ScreenCast Receiver in to the HDTV in the living room. 
• Loaded the XBox and signed in to XBox live. 

Now I didn't do much past that because I limited to 2GB / month on my phone. I just set everything up to prove that I could. The network looked a little like the following image. 

I might be getting some more stuff soon so I will post other random configurations I come up with. Thanks again to Belkin.