Extend the Range of your Wireless Network

Setting up a wireless home network is pretty simple now. Get a wireless router, connect the Internet port of the router to your broadband modem and then connect any of the numbered LAN ports to the desktop computer through an Ethernet cable.

Wireless G (or 802.11g) routers offer fairly good Wi-Fi signal strength but if you plan to transfer large files or stream videos around the house, you may well consider switching to a slightly more expensive Wireless N (or 802.11n) router – these offer better signal strength and higher data transfer speeds than Wireless G routers.

There’s however one problem with Wi-Fi signals emanating from your wireless router – they only have a limited range. The wireless signal strength will degrade as the distance between the router and your laptop increases and it will further weaken if you have too many brick walls in the house or if your computer is located on a different floor than the router.

Ways to Boost the WiFi Signal Strength

If you too have a problem getting Wi-Fi signals in every corner of your house, here are some tips (and accessories) to help you extend the range of your wireless network.

1. Install the DD-WRT* firmware on your wireless router – this might help increase the range of your Wi-Fi router by a few meters if not more.

To increase the signal strength, you can increase the router’s transmit power and also disable both frame burst and afterburner (the settings can be accessed from the router’s web dashboard). If DD-WRT firmware is not available for your router, try the Tomato firmware on your router.

2. Wifi alumnium reflector: Most routers have omni-directional antennas so they emit wireless signals in all directions (just like a light bulb).

How to Fix your Slow Internet Connection

Let’s say you have subscribed to a fast broadband Internet connection at home and you are getting the expected download speeds that were initially promised by the ISP.

However, sometimes it may happen that the speed of the same Internet connection slows down and then even simple websites may take forever to load on your machine.

Troubleshooting your Slow Internet Connection

There can be several reasons why you may be getting slower-than-usual Internet connection speeds. For instance, you could be accessing the web during peak hours. Or your download manager could be downloading files in the background thus consuming all the bandwidth. Or, if you are accessing the Internet over Wi-Fi, maybe you’re too far off from the wireless router.

Then there are external factors that may slow down the Internet. You are probably getting Internet through your existing phone line so if there’s a fault in the wiring, that may  negatively affect your connection speed. In fact, if your Internet connection is not stable and keeps dropping off frequently, blame the phone company.

Does Your Telephone Line Need Repair?

You don’t need any special equipment to determine if your phone line is the real culprit but before we get there, let’s run a few simple tests to discount all the other possibilities.

Test 1. Power-cycle the router and modem – unplug the cables, wait for couple of minute and then power on the modem followed by the router.

If you have been experiencing connectivity issues after a power-outage, power cycling will most probably fix the issue.

Test 2. Close all applications including any firewalls and anti-virus software. Then open speedtest.net to determine the actual download and upload speed of your Internet connection.

If you have Wi-Fi at your place, remove the router for a moment and connect the ADSL modem directly to your computer’s Ethernet port via a physical LAN cable. Repeat the speed test. Did you see any improvement in the connection speed?

Test 3. To ensure that none of the viruses or spyware programs are responsible for your slow Internet, open command prompt and run the following command:

netstat –b –f 5

This will easily help you figure out if any of the programs on your computer are silently connecting to the Internet without your knowledge. Should you find a strange process in the netstat result listing, kill it through the Task Manager.

Test 4. If your Internet speed woes aren’t over yet, it’s time to inspect the phone line. No, you don’t have to climb that telephone pole as the stats from your DSL modem /router will alone give the required data.

Open the web dashboard of your modem /router and note the following values for the downstream connection (not upstream). The fields are generally available under Statistics –> ADSL.

Getting Refunds for your iTunes Store Purchases

If you are wondering why anyone would want refunds for purchases that they have made from the iTunes store, consider the following situations:

A. You ordered an HD movie from the iTunes store but after making the purchase, you realize that it would take several hours to download that massive file to your computer. You can stop the download but your credit card will still be charged.

