Technical Reviews and Geek Toys

Are you installing a new 802.11b/g Access Point and are wondering what channel to use? Is your Wi-Fi connection interment? Are you trying to troubleshoot problematic interference in Wi-Fi, home audio systems, wireless sensor networks? Well MetaGeek has recently announced the availability of the new Wi-Spy 2.4i Spectrum Analyzer. This gadget is really cool as well as useful. Coupled with New Mac-Friendly Software, Chanalyzer Lite, this Low-Cost USB Device Helps Enterprises Visualize, Troubleshoot and Optimize 2.4 GHz Wireless Networks. Just plug the Wi-Spy 2.4i into a USB port and the Chanalyzer Lite merges the Wi-Spy data with Wi-Fi information collected from your laptop's Wi-Fi card to create easy-to-read graphs showing activity from Wi-Fi, cordless phones, microwave ovens and any other RF transmitters in your area. MetaGeek has other versions of the Wi-Spy Spectrum Analyzer which offers expanded capabilities for a greater cost. The Wi-Spy 2.4i however is a great addition to my toolbox.

Change is a part of everyone's life. New skill sets are required in order to progress in life as well as on the job and picking up those skill sets does not have to be painful or expensive. On-demand learning or Elearning has become increasingly useful allowing one to take classes without having to be in the classroom. This technology allows anyone with access to a computer and the Internet to study a wide range of subjects.

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I was looking for a wireless scanner to install on my Acer Aspire One running Ubuntu 9.04 ReMix. I was troubleshooting a wireless network and needed to monitor multiple radios using a common SSID. NetStumbler works very well... on Windows. I found iwscanner on the Ubuntu Forums. It seems to work great and was just what I was looking for.

Last year we tried a community garden and... well it didn't work very well. Too many bosses and not enough workers. This year we decided we didn't need that many things; a few tomato plants, a couple cucumber plants and maybe some strawberry plants. Our situation is not that different from many of you who live in an apartment. Some of you may not know how good tomatos are that have ripened on the vine. I was surfing the net and happened upon the plans for an awesome planter.

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It just goes without saying that one can never have enough hard drive space or RAM. In my office I have a Ubuntu server with Windows 2000 Advanced server running on virtualBox, Bella has a workstation running Kubuntu and I have a workstation running Kubuntu. The server and Bella's machine are both older boxes so I have added additional internal hard drives to both. Today in order to try to cut costs (electricity) my goal was to transfer everything off of Bella's machine to either the server or to her login on my machine and then shut down her machine.

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