Peter's Blog

I have tried a few rss reading options for my ipaq. All these allow articles to be downloaded to the pda for reading offline when out of wifi range or with the wifi turned off to save the battery.

• avantgo: an online service that generates feeds suitable for display offline on a pda. It's free if you use less than 2M if data a day. You can chose from specially formatted content such as the guardian newspaper or any rss feed
• feederreader: an rss aggregater that supports enclosures i.e. it can download podcasts. I found this over complicated and fiddly. It is free although donations are encouraged.
• egress: a commercial rss reader but I have found it much better than the others and it isn't that expensive. It also supports enclosures.

I wanted an rss reader that supported enclosures so I could download podcasts directly to the pda where I can listen to them anywhere, no messing with synchronisation. I have even plugged the pda into my hifi with good results.

I first used feederreader for this but I finally abandoned it because it gave the files it downloaded meaningless names containing just numbers. Egress gives them the name the author gave them which better describe the contents. Ok I could launch the playback from within feederreader but I don't want to, I don't want to have too many apps open at once or the pda gets flaky

I then found Egress to be a pretty good way to read rss in itself: the buttons in the pda step through the articles nicely. I haven't bothered with avantgo since I started using egress. I'm still in the trial period but i'm sure I will buy it.

Bought myself a new PDA, an HP Ipaq rx1950 Pocketpc. It was a bit of an impulse buy, a bit of retail therapy I felt in need of a few weeks back. The model I bought was essentially the cheapest I could get locally that had integrated wifi.

I used to use a palm tungsten T2 but it's digitiser does not work properly, it takes about five goes to get past the initial calibration and it's downhill from there. I still had a hankering for a pda, a portable notetaking device to serve as a backup for my failing memory.

Following my experiences with the palm and bluetooth I decided that wifi was pretty much essential, bluetooth was slow and the bluetooth stacks in windows complex and buggy.

The rx1950 runs Windows Mobile 2005, the latest name for Windows CE/pocketpc. It is a stylus driven thing, not my first preference but keyboard models are more expensive and have smaller screens.

Bullet point review:

• first impression when I took it out the box was how light it is, much lighter than my old palm. It's fairly thin as well, maybe half an inch thick. It would fit better in a trouser pocket if not for the carry case that comes with it which is almost as thick again.
• nice solid build quality: HP after all.
• stylus has a tendency to fall out: I put it in the carrying case the wrong way round to restrain it or I would certainly lose it.
• no charging cradle: comes with a USB cable and a mains adapter that plugs into the USB cable: rather awkward and fiddly and annoying that it cannot charge from the USB port. There are aftermarket USB cables available that will charge it.
• synchronises with the pc using activesync and I was amazed to discover that it won't sync over the wifi. Apparently microsoft decided it was a security hole and they couldn't think of a way to plug it so they just removed the feature. This leaves USB or infra-red so I'm using USB when I feel the need. Many pocketpc apps are available as cab files that can be downloaded directly to the device over the wifi and installed. Some producers are not enlightened to this and ship apps with windows installers that use activesync and hence can only be installed at home base.
• the device has 32M of 'program memory' for running programs data and this isn't really enough. The symptoms of this seem to be the o/s terminating apps that are not in the foreground. If you have, say, windows media player playing something then you can only run maybe one more program before something gets randomly zapped. Microsoft have tried to create a paradigm where you don't have separate applications but flip between different modes without worrying about having to close apps down. Apps are closed automatically by the OS as memory runs low and should be designed to save their state such that when they are reopened they are in the same state as when they were shut down. Unfortunately it looks like developers use standard development techniques and applications being suddenly terminated by the OS leaves the user high and dry.
• it has another 32M for storing programs but I bought a 1G SD card and I put everything in that.
• the screen is just about big enough. It is ok for reading without scrolling too much. For most web browsing it is awful unless I use http://skweezercom or google mobile to strip out any fancy stuff.
• the character recognisers that come with it are not much good: the handwriting recognition (transcriber) is slow and inaccurate. I am using something called Tengo which is a bit like predictive text on a phone so involves hitting only six big buttons. It has some clever design features and there is something about it that is kinda fun. I am writing this review with it so you may spot predictive-text style wrong word errors.
• a frequently used feature is the reset button: windows mobile is a typical windows o/s and isn't sophisticated enough to offer robust task management. Applications can lock it hard and banging on an unresponsive plastic screen is particularly fruitless.
• it has speaker and microphone. The speaker is just about loud enough to listen to podcasts. I haven't tried skype on it, the skype site doesn't list the rx1950 as supported and the cpu may not be fast enough.
• has 3.5mm audio jack and the sound to my ears was pretty good. It is a good mp3 player.
• battery life is very good, one charge gives a good day of use.

