Hardware - 10

Everybody who has ever been to a store has seen those electronic gates which are meant to keep shoplifters from stealing stuff. Normal shoplifters use some kind of countermeasures and are actually not bothered by the gates, only honest people get to suffer from them. Typically the gate triggers the alarm by accident when shop personnel simply forgot to remove the tag, or sometimes a rolled wire of some sorts will resemble a coil so that the gate thinks that my recently bought extension cord and/or Ethernet cable is an anti-theft tag. The other not-so-typical scenario is that, there is a tag attached to thing that you bought, but the gate does NOT trigger the alarm. Well, this time that's what happened.

I'm at home and realize, that there is a tag attached. It looks ugly and annoying and should be removed. Since I've always wanted to know how do they remove them in the shop, I took my trustworthy Dremel and started cutting.

Here are the pics:

It looks that there are 4 lightly magnetic ball bearings inside a small cavity made out of plastic and steel. The steely part of the cave is also magnetic so that it attracts the ball bearings to stay on that side. Then there is the part they remove in the store, it is a metallic stud which really doesn't move a lot when pulled. If a lot of force is applied to the stud, the four ball bearings are tightening to the direction of the pull, so that is it impossible (or very very hard) to actually succeed in removing the stud from the tag. In the store (you see them next to the cash register) they have a powerful magnet which is applied to the plastic side of the tag. When the tag is placed on top of the magnet, it pulls the ball bearings down (with the help of gravity), making the stud move away. A removed stud slips back to the tag very easily without magnets or anything, the ball bearings just move out of the way.

The tag is fully covered with plastic and most of it is a coil for the gate. Normal tags don't have sharp edges or brownish dust from dremeling. This one does, since I literally cut it half. The white plastic part in the 2nd pic is typically covered with the black plastic. Also the stud in the pics 3 and 4 is bit longer, since it is not cut short with a power tool.

Next question typically is: How to remove them next time without cutting/breaking the tag? My answer is that I don't know. My tag is busted anyway, but next time I have one that is not busted, I'll try applying some sort of magnet and hitting the tag to the direction of the magned. Eventually, it boils down to the magnetic force, so a powerful one is recommended. I don't know if I have one that has enough pull in it, but I'll sure try. Another thing that comes into mind is to keep twisting the stud while pulling, it should make the ball bearings roll and stay loose enough.

I ended up gotting a new laptop. Since my weapon of choice has been Thinkpad for ages, I got me a new Lenovo. The T-series has existed for ages. Even IBM made them during 90s. The T-series laptops are a bit pricey, but they are meant for working. Couple of years ago a colleague said "and they look like tools, too!".

Here is the link to Lenovo-page.

Since this is an ultrabook (whatever that actually means). It is quite light and only 22 mm thick, as you would expect there is no DVD-drive and only 2 USB-ports. They are USB3, but still, only two of them. Everything in this reminds me of Apple laptops, with the difference that there is a latch at the bottom of the machine. You can open the bottom very easily and all of the parts are easily accessible. It is easy to notice the philosophical difference in design and the ease of manufacturing with Lenovo and Apple. This one was designed by the same people, who actually build and fix them.

The really exciting part is that the state-of-the-art Ivy Bridge CPU/chipset/graphics -combo runs really, really fast. The difference to my previous laptop is a huge. To speed up things even more, I changed the 128 MiB Samsung SSD into 240 MiB Intel SpeedDaemon 520-series. I'm getting Windows Performance index of 4,9 with the weakest link being GPU and specifically desktop graphics. i5 CPU gets 6,9, memory gets 5,9 and SSD gets maximum reading of 7,9. All of these are really good numbers for a 1,7 GHz machine!

Typical usage scenario for a business laptop is to use it in docking station at the office. I got the Lenovo USB3-dock, but still I wouldn't call this a traditional docking station. To "dock" the laptop, you just connect USB3-cable and charger. The dock has quite a many USB3-ports, two DV-i ports and a 1Gbit/s Ethernet connector, all of which I require when docked.

But I'll stamp this with my seal-of-approval. T430u is definitely one to get!

I got my hands on Huawei B593, punched in a SIM-card and turned the thing on. The admin is at http://192.168.1.1/ and admin password is admin like on many other devices, no surprises there.

Since my SIM is a pre-paid one which I use for testing and temporary Internet access, I simply wanted to see how much credit I had there. But wait! There is no Send SMS -functionality. I got the PDF-manual which said that there would be one. I think every 3G USB-stick software has that, why a 4G router wouldn't have the simple thing?

Little bit of Googling revealed that some telcos actually don't put it there. I did get my box from an independent reseller, but it looked like it was a Sonera (Telia) branded hardware. Little bit of more Googling ended me to one of their competitors, Saunalahti. From their customer support page, I got their firmware, uploaded it and noticed a number of drastic changes. Login screen was changed in to a generic Huawei one. After login my precious SMS-menu was there!

Yet another shame on you Sonera! Why did you leave the SMS-sending out. Idiots!

Update:
The login screen for the Saunalahti firmware version V100R001C260SP055 looks like this.

Update 2:
Most non-Finnish readers cannot read the telco's support-page. Download link for the firmware is http://www.elisa.fi/elisa/docimages/attachment/tuki/elisa_r+m+h+s.tar.bz2

Update 3:
There is an article about firmware from 3 Denmark.