Headworx

Crapware is probably a better word for what I used to call bloatware . The software that you can live without. The same software that comes preloaded on your machine when purchased. Eating your CPU, RAM, battery. Eating your nerves when your machine hangs or stalls or takes too long to boot. The problem is now widely noticed and as necessity is the mother of an invention, anew class of software utilities emerges. Decrapifiers. Computer viruses spawned a wave of anti-virus software products, even entire companies, some of them listed on stock exchanges. Big industry. Then came firewalls. Software fighting against other software trying to get on to your computer and wreck havoc on the desktop. Now we have decrapifiers. Utilities promising to clean your windows machine to the state comparable with Macs. One of them is the PC Decrapifier . It is a good start. No perfect by all means, but good and helpful for starters. And looking at the dynamics of the amount of crapware coming with new PC...

A few weeks ago I posted an entry touting the entry - level SLR camera, namely the Nikon D40. I am a very happy D40 owner, it serves as my secondary camera and a great learning tool for the family members. We use Picasa as a "cloud" storage for photos and one thing I would really love to have (and have been writing about for a while) is eliminating the PC as a man-in-the-middle between a camera and an Internet photo storage / sharing site. Last week I have finally found some time to configure and test the new release of the before mentioned Eye-Fi SD card . Eye-Fi is a special storage card. On the outside it looks and behaves just like any other SD card. 2GB capacity may not sound big these days, but it is plenty enough for casual usage. D40 reports it can store some 500 snaps on it, which is more than enough. But the Eye-Fi is not an ordinary storage card. It has a dedicated computer and a communication device inside. Namely an 802.11 b/g WiFi transceiver and antenna. And ...

Last week I cried out loud my 802.11n hassles . People may wonder why move to faster wireless network at home, but the answer seems to be pretty clear: multimedia. More and more homes are equipped with some kind of a multimedia home server. In my case this is the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ . It serves three main purposes: Stores my digital pictures (the ones myself and other members of the family snap with our cameras) Stores digital videos (mostly satellite TV recordings I collect, like the Formula-1 races) Stores digital music (MP3 rips of CDs I buy and eMusic downloads) All the three types of content go through my laptop. Pictures are copied from memory cards to the laptop, cataloged with Picasa and sent to the NAS. Videos are downloaded from the hard drive of the Dreambox satellite tuner, and then converted from .TS (MPEG-2 satellite transport stream format) to .MPG (MPEG-2 native format) and sent to the NAS. Music goes almost the same way. Each time the laptop does some proces...

My wireless home has now 36 ethernet devices scattered all over the place. The only consistent way to count them is to look at the DHCP status log of the DFL-800 router / firewall that is the heart of my network. And BTW I consider the DFL-800 to be one of my best tech / gadget investments. It is not cheap and learning curve is steep. But it can do a lot and has never failed. Recently I have decided to upgrade the WiFi to the 802.11n standard, promising much better coverage and high throughput. Actually I have been in a need for both, as our newly finished veranda happens to be out of reach of the old and faithful Linksys WRT54GL. I knew the operation would be dangerous, so I started the whole process studying opinions of early 802.11.n adopters. They indicated I should stay away from Linksys, as their new boxes are nowhere near the classic WRT54GL. So I decided to pick the Asus WL-500W . And soon after plugging it in I found out my laptop (Lenovo X61s with Intel 4965AGN dual band n...