As a device for browsing rss feeds while watching tv, taking notes, listening to music, watching videos or whatever it is just fine. It is more convenient than a laptop and I can carry it in my pocket so is far more mobile. I can see that it is a quirky platform and will probably have been killed off by mobile phones and mp3 players within two years time.

I'll write about the applications I have installed in it some other time.

How to watch tv anywhere in the house?

1) Capture sound/pictures from tv to a pc and stream them round the house via wifi.

2) walk around house with gorgeous d410 laptop.

3) enjoy.

No more messing around with tv cables in the attic.

Problems:

• how to change channel?
• why didn't I think of this before?

I posted previously about an irksome acer wireless where the power saving decided to disable the wifi card but the user did not have the security settings to enable it again.

Well it happened again for a user today, only someone had deinstalled the Acer power management tools so there was no way for them to enable it. Log in as administrator, wifi fine, log in as mere power user, no wifi.

I was in a hurry as user was having a bad day so I went straight for a search through the registry for 'wireless'. One of the first entries I found was within some Acer registry settings, with a registry key for the user's login name and a key called WirelessEnabled set to 0. I set it to 1, logged out and back in and wifi was fine.

What beats me is why the security settings stopped the user turning the wifi card on but they still had permissions to edit the registry and change this setting.

Next problem is to figure out how this got disabled but I might worry about that when it happens. I exported the fixed registry key and showed the user how to import it back in if the wifi dies again during a critical client meeting.

Had a manager with a shiny new Dell Inspiron 220 laptop which was working ok but suddenly the Wifi stopped connecting. It reported a weak signal (1Mbps) when trying to connect to either of the company wireless access points.

On a hunch (I cannot recall my reasoning but I'm not sure it was desperation) I tried giving it a static IP address rather than using automatic settings (i.e. DHCP). Sure enough, this cured the problem, connected fine. I looked in the dhcp server logs and while it was not complaining that the IP address pool was all used, it did seem that all the IP addresses available were being used. I increased the number of IP addresses available to be allocated by the dhcp server and problem solved.

The big mystery to me is why Windows XP would report this as a problem with a weak signal? Isn't the access to the dhcp server and the allocation of the IP address at a layer above the wireless connection? Anyway, it's useful to be warned that the wireless diagnostics are misleading.

I went to visit someone to help with a problem using broadband. When using Internet Explorer they got errors to say the web site could not be found. The system had been like this for three or four weeks. They got on to BT technical support who went through the checklist and could find no problem. They told the victim to reinstall Internet Explorer or to try Firefox. They did both but still no joy. BT Tech support told them to try reinstalling IE again and if that didn't work complain to Microsoft as the system was running Windows XP home edition.

