Doug's Blog

Fixed! Laptop waking from sleep
Doug posted in Uncategorized on December 6th, 2011
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I love my ThinkPad T420s (I love my MacBook Air as well, but that’s not important right now); however, the blasted thing kept coming out of sleep once I put it into my laptop bag. I find my laptop later just about to overheat, leaving me frustrated and wondering what unhealthy forces my battery or other computer bits have been subjected to while it was in there.

After looking in the Event Viewer, I was able to track down the wake event was the ethernet port (nice, unplugging the ethernet after putting it in standby woke it right back up – that’s smart). It finally hit me there should be some mechanism to find out what devices in Windows 7 have the ability to wake my computer, so I can go and kill these things before they disrupt my sleeping machine again.

And there is! Open a command-prompt and enter the following:
powercfg -devicequery wake_armed

Source: Powercfg Command-Line Options

I simply ran that command, then double-clicked on each device in Device Manager, and unchecked “Allow this device to wake the computer” on the Power Management tab. Re-ran the command just to verify nothing was present. (Turns out it was not just the LAN adapter, but the keyboard and mouse as well.)

A nice sigh of relief to not have to worry about that. In the meantime, my laptop is still a little hot to the touch, but getting cooler. 🙂

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Configuration tips for the ubee DDW3611
Doug posted in Uncategorized on May 10th, 2011
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If you upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0 through Time-Warner Cable, you may be interested in a few configuration settings that were required to get my modem/router to function as well as my previous setup (using a simple Linksys router).

Update: Please review the comments section – tons of people have contributed helpful tips which may help you out if my original post does not.

WPA2: Enable
As part of the default installation, the router only supports WEP 40-bit and 128-bit encryption – this can limit your connectivity options with other devices, is less secure, and more of a pain to deal with the hex keys required to keep for the password. However, through calling tech support they can update your router to support WPA or WPA2 encryption. For me, my previous router was using WPA2, so I requested to enable that.

IP Flood Protection: Off (helpful against DDoS attacks)
With this turned on (the default setting), each machine coming out of standby (phones and computers) had to wait roughly 3 minutes before being able to use the network. This was driving me crazy. All fixed with this turned off.

WAN blocking: Disable
Enable: UPNP
Bridge mode: Off

OK, for the three settings listed above, I can only tell you that this was the final configuration that worked to have my Apple Airport Express to consistently join my network and extend it. (I use this to give my XBOX 360 connectivity in another room as well as stream music to my stereo.) At one point we tried adding the Airport Express’s MAC address to the router and turned on bridge mode (off by default); however, this just prevented the airport express from ever staying connected or being assigned a valid IP. Frankly, I believe most of the trouble was caused by turning on bridge mode. We went around with a number of setting changes until bridge mode was finally turned off. Bottom line is that you may or may not need to make the setting changes above to get your own Airport Express to work.

If you have more to contribute on these settings, feel free to leave a comment below. But I felt I should at least share what worked for me – everything now works as it did previously (plus increased bandwidth of course), but only after about 2 hours on support. Speaking of support: Each of these configuration changes required the help of someone in the “Level 3 Support.” I spoke with Chris and Tim on two different days. Both were quite knowledgeable (and knew each other – it’s not a huge bunch). If I keep having experiences like this, it will become slightly more difficult to spread the hate toward TWC that I shared in my previous post.

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Actual Cell Towers in Cary, NC (FCC has duplicates)
Doug posted in Uncategorized on December 13th, 2010
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In the process of finding a new home in Cary, I found a number of spots where I have no cell coverage. To get an idea of the current state of coverage, I searched for and found a list of cell towers in Cary. The problem, however, is this list confuses and distorts the situation. I created a corrected list (and map) for you.

While I commend the FCC for putting together this list of 135 supposed cell towers listed in Cary, I felt like it was a little confusing to find multiple entries of the same geographic coordinate (duplicates) in the data. This is something I deal with at work, so I pulled out the latitude and longitude values and distilled it down to these 23 unique entries. The same page also mentions that the information here may not be complete, and that other towers may exist. I don’t know enough about radio waves and earth contours to know whether 23 is the right number, but I thought the list might be helpful to anyone wanting them. And I already figured it out for myself. But that’s not the point. The point is that I created a map with these plotted (they have one at the FCC link above, but you don’t have much room on the screen to work with it). I wanted a map I can use in full screen on most setups. So I created this:
Google Map: Cell Towers in Cary, NC

Once I put all these coordinates onto a map, it looks like there are only 16 “real” unique locations, as several of these are within only a few feet of each other. Maybe towers next to one another (perhaps serving different carriers?).

Here is the unique list:
Lat: 35.606389 Lon: -78.825833
Lat: 35.730694 Lon: -78.803333
Lat: 35.741667 Lon: -78.779444
Lat: 35.763611 Lon: -78.753611
Lat: 35.764611 Lon: -78.813806
Lat: 35.766111 Lon: -78.870833
Lat: 35.767778 Lon: -78.845278
Lat: 35.768028 Lon: -78.845361
Lat: 35.769167 Lon: -78.763889
Lat: 35.785917 Lon: -78.792389
Lat: 35.787139 Lon: -78.726917
Lat: 35.787222 Lon: -78.726667
Lat: 35.791639 Lon: -78.748028
Lat: 35.791917 Lon: -78.747972
Lat: 35.791944 Lon: -78.748056
Lat: 35.793889 Lon: -78.761389
Lat: 35.801111 Lon: -78.814167
Lat: 35.818056 Lon: -78.743889
Lat: 35.818083 Lon: -78.743833
Lat: 35.831611 Lon: -78.765917
Lat: 35.831667 Lon: -78.765833
Lat: 35.832444 Lon: -78.871750
Lat: 35.832500 Lon: -78.775278

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