home network
Fix
Troubleshoot a Slow Home Network
11:30PM Gina Trapani | Not getting the bit transfer rate you used to at home? The New York Times covers how to troubleshoot a slow home network, including rebooting your router and changing the Wi-Fi signal’s channel to avoid interference with neighbours and other devices. More »
Work
Look@Lan Monitors Your Network
11:30PM Lifehacker US Edition | Windows only: User-friendly network monitoring utility Look@Lan quickly displays information about your local network such as the percentage of machines online and the operating systems installed on them. With automatic network configuration detection and a quick start wizard, you can be up and running seconds after installing the program. Look@Lan has audio notification of changes to the network and you can configure it to send email notifications about changes as well. Look@Lan can limit scan ranges based on IP address, network adaptor, or port types; it comes with ping, traceroute, and a tree-based network viewer built in. Here’s what some of Look@Lan’s graphs look like. More »
Secure Your Home Wi-Fi Network
12:30AM Gina Trapani | Tech site Ars Technica runs down the basics of securing your home wireless network with the most secure and up-to-date methods. The main takeaway is that when you enable encryption on your wireless router, use WPA encryption instead of WEP, because it’s better and stronger. Unlike WEP, WPA uses a 48-bit initialization vector and a 128-bit encryption key. More importantly, however, WPA uses what’s called the Temporary Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). Whereas WEP recycles the same key for encrypting all the packets flowing across the network, WPA’s TKIP changes the encryption key every single time a packet is transmitted. This, combined with the use of longer keys, prevents a hacker from compromising a router simply by passively observing a large enough set of packet transmissions. More »
Free Ways to Synchronise Folders Between Computers
3:00AM Gina Trapani | Nothing sucks worse than getting to the office in the morning and realizing you left the most recent copy of an important file—whether it’s your to-do list or a PowerPoint presentation—on your home computer. No matter where you are and what computer you’re using, you always want the most updated set of documents and files you’ve got without having to carry ‘em around on a thumb drive. Luckily, several free solutions can automatically sync folders between computers—even over the internet, through office firewalls—no matter what operating system you use. Whether you want work files edited at home to magically appear on your PC at the office, or the family room Mac to have a copy of the latest batch of digital photos downloaded onto the computer in the den, three free applications can help. More »
Wire Your Living Room Over Wi-Fi with a Bridge
3:00AM Gina Trapani | More devices in your living room have Ethernet ports than ever before, but you can’t plug them into the network if your router’s in the other room. When your Wi-Fi access point is in the home office but your TiVo, Xbox, and media centre are screaming for network love under your TV in the living room, you want a wireless bridge (also known as an Ethernet converter). A wireless bridge catches your home network’s Wi-Fi signal and provides ports where you can plug in wired devices near it. Let’s take a look at how to wire up your living room using a wireless bridge. More »
Set Up a PDF Printer on a Windows Home Network
2:00AM Kevin Purdy | Free Windows utility PDFCreator is a great all-in-one PDF wrangler and paper-saving print option. If you’ve got more than one computer at home doing some regular printing, PDFCreator can also be deployed on a simple Windows home server box (like the kind you might built a home FTP server on) to help everyone in your household save paper. The Confessions of a Freeware Junkie blog has the lowdown on getting PDFCreator set up for creating and sharing PDFs, or securely locking away each users’ printouts, if that’s more your speed. Whether single-user or network-installed, PDFCreator is a free download for Windows systems only. Create a shared PDF Printer using PDFCreator [Confessions of a Freeware Junkie] More »
Time Machine Over the Network with iTimeMachine
6:00AM Gina Trapani | Mac OS X Leopard only: Back up your Mac with Time Machine not to a local hard drive but to a shared network disk with iTimeMachine. This simple two-button desktop utility makes your shared network drives show up in Time Machine’s possible backup destination list. But it isn’t as user friendly as it could be. More »
Add More Functionality to Leopard’s Screen Sharing
5:00AM Adam Pash | Macworld has discovered that there’s a lot more functionality hidden in Leopard’s new Screen Sharing application (yes, it’s actually just a normal application and not some obscure service), and unlocking it is just a matter of a couple of simple Terminal commands. First, you’ll want to find the Screen Sharing app in /System/Library/CoreServices and drag it into your Dock or copy it to your Applications folder for easier access. Once you do that, fire up Terminal and enter the following (one-line) command, which will provide easy-to-read shortcuts for connecting to any local computer: defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1 Now run the Screen Sharing app and you should see an interface similar to what you see in the screenshot above. But that’s not all. The next Terminal tweak adds toolbar buttons to the Screen Sharing window to control the quality of your session, window control, and a few other useful tweaks. More »
