Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Okay, due to my discovery of a rogue AP yesterday I have bitten the bullet and reengaged MAC filtering and am also now trying 128bit WEP for the first time. Seems to work okay so far. I'll have to revisit the Linksys WET11 Bridge at a future point to see if it is hosed or there is a work around. Maybe if a new firmware is issued I'll fiddle with it again.

I'm now using wblogger exclusively. I've got file uploads working so I can easily post photos, etc. This program works very well and as usual it's free!

Another beautiful day. Hopefully the pollen count is lower today. It's been very rough on my allergies these past few days.

P.E.I.

Another nice picture from the P.E.I. 1995 archives:

peilighthousecliff-1

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Well, my Dell 600m came yesterday at 6:15 pm. Very nice laptop. Lots of setting up to do but I ran it on batteries with Wi-Fi for over 3 hrs. and still had time left. Looks like this Centrino stuff has merit.

Speaking of Wi-Fi, I started encountering disconnects on my desktop PC connected to my WET11 wireless bridge. This had been a reliable network but as of today it started going wacky. It would connect for a few minutes and then the lights for both the WLAN and the LAN would go out and then I'd have to unplug the power and the cycle would begin again. This was really puzzling. I started to think that introducing the Dell with it's Intel Pro Wireless was causing some interference but even when I turned off the Dell the problems persisted. Much head scratching on this one. I fiddled around with the settings on my SMC WAP - changing the default channel, etc. Nothing seemed to work. I googled the net but didn't turn up anything definitive. I finally gave up and went out and bought an SMC Wireless USB adapter. This installed in minutes and is working great so far.

The even more curious thing is that while looking at all this I started to notice that there was more than one access point showing up in my area! This is quite a surprise since I am in a residential court and was not expecting to see this. After further study I have definitely confirmed the presence of a "rogue" AP that has an SSID of "Speedstream". I can actually connect to it but it doesn't seem to serve DHCP so I can't log onto the Net. I am now wondering if this is the cause of the WET11 going south? Both APs are using channel 11. Even more interesting is where is this AP located? I installed NetStumbler which picked up this AP but since I don't have a GPS unit I can't pinpoint its location.

This is a very curious turn of events.

Monday, April 28, 2003

I'm getting back into reading books. I get so many newspapers and magazines I sometimes have a hard time settling in with a book. On a whim I picked up the bestseller "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. Reminds me of Eco's "The Name of the Rose" or the art mysteries by Iain Pears. I'm a sucker for mysteries and Leonardo Da Vinci, etc.

So it's 6pm and no UPS man? BooHoo! I know he will come today.
So, I'm killing time waiting for the UPS man to deliver my new Dell Centrino Laptop. I'm a bit excited to see how I like it. This is the first time I've bought a Dell. Since I just build my desktop PCs from parts, it will be interesting to see how the other half lives. I've got a bit of trepidation about using Win XP but I'll grin and bear it. I will install a good bit of OpenSource software to balance things out.

Listening to Sean Hannity and suffering with my allergies. It's a beautiful warm day but the pollen count must be sky high today. I took a Claritin but still I suffer. I'm sure it doesn't help that I have all the windows open.

I've been doing quite a lot of work transferring out of print LPs to CD-R. I've got a pretty good system setup to expedite the process while preserving the fidelity I require. I spent a lot of time tweaking the Music Hall 2.1 turntable I bought for this purpose. It is low-end compared to my AR-Merrill-Morch-Benz rig but it's quite acceptable. I started out using the supplied Goldring cartridge but decided to upgrade. First, I tried a Grado ZTE+ I had lying around. This was an improvement in overall sound but a real disaster in hum shielding which Grado is notorious for. I found a source of MU-Metal that is used to shield electronics. I used it years ago for other electronic projects. It was only about $20 for a sheet big enough for my purposes. I installed it under the platter using double stick tape. It did dramatically reduce the hum but still it allowed the magnetic field to increase at the outer edge of the platter. I finally abandoned the Grado and installed a nice Benz-Micro MC20E2 Moving Coil cartridge I had lying around. This is a real upgrade and I'll stick with this solution. Not very much hum now and the little left I can EQ out using a notch filter at 120hz in Vegas when I edit the WAV file. I'm now getting some very nice audio transfers to CD-R that I bet could fool some that did not know they were sourced from LP.

Sunset on P.E.I.

I've been going through some photos lately. I particularly like this one from my trip to P.E.I. back in 1995:

IMG0093

Wednesday, April 09, 2003

Just found an offline blog tool called w.bloggar. Looks like a useful tool. Let's see if I can get this to post to my website.