Months of work culminate in a thirty minute review with the board. You’ve been working for weeks on the deck, and even if you say so yourself, it’s looking sharp (especially those 3am changes you made overnight).

You enter the boardroom, they’re all there, waiting. Smiling politely. Laptop in hand, you scan the room searching for the projector cable. It’s there hiding under some papers. It’s a VGA cable. You smile nervously around the room.

“I don’t suppose anyone has a DVI adaptor, do they?” Puzzled looks. You’re losing them, and you haven’t even started. Remarkably, an adaptor arrives. You connect, power on, Fn+Fwhatwasit? F3, F4, F5? Nothing, nada, zip. The picture appears briefly, then blackness.

“Try pressing Source on the remote”, says the CEO. The CEO.

Your desktop appears at last, stretched horribly across the screen. In black and white.

They’re talking amongst themselves now – you’ve got a mountain to climb.

“OK, let’s go with the handouts….”

It’s a common problem, and even today in thousands of offices around the world, in a multitude of languages, you’ll hear people struggling to connect their laptops to projectors and external screens. Don’t get me wrong, life has got a lot easier with Windows 7, but if your workplace is still to migrate and with a multitude of display drivers, connectors and differing hardware out there, it’s still a potentially career-limiting pain point. Why would the board hand that $5 million development budget to the guy who can’t even work the projector?

Intel’s Wireless Display (or WiDi to its friends) is the latest attempt to make life easier. Shipped as a fully integrated feature on new laptops from most of the major manufacturers, it allows an easy, wireless connection to a compatible adaptor connected to the TV (like Netgear’s Push2TV). One click of the mouse, and both audio and video from your laptop will automatically be transferred to the big screen.

No more concerns about having the right connector with you for any occasion. No need to bring portable speakers with you to every meeting. Power on, hit the button, and you’re set to stun. You’ll be forever remembered as the guy who did that kick-ass demo, rather than the guy with the projector problem.

You can check out WiDi enabled laptops today at Best Buy in the US, Comet in the UK as well as a variety of other retailers.

So are my printer and I best buddies? Well, we’re more acquaintances. It does its job, gives me know trouble, but you’ll agree with me, after losing it so many times in frustration, it’s tough to love your printer. You may drone on to friends and colleagues about your new phone, tablet or notebook, but you’re not likely to give them an impromptu demo of your printer any time soon.

That may well change with HP’s latest range of printers, and the HP PhotoSmart eStation in particular caught my eye.

Take a decent, All in One printer (with 802.11n Wi-Fi, scanner and fax) and whack a 7” detachable touchscreen tablet on the front, which serves as control panel and web browser, including news, weather, email , ebook reader and more. That in itself is cool convergence, but then add a dash of HP’s new ePrint feature, which lets you print Microsoft Office documents, PDFs, Images and web pages whilst on the road by email, and we’re starting to get into “bore your friends” territory. Add a library of web apps from social networks like Facebook and other providers and now we’re talking about a printer you can friend.

With all of these features, I’m not sure whether this printer is still a “printer”, or whether a new “More Than All In One” category needs to be invented – but I’m ready to forget the crimes of the past, and get to know this printer a little better.

The software also lets you keep a list of favorites, like the hotspots you use at home, a friend’s house, work, or your favorite coffee shop, for example.

Another new feature in WeFi 4.0 is Facebook integration. With this, you can now login via your Facebook account and see how many hotspots you’ve mapped out. All the Wi-Fi hotspots in your area can be seen by clicking the “Wi-Fi Maps” tab.

WeFi 4.0 introduces WeFi Premium, too, a subscription service that provides access to over 90,000 hotspots in the world (mostly U.S., though).

You can grab the latest version of WeFi for free from here.

Microsoft was one of the first companies to receive a license from the FCC to create prototype white space devices. In order for these devices to locate other spectrum users and not interfere with their signals (wireless microphones are often used in this space, for example), the researchers developed a special algorithm which measures the spectrum and locates available frequencies. If interference occurs, the white space devices switch to another channel quickly. In Microsoft’s experiments, the transition took 3 seconds.

The resulting set of protocols used for wireless internet networking using these methods are collectively being called “White-Fi” technology because of their similarities to the Wi-Fi systems used today. With “White-Fi,” the long-range wireless broadband necessary to cover rural areas, could soon become a reality. It could even allow you to connect to your home’s router from up to a mile away, noted Ranveer Chandra, a researcher working on this project.

Although White-Fi technology won’t provide as much bandwidth as other wireless technologies like WiMAX or LTE, it would at least provide broadband comparable to Wi-Fi networks but at longer distances.