I did the following:

• From connections I started a connection to the internet. It seemed to connect ok, no errors.
• Looked in connection TCP/IP properties and it was set to use DHCP. Nothing unusual, not as if the DNS settings were wrong.
• I opened a command prompt and tried:

  nslookup google.com
  

  This found google.com so indeed DNS was fine and the connection was working (it found the DNS server).
• I opened IE and Firefox and they gave errors as if there were no connection (like when wifi fails).
• I looked in Firefox connection settings and they were fine, direct connection to the internet, no strange proxies or anything.
• Thought about how the connection could possibly be broken and suddenly thought firewall. Looked around and found Norton Personal Firewall installed. I opened it up and it was complaining that the subscription had lapsed. I disabled it and Firefox and IE worked fine.
• The PC was running XP SP1, automatic updates were disabled. Decided to go into windows update and try to get SP2. While downloading 30 pending critical security updates over the course of an hour the Norton thing kept moaning about break-in attempts, all trying to use a buffer overflow to break into a DOM RPC port (port number four hundred and something). Norton kept waving a dialog that had to be ok'ed.
• Installed all the updates. It didn't offer to upgrade to SP2 but I remembered how to enable the firewall in SP1 (hidden in connection properties) so I enabled it. Didn't see any more break in attempts. I think the same firewall is present in SP2, they just turned it on by default and made it more prominent.
• Enabled automatic windows update.

Morals:

• Norton firewall breaks your internet connection if you stop paying for it.
• Windows really needs firewalling

I fixed all the problems I had with my new Dell D410 Laptop. The trackpad is perfect, video fast, hibernates and restarts in about eight seconds. All I had to do was install Windows XP on it with all the Dell drivers.

It's only now I can see how fast it is: with ubuntu I felt it was somehow constrained, I was compromising and I would only see it's potential using XP. Ubuntu was doing weird things, the trackpad was unreliable and frustrating and sometimes when it was busy it wouldn't task switch, almost as if it had hung.

From the device manager I have confirmed that it has a 5400rpm hard disk which is good for a laptop and noticably faster than the 4200rpm disk in my old Inspiron 500m. 1G of memory makes a difference. Rebooting FireFox is instant, it just appears.

The screen resolution was immediately better, smaller text, more on screen. Then I was looking for the tweakui powertoy on the microsoft site and found the cleartype power toy which makes the text on LCD screens less pixellated: it really works, makes a big difference.

The battery meter tells me I have over four hours of battery life. I am unlikely to get four hours to test it in today but I will be happy if it manages that. The Dell can disable the wired network card when running from battery to save life. When I put the laptop in the docking station for a recharge then I can still use the wired network from that. Theory: does the extra power drain of 1G memory make up from the power loss of swapping to the hard disk?

I think I have reaffirmed my opinion that Linux is a fine server operating system and Windows is a fine desktop operating system. I have both available and I am happy.

Another theory: this laptop and all the peripherals in it were designed with windows in mind. The manufacturers of the various parts wrote windows drivers for them and did a good job because they knew the components intimately. Some linux drivers may be written by manufacturers, some from data sheets and some reverse engineered (educated guesswork). Which approach will give the best results? If some windows drivers are written badly and never peer reviewed will Dell use them in their PC's? My dedicated server runs debian, I am happy that it can control a hard disk and a network card. My desktop O/S has to be compatible with many more things.

Dell D410 whinges:

• It has just one speaker and it is pathetic, very tinny.
• It normally runs cool but if it is doing something CPU intensive it really chucks the heat out of a vent on the left hand side. The estimated battery life drops from three hours to one but comes back once things slow down.
• All Dell drivers are nicely organised in the 'Dell Resource CD' but you have to install them one by one (chipset, wifi, video etc) which is a bit tedious.

Got new laptop: Dell Latitude D410.

Specs:

• Pentium Centrino Mobile 1.86GHz
• 1G memory
• 40G hard disk
• 12" screen
• weights < 4lbs

I wanted something light, not a portable desktop but a true laptop.

I bought it from Europc as 'refurbished' which seems to mean factory return or < 6 months old. It was close to £400 off the Dell price. After I ordered it I started wondering what could be wrong with it as other similar systems from the same place were north of £850. The next day they rang me and asked me if I realised that it had no operating system. No Redmond tax: that explains it. I thought about it for about 2 seconds and said I don't care, I'll take it.