B. You have an iPhone but you accidentally bought an iPad version of some app which is obviously of no use to you.

C. You wanted to buy a game but there were at least a dozen similar titles on the iTunes store. The one you finally bought is not the one you were originally looking for and you therefore want to return it to Apple.

D. You purchased a song from iTunes store but there’s some problem with the audio format and it won’t play on your iPod or iPhone.

E. You have two or more iTunes accounts and you purchased an iPhone App using the wrong iTunes account. You can’t transfer apps across accounts so a refund followed by re-purchase makes more sense.

F. The 1-Click ordering system, that Apple licensed from Amazon, makes it easy for anyone to buy apps, songs, movies and games from the iTunes store with a single click but this can sometimes lead to accidental purchases especially when kids have access to your devices.

Block Facebook Applications

Do you hate getting invites from friends requesting you to install Facebook applications that are of no interest to you? Would you like to permanently block all those annoying Facebook apps that post messages to your wall without asking?

If you are someone like me who primarily uses Facebook to connect with family members and have little interest in Facebook apps, you can choose to permanently opt-out of the Facebook apps platform. This will make your profile inaccessible to all other apps and you therefore won’t get any invites or wall posts in future.

To disable the Facebook apps platform, log in to your Facebook account, select Privacy Settings under Account and then click “Edit your settings” under the Applications and Websites section. Here you’ll see an option to turn off all the platform applications with a single click.

How to Create Custom Facebook Pages

As an example, see this customized Facebook page that includes a welcome page (also known as custom landing tab) for new visitors, presentations, a live RSS feed, videos and more. And it doesn’t take lot of effort to build such a page. Let’s see how:

Step 1: Assuming that you’ve already created a basic Facebook Page, open the Static FBML application and add it to your Facebook page.

Step 2: Go back to your Facebook Page, click the “Edit Page” link in the sidebar and again click “Edit” under the FBML section.

Step 3: This is your playground -- anything that you insert into this FBML text box will be visible on your Facebook Page. It accepts standard HTML tags so you may insert images, tables, paragraphs and more into your Facebook Page with simple markup.

Step 4: Now click “Edit” under Wall Settings and set the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else” to one of your new FBML boxes.

Add Elements to your Facebook Page

Now that your basic Facebook Page with the Static FBML app is in place, here are some ideas / code-snippets that you may add to your Page:

1. A Better Landing Page

If you want to show a different landing page to fans and non-fans, use the visible-to-connection tag as in the following example.

Fans will see a link to download a PDF book while non-fans will see a welcome image. Remember that the width of this image should not exceed 520px.

Download Attachments from Multiple E-Mails

If you ever get an email message in your Inbox that includes multiple file attachments, you can easily download all the attachments to your hard disk as a single zip archive with a click. Such a feature is available in all popular email clients including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and even Microsoft Outlook.

However, let’s now consider a slightly different problem.

You have multiple emails that contain multiple attachments of multiple types and you now want to download them all (the attachments) to a local folder? How do you do this?

Well, here’s an easy workaround.

Step 1: Go to drop.io and click the “Create a Drop” button. Drop.io is now a paid service but you can still create temporary accounts for free.

Step 2: You’ll be assigned a unique email address for your drop.io account. Copy this email address to your clipboard (it’s listed in the right sidebar).

Step 3: Go back to your email inbox and forward all the messages, that you would like to download, to your new drop.io email address. Within seconds, drop.io will pull all the file attachments from your emails and will add them to the new “drop” that you created in Step 1.

Step 4: Now click Share –> Zip file to create a compressed zip file containing all the email attachments that you can save to your computer with a click. Once you are done with the download, go to Settings –> Maintenance –> Destroy Drop to delete all your files from drop.io permanently.

Do More with your Browser’s Search Box

The search box is located in the upper right corner of IE and Firefox while Chrome has this thing integrated in the address bar itself. The function is however the same – it offers you a convenient way to search using your favorite search engine.

