Even though HP recently bought Palm, there hasn’t really been much hints of them trying to develop a device that uses Palm’s WebOS operating system. HP has just recently registered the “Palmpad” trademark. This is a possible hint that HP is developing a new tablet that uses Palm’s WebOS. After seeing the Windows 7 tablet HP had been working on, I think that this will have a similar design, but at the same time much lower specs. I’d probably expect it to have a 1GHz Snapdragon and 256MB RAM, but we’ll have to see what HP has in store.

David – Senior Editor

This week, I moved all my junk from one room to another. In celebration of the glories of my new office (more info coming soon on office specs), I decided to do what I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: set up an Ethernet bridge/hub.

My room has only one Ethernet port, and as I have multiple networkable devices, I saw the need for a way to split that connection up. So, I grabbed an old router of mine, a Netgear WGT624. To set it up as a bridge, I did the following:

Note: these instructions are specifically for the Netgear WGT624 v3 router model. Steps for other Netgear routers are probably mostly identical, and other routers should have similar instructions. Just look around for the names of settings that I talk about below, and you should be fine, but just in case, you should Google for instructions for your specific hub.

Step 1: Locate an Ethernet port in your room, connect a CAT6 cable to it.

Step 2: Insert the other end of the CAT6 cable into the WAN port of your WGT624. If you don’t know what a WAN port is, see the above diagram.

Step 3: Grab another CAT6 cable, connect it to one of your router’s LAN ports and to an input on one of your computers. If you don’t know what a LAN port is, see the above diagram.

Step 4: On your computer, connect to the router LAN and browse to 192.168.1.1 (or your router’s setup panel IP address). Login to the admin panel – the default username and password for the WGT624 model are “admin” and “password” (sans quotes).

Step 5: In the router administration settings, go to “LAN IP Setup”, under “Advanced”  in the left navigation frame. On that page, uncheck the checkbox marked “Use Router as DHCP Server”. Click Apply.

Step 6 (optional): If you want this hub to be Ethernet-only, you want to disable Wireless. So, in the left navigation frame of your router administration settings panel, click “Wireless Settings”, under “Advanced”. On that page, uncheck the checkbox labeled “Enable Wireless Router Radio”. Hit Apply.

Step 7: Exit out of the router administration settings panel. Next, walk over to your WGT624 and remove the Ethernet cable you inserted into the WAN port. Now, insert that cable into another LAN port. Once again, see the diagram above for details on the locations of WAN and LAN ports.

You have now successfully configured your WGT624 router to act as an Ethernet bridge/hub. To connect your devices, insert them into the LAN ports on your WGT624. You make encounter a warning notice from your main router (not the WGT624) when you first try to connect with it.

Good luck!

Image courtesy of ehartwell.com.

This post was originally published on Absolutely2Nothing, the author’s blog.

Maxim – Editor, TechReevu.com