They weren't strictly accurate, it did come with a copy of Freedos...

I installed ubuntu on it, taking the plunge of going totally linux on my main personal computer. Can I live without Windows on it? If I can't I can always get a copy but let's see how it goes.

Various Notes:

• Looks like new, transparent film like new pc's have, not dusty or faded.
• Installed ubuntu with no problems, mostly it Just Worked.
• Had to downgrade wireless network to WEP as it does not support WSA out-of-the-box. I had to fiddle for some time to get the keys in agreement. Seems to work very well, maybe better than the 500m. I always thought that the di624 was the weak spot UPDATE: it is, see comment.
• Battery life is over three hours, more than twice the Dell Inspiron 500m and enough to last an evening. UPDATE: should mention (as I wondered this before I bought it but couldn't find mention in any reviews) that this was with Wifi running all the time. I set the screen to minimum brightness.
• Suspend to disk doesn't work. Had to install linux source code to figure out how it was supposed to be used and it didn't work anyway. I could go through kernel patching to get suspend2 running or I can live with a long initial boot and lots of suspending-to-ram (which seems to work fine).
• It has both a trackpad and a nipple thing: I hate the nipple things, I'm used to the trackpad from my 500m. Unfortunately the default drivers lack the support for scrolling, tap-to-click, tap and drag and various other neat shortcurs. I think I could get it working, either by patching the kernel or by installing a different version of X windows. I'm not in a big hurry to do either. UPDATE: trackpad working.
• Some reviews say the keyboard is cramped but to me typing on it now it is gorgeous: apart from the page-down key which is hyper-sensitive: I'm hoping the previous owner rejected it because of this and nothing else is wrong with it.
• Living with kubuntu: installed ubuntu and upgraded to it as the kubuntu servers were unresponsive. I got warty warthog which was released only days before I got the laptop.
• The 12" screen is a bit tighter than I had hoped. It is 1024x768 but seems like less. I've made the fonts small and I can get into the habit of running firefox full screen by banging F11. The display quality is good, crisp and good contrast.
• It's fast: nothing seems to take very long. Gimp boots in about five seconds, compared to maybe 15 on the 500m (under windows). UPDATE: not sure I've ever seen the top command show a process using more than 2% cpu time. Must find something intensive for it to do.
• It came with a media dock that holds the DVD-rom (no DVD-RW ). This can also act as a charging station and has sockets for VGA, wired network etc. It supports Wake-on-lan so I am tempted to set it up so I can wake it remotely from my hosting pc and do cool things like program the sky+ box from the irda port. I email the hosting pc from my mobile and coolness ensues.
• Better build quality than the inspiron. Lattitudes are the business models and are targeted higher. It doesn't creak much when squeezed. Not a 10/10, maybe 8 for creakiness, where 500m was a 5.

Right now I love it. The small screen may get annoying and I'll miss suspend-to-disk (unless I go kernel building, which I cannot be bothered with).

Following from the tragic accident here is the progress on the fate of the Dell Inspiron 500m laptop that had coffee poured over it.

• After a day or so of drying out I took off the covers of the memory and wifi card bays and drained out the coffee which was still liquid.
• After a day or two more the laptop would actually boot but the keyboard did not work.
• Laptop would run on battery but not mains.
• Left more time for it to dry out.
• Laptop would only run from mains if battery was pulled out: can run on battery alone but cannot charge it, even with the laptop switched off. The mains adapter appears to crowbar: the green led on it fads out.
• Took laptop to bits. Keyboard very dead. Stripped it down to it's membrane, no visible coffee staining but it would not work. Probing keyboard plug with a bit of wire I established that the circuitry was ok, the membrane was dead.
• Cleaned up what I could with nail varnish remover, which appears to be acetone and water so should be safe.
• Ordered new keyboard from ebay for £45. The keyboard is type 1M723.
• Fitted new keyboard, works fine.
• Examined circuit board to try to resolve battery problems. Heavy corrosion around the battery circuitry. Cleaned it up to no avail.

