Wireless Charging with Android

Ok, so not PC related but good info....

Recently got a new Android cell phone that features wireless charging.  Great!  It is supper nice to just rest the phone on the charger vs. having to plug in a cable all the them.  I specifically sought out a charging stand that has two coils so the phone can be in either vertical or horizontal position, and was rated to work with phone protective cases.  FYI not all charging stand come with AC adapters!

It worked great, until I brought into the office and plugged the USB cable into the surge protector at my desk which has a 2.1amp USB outlet.  The phone would charge for 10 seconds then say: "Wireless charging has been paused".  After a bunch of Googling and trouble shooting, (different USB cables, different chargers, different power sources, rebooting in safe mode, clearing app cache). 

I discovered that the phone would charge without the OtterBox Commuter series protective case.   I remembered that when I first used it at the house it work just fine, however I was using an OEM Samsung Fast Adaptive Charger.  Hmmm....grabbed one and plugged that stand into and presto...works like it should.  Now why the Samsung charger works and a normal "dumb" 2.1amp USB charger doesn't I don't know.

FWIW the Samsung Fast Adaptive Chargers list two power modes: 2amp @ 5v and 1.67amp @ 9v....interesting.

Riverbed WAN Accelerator

More recycling!   This RiverBed 5050 unit was put into retirement, so I played with it a bit.

A single AMD Opteron 2378 Quad core CPU @ 2.4ghz, upgradable to a 2nd CPU, 16gb ECC DDR2 ram (it had 8gb but I upgraded it to 16gb), LSI 1068 RAID card built in on the system board, holds sixteen 3.5" hard drives, it came with twelve 250gb Western Digital Enterprise hard drives, and dual power supplies.  The motherboard is propitiatory, so no replacement would easily work, it is designed for a very quick swap out.

The Riverbed OS (RIOS) is loaded on a Flash card that has the pin out of a USB header, like what one would find on a desktop motherboard.  These are "headless" systems, aka no monitor can be hooked up to it, all manipulation is done via a web console or a serial console.  I was curious so since it had PCI-e slots, I put a video card, and it worked, I was able to get into the BIOS, the RAID card utility, and use it like a normal server.

Buffalo Terastation NAS/Server

I got this one in recycling, I thought it interesting to play with.  It is has an Intel Atom 1.6ghz CPU, 2gb of ram (single slot of DDR2 so-dimm), dual network cards, USB 3.0, and a COA of Windows 2008r2 Workgroup Storage Server.  With a single Western Digital Green 2tb SATA drive it consumes a mere 24watts of electricity.  

Apparently when new it comes with a USB drive that one can reload the operating system, however since this is a number of years old and a recycle rescue, no such recovery was possible.  I loaded regular Windows 2008r2, which loaded fine, but require the hunting of drivers, unfortunatly the Buffalo tech support page is pretty useless.  For kicks and grins VMware ESXi v6.5 did run and install, however it would not see the NICs.   I didn't bother trying to hunt down compatible drivers.

I'd like to keep it and potentially run it as a FreeNAS or something but we only have so much need.  I'd like to put a 4gb module in it but apparently they are worth their weight in gold.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/790640-REG/Buffalo_WS_WV2_0TL_R1_2TB_TeraStation_Pro_Duo.html