Other than search, there are some more interesting uses of the search bar as well.

1. Avoid Spelling Mistakes

If you writing an email inside the browser and are unsure about the spelling of some word, you can simply type that misspelled word in the search box.

Google will immediately offer you the correct spelling as a query suggestion that you can copy-paste into your email message.

2. Clean-up Formatting from Copied Text

When copying content from a web page into an email message, you can first paste that text into your browser’s search box and then copy it to the clipboard.

This will automatically convert the rich text into plain text removing all the hyperlinks and other formatting that you don’t want to add to your email message.

3. Correct Grammar Errors

The search box can also help you fix grammatical errors in your sentences.

Say you sometimes get confused between words like ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ or between ‘advise’ and ‘advice.’ In that case, just type the whole sentence in the search box and it should save you from making that silly grammatical error again.

Easily Share Large Files over the Internet

If you are to share a large file with someone over the Internet, there are generally two options – you can either attach the files to an email message or, if the files are too big to fit in an email program, you can upload them to an online storage service and then share the download links with the recipient.

Let’s now explore some of the popular services that’ll make it easy for you to transfer large files over the Internet without any hassles or costs.

A: Share Large Files over Email

The Gmail service cannot handle email attachments that are larger than 25 MB but the recently-revamped Hotmail service is a much better alternative as it lets you send email messages as large as 10 GB.

The maximum size of an individual file that you can attach to an Hotmail message is only 50 MB but you can use a file-splitting utility like HJ-Split to break a big file into smaller chunks and then attach them all to a single message. The recipient can then join these chunks to restore the original file and he can do without requiring external programs.

A Simple Way to Block Adult Sites from Kids

If your tech-savvy kids are spending a fair amount of their computer time surfing the Internet, there’s a chance that they may sometimes accidentally stumble upon adult sites that you would definitely not like them to see.

Keep your Kids from Seeing Adult Content on the Web

It is nearly impossible for any parent to manually monitor their child’s entire computer session and what you therefore need is a solution that works in the background even while you aren’t around to watch over them.

There are couple of options. For instance, YouTube has a safety mode to block videos that aren’t appropriate for children. Then you have OpenDNS that you can configure with your router or computer to block an entire category of websites that contain violent or adult content.

There are some site blocking programs (NetNanny for example) that monitor your kid’s activity on the computer and will automatically restrict them from visiting sites that aren’t meant for them. Then you have the slightly-geeky 127.0.0.1 trick to that helps you block any of the known websites on your computer.

Use Google Contacts as a Unified Address Book

Your contacts are often scattered across multiple email accounts and social sites. For instance, you may have switched to Gmail but some of your contacts may still be stored in the old address books of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Then there are places like Facebook and LinkedIn that store personal and professional details of your contacts (including profile pictures) but fetching this information into your main address book is often a tricky thing.

One Place for all your Contacts

If you find it a hassle to maintain multiple address books, a possible solution is that you consolidate them all into a single cloud-based service like Google Contacts.

Here are some ideas on how you may go about doing this:

Step 1: Bring all address books into Google Contacts

Go to Gmail Settings and click the “Import Mail and Contacts” button to bring all the existing contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, and your other email accounts into Google Contacts.

Next download your address books from LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook,Orkut and other accounts as CSV files and import them all into Google Contacts one-by-one.

Step 2: Clean-up the duplicates

When you import contacts from multiple places, it is obvious that some of the entries would be duplicates of each other. Google Contacts however makes it quite easy for you to manage these duplicates.

Choose “Find Duplicates” under “My Contacts” and the tool will group all the entries that share the same name. Do remember to review all the default suggestions one-by-one as sometimes two people in your contact list can have similar names and you don’t want to combine them into one. Once you’re ready, just hit the  Merge button.

Google Contacts Manager mostly relies on the person’s name to detect duplicate entries. If it fails to recognize all your duplicate contacts, you can merge them manually as shown in the next screenshot.