Conclusion: laptop is working fine, I'm using it to type this, but I can only run it from the mains. If I unplug it from the mains then I lose my BIOS settings when I plug it back in. From a portable computer I have gone to one that cannot even be moved without typing the date in.

It's sad.

The worst of it is that now I'm tempted to get a 12" Apple iBook.

Pros:

• Smaller
• the battery lasts longer
• a totally new non-ms environment to explore.

Cons:

• Apple are going intel next year. How long would PowerPC support linger?
• Linux will support intel indefinitely. In 5 years time when this box is only useful as a server, will I be able to get any contemporary software to run on it?
• Apple appear to be corporate bully boys like microsoft. They aren't the cool guys.
• I have to find Macintosh versions of my favourite apps: Firefox, Vim, Putty.
• Paying for it
• I have to grow a pony tail.

User was having trouble with an Acer Travelmate 2300 laptop, it wouldn't connect to Wifi, no networks listed. Problem appears to be because the power management is refusing to turn the power to the Wifi on. The user's account is set to 'Power User' (ironically) and the Acer power management stuff crashes when you try to use it. Change user to administrator and can power it up but not a solution.

Probably something to do with security privileges, but with windows that boils down to guessing what privilege is missing and struggling to enable it. It may well be the 'load device driver' privilege, I tried enabling that but no joy but I don't know if this is because I chose the wrong privilege or failed to set it.

Acer's web site is not as informative as it could be.

Moral: buy Dell not Acer.

Tempted by Dell Axim X50, a PocketPC, which Dell are selling for £234 which seems like good deal for something with:

• Wifi (only b but that will do)
• Bluetooth
• 64M ram
• 128M flash
• Compactflash and SD slots: can share compactflash with my camera and they do a 1G card for £41.36 which is a good deal
• Free TV Tuner (!). Just have to walk around carrying a UHF aerial.
• Powerful IR emitter, useable as remote control.
• It works with Skype which means free phone calls from starbucks.

I haven't been using my Tungsten T2 recently. Reasons:

• My digitiser is flaky and I have to be pixel perfect clicking on things. The handwriting recognition is pretty poor, have to write ultra-big block capitals all the time which always seems like hard work.
• No Wifi Bluetooth is no comparison.
• Palm OS is pretty noddy compared to windows: it does have 'files' as such just databases which makes it hard to port anything to it.
• Appears to be a dying platform: Palm are being sluggish with their Wifi and this could be a fatal error.
• Sony are already pulling the plug on their Palm PDA's to focus on phones.

Got Ubuntu Linux server to share it's printer with Windows XP. After setting up samba (i.e. installing the samba package) and getting it to a state where the server PC appeared in the workgroup (make sure workgroup has same name on all computers). Also make sure Ubuntu knows about the printer. CUPS, the unix printing thing, is installed by default on Ubuntu and all the above is too trivial to comment on. Unfortunately, sharing the printer is not so trivial, you have to edit config files and reboot daemons: but, hey, we love that or we wouldn't use Linux?

• Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf as follows:

  # add to [General] section:
    printcap name = cups
    printing = cups
    security = share
  
  # make sure [printers] section looks like this
  [printers]
    browseable = yes
    printable = yes
    public = yes
    create mode = 0700
    guest only = yes
    use client driver = yes
    path = /tmp
  

• reboot samba:

  sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart
  

• In windows, go to control panel/printers/add network printer.
• Browse for server computer. In it's list of printers should be the one you want
• Install the printer. A dialog may come up about downloading a printer driver. This probably won't work but windows will go on to let wou choose a driver from a list.
• Print a test page.

Whoopee, can print upstairs from laptop downstairs via wifi. There is no security here so watch out who is using your expensive ink.

