» Tech

Router Update

me — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:50:03 +0000

A while back I updated an old Linksys router with the fancy pants Tomato Firmware. All has been well over the last 6 weeks. No need to reboot, everything has worked out great. The biggest slice of traffic the router sees is VPN, VOIP, and basic web browsing. We are not big downloaders, freepers, frappers, or anything else (get your mind out of the gutter). Including Tivos, computers, printers, NAS, and a few other wifi enabled devices - our home network can see on average of 10 networked devices. It has worked great with segregating out the VOIP traffic (giving it priority).

If anything changes I will update the site, but for now Tomato on a WRT54G router is working great.

Spice up your inbox.

me — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:53:56 +0000

No. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Google rolled out a way to skin/theme your Gmail account.

Yesterday they rolled out 30 themes to users. If you don’t have the themes yet, you will soon. Google is rolling the feature out over several days. You will see a themes tab underneath your Settings.

Several of them look pretty cool - I may have to give one a shot.

GMail Updates

me — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:01:08 +0000

So a few weeks back - the gmail team released the am I drunk test for sending emails. Quite a fancy update for a product still in beta. Today, I see that they have unleashed emoticon icons for gmail.

Now that the team is adding “for fun” type things - can we bring it out of beta? Or is Google pulling the wool over our eyes - is the beta monicker a joke now? I don’t get it.

Router Fun

me — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:17:29 +0000

A little over a year ago, I switched routers. I went from my trusty Linksys WRT54G to a ZoneAlarm (CheckPoint) Z100G router. My wife would be working from home now and I wanted a beefed up router for our home network. The Check Point router had all kinds of bonus features for small office use. It was really rock solid. Over time though, I found its many shortcomings. There is no QoS. Running video and VoIP - I really needed a router that had good QoS. The number of connections are limited. At any one time I can have up ten devices on my network, and this box limited the number of outbound connections to 5. I soon had to buy more seats. With network printers, NAS, computers, and Tivos - you can run out of 5 seats rather quickly.

I finally had to give up on the Z100G router. Last night, I dusted off my trusty Linksys WRT54G and flashed the router. Afterwards I immediately loaded the Tomato firmware on it. The routers has been happily running, it has great QoS built in to the firmware. I’ll do another post more in depth on Tomato firmware later with links to helpful sites.

OpenOffice 3.0

me — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:24:48 +0000

Today, OpenOffice 3.0 was released to the masses.

As of now it looks like the site is having a hard time coping with massive downloads. I’ll spare you a review or a run down of what is included. You can swing a cat out in the internets and hit a dozen of these sites.

My question to you faithful reader. Do you use something akin to Open Office - or have you souled out to Microsoft? As for me - I use mostly MS Office at work. At home I rarely have the need for an office type product. I can usually get by with a text editor and some cloud computing if needed.

I am going to try and download Open Office 3 later in the week and see how it looks. I am not sure what version I currently have installed on my Linux box at home.

Image via Wikipedia

Eye in the sky

me — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:50:01 +0000

GEOEye-1 has sharpened Google’s satelite imagery.

Head over to the link above to see the difference - amazing.

Image via Wikipedia

Help for the drunks

me — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:54:45 +0000

Google released Mail Goggles today.

It is supposed to help me you quit sending those late night, booze influenced tirades. I am sure Brittany Spears will be glad that she no longer receives emails from me late at night on Friday. As I profess my love for some of that trailer park goodness.

So . . . get out the tequila, drink up over the weekend, surf the net. The boys at Google have your back.

Image via Wikipedia

OpenSuse 11

me — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:48:48 +0000

I had been running Ubuntu for sometime at home. I had been reading a good bit about the new release of OpenSuse 11. And had been wanting to try it. The other day at work I downloaded the DVD ISO and burned it, I finally got around to installing it last night. This has to be one of the easiest OS installs I have ever done. It was almost completely hands off. After the install - I was presented with a beautiful desktop. I had to do some minor tweaking to the video card and monitor settings to get the correct resolution. The DVD version install every imaginable option and software. I didn’t get to muck around with it too much - it was late by time I finished. Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to dive in and get my hands dirty. But, from the outset - it looks like the distro for me.

Image via Wikipedia

In the Cloud

me — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 14:32:36 +0000

So . . . MS is developing an OS for cloud computing. We can all jump for joy, our prayers have been answered. I am too lazy to look it up. OK . . . here - I know you are lazy as well. Bums. Here is an article about Windows coming to Amazon’s EC2. To me that opens a whole can of worms - I can not wait to see how they handle licensing for that. Prepare your first born. By the way All Things Distributed blog is great - it is written by Werner Vogels - the CTO of Amazon.

Pretty soon it will all be on the cloud. Once I slow down to think about it - I have much more in the cloud than I originally thought.

Image via Wikipedia

Android Dream

me — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:48:44 +0000

After seeing pics of the new Google OS based phone the HTC Dream. I want to ask. WTF?

Seriously. Could that phone has been put on a more ugly platform? I have never really been fond of the HTC phones to begin with. The remind me of an older Palm Pilot or something from the early tech days. And why in world T-Mobile? Couldn’t they have ran with someone with more of a nationalized foot print?

In my opinon they have only given more creedence to the I-Phone. I know the plan was not to go after the already existing smart phone market (I-Phone, Black Berry, and Palm). They want to go after the other users - users of normal phones. Those that usually text and make calls - and that’s that.

I feel I could keep railing on this phone. I’ll quit. For now.