Time Warner Caps Dropped! Victory!
We won! Perhaps… but it is a start. Time Warner has dropped its plans to enforce Bandwidth caps across Texas and NY! Though with caveats, this is a great day! And that too, after I had ranted on in the previous post. Seems Senator Schumer’s displeasure was the push needed to bring down this ill-conceived plan on the part of Time Warner.
Time for celebrations in Blogosphere! One down, Comcast next.
The latest Macbook Air killer falls flat – Dell Adamo
A very interesting article on this much awaited “Macbook Air killer”. Engadget dismisses this upstart with a low rating and a much deserved slapping around. Read here. $2000+ for this monstrosity, please…
…but you’ve got to be pretty shallow to spend $2000 on a system and not care how it performs.
WRT54G2 – a cheap Wireless Adapter for the XBox 360
Success! After Drew in our office pointed me to a Gizmodo article mentioning how to create a cheap Wireless Device for the XBox 360 using custom firmware, I was all raring to give it a go. As one might know, an XBox Wireless Adapter retails for around a hundred dollars, and even with smart bargain hunting, one is not likely to find it cheaper than around eighty. Not willing to shell out that much for a Wireless adapter (I’d rather spend it on games), I decided to go for a refurb WRT54G2 device I found through a bargain website, on Newegg, for a princely sum of twenty-one dollars. All signs on the DD-WRT website pointed to compatibility with the micro firmware version.
The directions to upgrade the existent firmware on the device were clear. What was lacking in clarity though, was the process to convert it into a wireless bridge. A wireless bridge connects two different LAN segments via a Wireless link – useful to increase the reach of the Wireless Network, amongst other uses. For a fuller description – clicky.
The process can be a little convoluted to say the least. I started by connecting the router to a Windows PC (yuck) via one of the router’s LAN ports. The firmware upgrade process was the same as described on the website. However, directions to set it into the wireless bridge mode were murky – what was missing was that before one starts the configuration, one needs to connect it to the existing Wireless Router.
Click the Status Tab -> Wireless -> Site Survey (at the bottom), which will bring up a window with a list of Wireless Routers in the proximity. Choose yours, and click JOIN on the side. This will connect the two Routers, but here’s the tricky part – if you have security on, the directions on the DD-WRT manual don’t specify where one can enter the same.
Enter the Wireless key for the master router in Wireless (Tab) -> Wireless Security, and continue as described on the DD-WRT site. Perfect!
I have it connected to my XBox 360 and indeed, no drops and no connection issues whatsoever. I couldn’t be more happy at having saved some sixty dollars (which I will spend on a new HDD).
Uploading images to WordPress = FAIL?
From the start, whenever I tried to upload a larger file to WordPress from an external editor, I always ran into an “500 Internal Server Error”. Just how many images etc did I have to scale down because of this, I alone know. I decided to get off my bum and research this a bit, and found that it is a problem prevalent with some web hosts, where the services tend to revert back to PHP4 by default. The fix is simple. Add the following to your .htaccess
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
And Bob’s your chum.
Trying out Blogo
My search for a reliable and aesthetically pleasing offline blog editor for Mac has led me to Blogo. I am excoriating myself for never having tried this puppy out earlier. I am so impressed by how easy this app makes blogging – every aspect from writing (in full screen mode when one needs to concentrate), to attaching images (Drag drop please). Just wonderful. Blogo is a prime example of how Software designed for Mac is far superior to anything for any other platform.
Available as a 21 day trial, and $25 to buy, this is well worth the money spent. Go gettit!
PS: Wonderful feature! Preview your post exactly as it would appear on the blog. Wow. I have seen other editors try and miserably fail at that. Blogo does it, and with aplomb!
