Question: Randy asks, "My house is kind of L-shaped, and the router is on one end of the house and the bedrooms are on the other. I don't get a great signal in the bedroom area. What can I do?"
Answer: Good question, Randy. I generally tend to recommend locating the router near the center of the house. However, for some houses, that's not really practical. My router for instance, isn't located near the center of the house either. In those cases, you can run into signal strength problems with systems on the other end of the house, as you seem to have. When that's the case, I recommend running a standard network wire between the router and somewhere near the other end of the house. This way, you can install a device called a wireless access point to extend the range of your network. When you do, be sure you give the same SSID (wireless network name) and security code as you used on the router so that your computer can automatically roam to the strongest signal just like your cell phone does. If you've forgotten, you may have to give a call, or check the router's settings with your browser.
Cool Site: Kaboose.com: I found this week's cool site when I was looking for computer lessons. Kaboose.com is just chock-full of neat stuff. It's VBS time and just in case you're looking for craft ideas, the site has a whole section on crafts, where I found a cool recipe for homemade ice cream in a bag, which we'll have in the show notes. It takes 2 Zipper bags, five minutes of shaking, and a few other simple ingredients to get a scoop of genuine homemade ice cream. This section also includes videos for how to make some of the crafts, so if you're not particularly sure how something should be made, that may help. You'll find a section on parenting which is where I did find some free computer lessons. The site is supported by ads, but all its content seems to be free. There are sections on health, food, games, holidays, and summertime. A section called Just for Mom has articles and videos that are geared toward mothers. With all that, it's not surprising to me that the site has a search feature. They have several email newsletters you can subscribe to like a recipe newsletter, weekly parents' newsletter, a crafts and activities newsletter and a couple more. I should mention that while the site is not specifically a Christian site, but with the exception of horoscopes and coverage of Ramadan in the holiday section, I didn't notice anything that would seem to be antagonistic to faith, so I would classify the site as family-friendly overall. And free.
Cool Gadget: Kingston Wi-Drive: This week's cool gadget is going to be on my kids' wish lists: the Kingston Wi-Drive. This is a Wi-Fi enabled flash drive currently for Apple iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, etc. and it gives you 16 or 32 GB of storage that you can use to put your media on before a long trip, like summer vacations. This particular device is kind of pricey ($130-$175), and it's one more device to have to carry, but it's battery-powered and since Kingston is a memory manufacturer, this device is based on flash memory as opposed to less expensive, higher capacity media servers like the Seagate GoFlex, which although it costs $200, has a 500GB spinning hard drive because Seagate is a hard drive company. So, that device has a lower cost-per-gigabyte, but the spinning drive means shorter battery life, so that's something I like about the Wi-Drive. This gadget is slated to become available sometime this month and will at some point be able to stream content to Android devices, it's just not clear to me whether that will happen before or after the product launches. So, while I like the device, I wish the capacity were higher. Even so, the iPad maxes out at 64GB, so you'll still be at least doubling your internal storage.
It's All "Geek" To Me: CD-RW: This week, we have a term that's more of an acronym: CD-RW. It stands for Compact Disc - Read/Write. When it comes to compact discs, you can write to two different kinds. The first is called CD-R, for Compact Disc – Recordable. This kind of disc cannot be changed after it's written. They are best for long-term storage, but if you need to be able to erase the disc and rewrite it, you need a CD-RW. By the way, the RW in CD-RW can also mean rewritable.