Someone at work has a new laptop and wanted to be able to connect it to the network via Wifi. To make life with the laptop easier it would be preferable to set it up to automatically get it's IP address so that it can connect both here and at starbucks without having to edit network settings.

However, at work we all have static IP addresses, we don't use DHCP because of the opinion that it makes it harder to trace who is looking at pr0n when they should be working.

I proposed putting a dhcp server on my Ubuntu box and having a play.

Looking through the /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf file, it turns out that you can hard code particular MAC addresses to specific IP addresses, essentially assigning static IP addresses to specific network cards at the server end. This is as secure as it gets, you can trace who is looking at pr0n down to the network card in their PC.

I set it up as follows:

• Installed dhcpd package
• Edited /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf
• Added:

  option domain-name "domainname.com";   # local domain
  option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.3, 192.168.0.181;  # local name servers
  

• Added:

  * Added:
  <verbatim>
  subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
     option routers 192.168.0.12;   # pcw: gateway
  }
  

  This was the trickiest bit to get right. It has to have a subnet definition and normally these can be empty but the 'routers' line can be used to specify the gateway.
• Add MAC details for each host pc:

  host pcw {
    hardware ethernet 12:34:56:78:12:34;
    fixed-address 192.168.0.132;
  }
  

• Reboot dhcp server:

  sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart
  

Conclusion: DHCP is cool, it will not necessarily cost you tracability (at least on linux: dunno about windows, there might be a dancing paper clip that will tell you) and all the pc's on the network get configured automatically.

NTL broadband connection died at about 5pm. Checked DI624 router and could connect to it's admin functions from laptop via WiFi but could not do a good DHCP renew (it renewed but to 192.168.100.1 which is a local subnet address, not a 'proper' internet address). Looking at the cable modem the ready light was flashing which past experience tells me the line is dead. I didn't bother ringing tech support this time, I was patient.

My wife has had her phone for a year so down to the O2 shop for an upgrade. She fancied a change from Nokia and liked the colour of the Motorola V600 but unfortunately that is discontinued, it has been replaced by the V547 so I got her one of those. For free . It has:

• Clamshell design
• Bluetooth
• Big clear screen
• Camera: slightly better than nokia cameras (e.g. my 6610i, wife's old 7250i) don't look quite so much like they were taken through the bottom of a dirty jam jar. Still no match for a digital camera.
• MP3 ringtones! Cool, was able to download the crazy frog which has everyone in stitches.
• Good build quality
• The keyboard has a nicer feel than the Nokias which are a bit cheap and clicky.
• The UI is rather like my late lamented Sony-ericsson T68i: fiddly and annoying.
• Good predictive text: it quickly learns that you want to type 'am home' more often than 'an good'.

With the free phone I got 25% off a Jabra BT200 FreeSpeak Bluetooth Headset and a car charger for £5.

The Jabra headset Just Worked with the phone and it is indeed cool. My wife was delighted with it, she wants me to ring her whenever she goes out so she can pose with it. I set it up to voice dial and told her she can leave the phone in her handbag.

I wanted to try the headset with Skype so I tried reinstalling my existing bluetooth USB dongles:

Smart Modular Technologies

I downloaded their latest blueopal drivers and installed them. On first installation the Audio drivers and some other bits failed to install. It did manage to install an OBEX network driver and I was able to copy files to and from the phone. This is how I installed the crazy frog .mp3 file which I downloaded above. (Am I missing something? Was I supposed to pay for it?). I tried reinstalling the blueopal drivers to get headset support and was rewarded with my first every BSOD under windows XP. The setup program kept trying to reinstall, giving more BSOD's so I had to uninstall it manually by deleting files and picking the nasty bits out of the registry by hand.

MicroStar International (MSI) dongle

Luckily I had an MSI dongle as well. I downloaded the latest SP1 drivers for this (carefully avoiding the XP SP2 version that uses the new Microsoft USB stack but that not support a headset, not until MS get into the VOIP business) and installed them with no problems.

