Using an old Wireless Router as an Access Point or Range Extender.

Surprisingly easy to do, if you know how.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-turn-an-old-router-into-a-wireless-bridge/

http://www.dslreports.com/faq/11233

See also:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Access_Point

Interesting and mostly (I think) right on the money article about why people pirate games.

Talking to Pirates

A couple of things that I found interesting were the implied percentages of people who responded with different reasons/justifications for their piracy. As someone who used to travel to Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong regularly (before the Internet made location irrelevant) I saw just how many people would buy pirated movies/games just because they were cheap and easy. It was actually easier to get a pirated copy of Fallout 2 than it was to get a real one, by several orders of magnitude (as measured by distance to travel) and certainly cheaper...

I wasn't as surprised as Cliff that price was a major factor, although I think he was biased because he intended it as a question about his own games, not the general market, and the answers were based on retail for the most part, I would guess.

I was surprised that Cliff didn't mention Stardock as another example of a company that makes great games and doesn't use any DRM. I love their model of install it, use it on as many machines as you like, but you have to register to get the updates.

dropping the price of his own games I have to question, as well, since are already fairly reasonable, but certainly dropping the price of an old game right before the next installment/version comes out is an old marketing trick that is a proven one.

Best of luck to Cliff and all the other independent developers out there, it's a tough biz to be in.

xkcd is a fabulous comic for geeks, but today, a tribute...

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe:




R.I.P. friend I never met...

Why I hate Outlook, reason 76364939928

There is an issue where if you close Outlook via the Red X in the corner, it doesn’t close the same way as doing so via File/Close. This affects all versions of Outlook, btw. The X was hanging and leaving the exe process running as a background task, which, if you disconnect the computer, (laptop) causes issues.

Solution: disable the iTunes Add-in or any other Add-in that is unneeded.

At least it seems to be working…

so, by this point someone (if there is anyone out there) may have realized that what I really use this for at this point is to make a log of the answers to problems I have had to search for the answers to. This post is no exception.

problem: Sony vl900 remote transmits the on/off signal to my yamaha receiver too long and turns it back on when I try to turn it off.

Answer:
http://www.remotecentral.com/cgi-bin/mboard/rc-sony/thread.cgi?keywords=1387&highlight=repeat|vl900|rate

Another issue:
Problem: the Learning remote won't learn the TIVO Channel Down command

Answer: the TIVO remote doesn't transmit clearly - you have to buy another pre-programmed remote and use it to learn from

http://www.remotecentral.com/cgi-bin/mboard/rc-sony/thread.cgi?keywords=5137&highlight=button|vl900|tivo|down

One Laptop per Child Foundation, Invest your money and your time - OLPC Foundation

One Laptop per Child Foundation, Invest your money and your time - OLPC Foundation

I've been following this since it's inception and really believe in it's mission and potential.

Perhaps you know people who would want to participate?

(From photographer David Reicks)

Here's a Win-Win-Win for the Holidays.

A child in a developing country gets a laptop, you get one too, plus

you get a charitable donation and a nice freebie for when you travel.

I don't know about you, but I'd been eyeing the XO laptop since I

heard about it earlier this year. When I found the reminder email

from the One Laptop Per Child foundation in my "junk box" this

morning, I decided to take the plunge after seeing the sweetened deal.

The One Laptop Per Child education project has a "Give One, Get One"

program running from November 12 to the 26th. You pay $399 plus

shipping, and one of the XO laptops will be sent to a child in

developing country, and one of them is yours to keep (along with a

$200 charitable contribution).

The clincher was seeing that T-mobile sweetened the deal by offering

a free year of T-Mobile Hotspot internet access to people that

contribute (not just for the XO laptop, but any wireless device).

Since I'll be logging a few miles this next year for the SAA photo

metadata project, I think this makes it a Win-Win-Win! (if that's

possible). The cost of a year of Hotspot access is nearly the same as

what you are spending for the whole deal, so hard to see how you can go wrong.

Anyway, if you are interested, here's the link.

http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/give-one-get-one.php

If you aren't interested in keeping your personal laptop, think of it as a

stock photo prop, or give it to one of your kids, a niece or nephew,

or other deserving child you know.

Here My Home Once Stood - A Holocaust Memoir

Here My Home Once Stood - A Holocaust Memoir

I got a letter last week from a good friend, Phil Shpilberg and, in an effort to help promote this amazing story and labor of love, I post this.

Dear Friends and Family,

In a week, my grandfather, Moyshe Rekhtman, will turn 80 years old. This coincides with the completion of my manuscript of his memoir, Here My Home Once Stood. For the past three years, I have passionately translated his Russian audio recordings, written and edited the story of his escape from two concentration camps and subsequent struggle to survive. As an almost blind 14-year-old, my grandfather refused to die in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, where 1.5 million other Jews perished.

I hope to publish this work soon. Until that time I would like to share excerpts of it with you via my blog

http://hmhos.blogspot.com/


If it moves you, please subscribe to the blog and tell others who may be interested. And of course, if you can help me connect with a publisher or agent, I would be grateful.

I hope that Here My Home Once Stood can, in some small way, stop future human suffering. Any proceeds from the project will go to that end.

Thank you,
Phil Shpilberg