Couple interesting WiFi tips
Dave over at the Asterisk Blog wrote up a few interesting tips for building home wireless networks. I’d like to point people who ask me questions about wireless networks to lists like this. His tips can deal with the questions like “why can’t I get a signal even though I’m not that far away?”, or “how come I can’t pick up my wifi signal in my shed 200 yards away?” Here’s a couple good ones:
If you?re using a cordless phone, replace it. Cordless phones are among the worst sources of interference for wireless networks. They tend to transmit at a higher power output than Wi-Fi gear, making them louder and therefore harder to talk over, and they tend to transmit frequently, especially when the handset and base station are separated.
The farther you are from your wireless router, the greater the potential for interference to block or to slow your connection. You can strengthen the connection with antennas or repeaters. Or, try using a power-line bridge to import the connection from your router, and feed it into a power-line access point.
[link]
Fixing My Damn Bluetooth
So I spent the last 6 months owning a bluetooth headset and being completely unable to use it, thanks to Verizon’s horrendous phone software. I have a RAZR V3m from Verizon, and for my birthday Colette bought me a Motorola H350 headset, like this:
From the moment I first used it I could never receive calls via the headset. Whenever I’d answer a call with the headset connected, I could hear the caller but they couldn’t hear me. After that I basically quit using it until a few days ago, when I decided “F THIS I’M USING THIS PIECE”. Someone on a message board had told me that a master factory reset would correct the issue, but that turned out to be untrue. Everything was still fubar. So I finally broke down and rode to the Verizon store to have the tech there flash the firmware on the phone to the latest version (thanks to Verizon’s genius, you can’t do anything like this yourself). He takes the phone and the headset and tells me it’ll take 45 minutes for the process to complete, which is BS but I left it with him anyways. After I got it back he tells me everything’s working perfectly, but I quickly find out that he’s wrong… it’s even worse than before. Now I couldn’t even hear the person calling me. Once I stopped being pissed off at it again, I tried the master reset just for kicks and it worked! Now I can look like a douche with a headset on everywhere I go. Thank GOD.
iPhone, iPhone, iPhone!
The iPhone is a reality! And apparently, somehow they’re calling it the iPhone, even though it’s been all over the net lately that iPhone is a registered trademark of Linksys/Cisco. Oh well.
The phone looks NICE. Heres a glimpse:
The interface is completely touchscreen-based. It serves as an 8GB widescreen iPod, 2-megapixel camera, and fully functional phone. The phone is quad-band GSM + EDGE with WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0. Pretty crazy having all that hardware packed into a device thinner than both the Moto Q and the Blackjack. It’ll also run FULL OS X, Safari, Google Maps, AND support a new IMAP push email service from Yahoo!. It’s scheduled to ship in June and be sold through the Apple and Cingular stores (Cingular has excusivity on the device in the US). I don’t even think the most hardcore Apple fanboys saw this many features coming.
Telephony, Running Servers, & Other Hackery
If you folks out there are interested in running servers out of your house, be it mail servers, web servers, streaming media, VoIP, what-have-you, or you’re interested in home-brew telephony projects, I highly recommend a blog called Nerd Vittles. Clever name, if you ask me. The site, run by a guy named Ward Mundy, contains countless full-blown, step-by-step guides to setting up all kinds of homemade systems such as Asterisk, the open-source PBX. I’ve read most, if not all, of the guides he’s got on his site and they never fail to impress. I mention this because lately I’ve been really looking forward to getting more into the whole PBX/telephony/Trixbox scene so that I may then sell my services to whomever would like them. You could easily save any small business about $10,000 per year on telephone lines, problems, and service and support from your telecom vendor. All these godforsaken proprietary PBX systems have to be the bane of every overworked engineer-cum-IT support specialist on the planet. I know every time we need ANYTHING done on our system at my office, we’re required by contract to have the lazy guy from the telecom company take his sweet 2 to 3 weeks to come out and fix it. That fat check he gets must be well worth it! Anyways, I can’t wait to turn some 2 year old machine we’ve got sitting around the office into a VoIP telephony powerhouse… and all for the cost of a few hours of research and study. I will soon supplant Johnny Repairaphone as the goto telephone master!