The headset gives new microphone and audio devices so I redirected everything to the headset and again it Just Worked. Skype worked ok and talking to someone in the same room you can hear a delay of about a second between them speaking and it coming through the headset. Ragarding range, the MSI dongle is supposed to have a 100m range and with the laptop downstairs the headset can receive anywhere in the house, although at the furthest reaches the sound gets a bit choppy. I won't try Skype over Wifi, my Wifi is too flaky.

Peter's vision of the future (well maybe not that visionary):

• full mp3 players in cell phones. If an iPod shuffle is the size of a stick of gum, why not make the cell phone a little bit bigger for a 500M flash memory chip?
• death of land line phones, ripped apart by mobile phones and VOIP.
• Nokia had better pull their fingers out, the V547 makes the Nokia phones look very dull.

Following previous activities my wifi connection had been ok for a week or two. I had no strange failures to connect when powering up my laptop, life was sweet. Last night I was in the middle of a good surf and the wireless connection died. It stayed dead through rebooting the laptop, swearing etc.

Eventually I went upstairs and rebooted the DI624 and this immediately fixed the problem.

This evening I went to use my desktop PC which is wired to the DI624 and it could not connect to the internet: DNS lookups failed. It could conneect to the routers administration pages on 192.168.0.1 but nslookup failed, e.g:

c:>nslookup www.bisiand.me.uk
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Can't find server name for address 194.168.8.100: Timed out
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Can't find server name for address 194.168.4.100: Timed out
*** Default servers are not available
Server:  UnKnown
Address:  194.168.8.100

DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
DNS request timed out.
    timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Request to UnKnown timed-out

A side-by-side comparison with the laptop showed me that it was fine:

C:>nslookup www.bisiand.me.uk
Server:  cache2.ntli.net
Address:  194.168.8.100

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    www.bisiand.me.uk
Address:  209.59.159.21

After some fiddling I rebooted the router through an option in the admin pages and this fixed the problem again.

Moral: the DI624 plays up about once every two weeks. Not sure I can pin this on the Intel Wifi card built into my laptop.

Since I flashed my DLink DI624 last week I haven't had any annoying/weird connection problems. So either:

• Flashing DI624 fixed annoying/weird problems
• WiFi using neighbours are on holiday
• It's a flash in the pan and will start again, worse than ever.

Right now I have a UltraVNC window open on my laptop controlling my desktop PC upstairs while it burns a Knoppix ISO downloaded with BitTorrent using ISO Recorder.

Cool

The networking on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop stopped working while I was using it. Reboots etc failed to bring it back to life. I took it closer to the wireless router (DLink DI-624), reprogrammed the network keys on the router and the laptop and it started working again. Dunno if it was an XP SP2 problem.

Two of my neighbours appear to have wireless networks now. My bandwidth was down to 32Mbps right next to the access point Wonder if I can boost my signal and jam out theirs?

I think the cheapest option for WiFi at home would be just an access point. These are £50 rather than £100 for a wireless router.

Pros:

• Cheaper

• Haven't wasted router

• Can have 100Mbps from main pc to router

Cons:

• All those wires and power supplies

• Wireless router may have easier to use firewall.

Saw Sharp MM1110 in PCWorld. A5 format subnotebook running XP. Very nice but £1100.

Pros:

• Very light and portable (<1kg)

• Nice build

• Built in WiFi.

• Makes other notebooks look big and heavy.

• Demo in store ran ok.

Cons:

• Price

• Batterys last 2-3 hours. An external battery is available in the US

• Only retailer I can find in uk is PCWorld (called Actius MM10 in other countrys.

• Not on Sharp uk web site

• Transmeta CPU. Weird chipset and compatability problems?

• No CD.

• 30 secs to come out of hibernate.

It would be a big luxury for wireless surfing anywhere in the house. So tempting but so expensive.