Watch Videos on your PC without any Interruption

When watching web videos or DVD movies on your computer, your video playback may be interrupted in many different ways.

For instance, the screen saver can activate itself or the computer screen may enter sleep mode if you don’t touch the mouse or the keyboard for a long period (because you are busy watching the video). Sometimes, pop-up notifications from IMs and other programs that are running in the background can also interrupt playback.

You can easily turn-off these distractions through Windows Settings but the problem with this approach is that the changes will stay even when you are done watching the video. To give you an example, if you disable the screensaver before hitting play, it will stay in the disabled state forever unless you re-enable it manually.

Therefore, instead of fiddling with your existing configuration, you may consider using utilities that will also disable all these distracting elements, but only temporarily.

Some media players are start enough and will automatically turn off the screen saver during video playback. If you are using VLC, go to Video settings and check the option that says “Disable screensaver.” In Windows Media Player, go to Player options and uncheck the box that says “Allow screen saver during playback.”

If your media player doesn’t have such a feature, you can use this excellent utility called Mouse Jiggler to prevent the screensaver from becoming active. It moves the mouse pointer back and forth periodically so Windows will never go into an idle state and therefore the screensaver won’t show up.

How to Password Protect your Files and Folders

Tutorial: Encrypt and Password Protect your Files and Folders

SafeHouse Explorer, works something like this. It creates a hidden storage area on your disk to hold all the files that you want to protect. These files and folders are hidden from normal view and will only become visible when you enter the correct password.

Here’s a more detailed tutorial on how you can protect your files with SafeHouse Explorer.

Step 1: Download and install SafeHouse Explorer to your hard-drive.

The software works with XP, Vista and Windows 7 (both 32 and 64-bit editions). It is also portable so you may run it directly without installation.

Step 2: Once the installation is complete, click the “New Volume” button to create your hidden storage that will house your various files and folders.

You may either create one large volume to store all the “private” files or you can create multiple smaller-size volumes each corresponding to the type of files that they’ll store. For instance, you may have one volume for storing confidential documents and spreadsheets while another one could be for hiding those “personal” pictures and so on.

Choose a volume size based on the size of the folders that you’ll be storing inside that volume. The “Pre-initialize Volume with Random Data” basically means that your virtual drive will be filled with random data if there aren’t enough files to fill complete that volume. Use the default “on” setting.

Step 3: Now that your volume is created, open Windows Explorer (Win+E) and you’ll see a new “virtual drive” under My Computer. Just drag and drop any of your folders and files into this virtual drive and they’ll instantly get protected using encryption.

Once you have added all the files to the “protected” volume, make sure you delete them from the original location as the original copy is unencrypted and therefore anyone can open it without requiring a password.

How to Check the Health of your Hard Drive

Hard disk failure is possibly the worst thing that can happen to your computer and it often occurs without giving any warning signs.

Test Your Hard Drive for Impending Problems

You may however run certain tests on your computer beforehand to get an idea about the current condition of your hard disk. This should in turn help you decide whether a replacement drive is necessary or not.

Step 1: Check your hard disk for errors

All recent versions of Windows include a utility called Chkdsk.exe that can check your hard disk for any bad sectors.

You may either run Chkdsk from the command line (see details) or launch Windows Explorer, right click the drive that you wish to examine and choose Properties. Switch to the Tools tab and click the “Check Now” button under Error checking. Select “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” to perform a thorough disk check.

Step 2: Understand the sounds of your disk

Do you sometimes hear strange sounds coming out of the CPU box? Well, if the hard drive is making those sounds, it could be an alarming situation and your best bet would be that you turn off the computer before any further damage is done to the disk.

But how do you distinguish between sounds coming from a hard disk with noise that’s made by the fans or the power supply? Here’s a useful page where you can listen to recorded sounds of various hard drives that have lead to a crash. If your disk is making a similar sound, get a replacement quickly.