Home network woes

First, the power supply of the old faithful D-Link 713P gateway/router died after short power outage couple of weeks ago. I decided to upgrade the home network and ordered new Linksys WRT54G router and WLAN card from the same company for my laptop. The new system should give some extra speed with 802.11g and some extra security e.g. with WPA.

The setup of the new system was straightforward but I did instantly run into problems with the new WLAN card. With my old 802.11b card even the wireless net started to work right away, my old Tangerine iBook did also catch the net wirelessly without a hitch.

My means to correct the situation made the situation worse. When I upgraded the linksys firmware to the latest from the US site, the WinXP laptop started to lose the network every couple of minutes - even with the old WLAN card. Our VoIP phone connection (cheap gransream 102 hooked to finnish http://www.laajakaistapuhelin.net) was resurrected when I set up the standard port redirections, and the wired connections seemed to work just ok. The wireless problems persisted, however, despite trying different drivers and configurations.

Then, one night I decided to try the EU version of the firmware. Never do things like that when you are too tired! I managed to brute-force update a firmware ment for another linksys model to the box, and managed to kill the router in the process!! Completely my mistake.. I would have presumed some kind of checksum check on when updating the firmware, but no. Anyway, I learnt my lesson!

Now I have to send the linksys router to the linksys for replacement, lets hope there is more luck with new one.

After three months of wireless keyboard usage

Well, the keyboard itself has been working like a dream. I have been using it mostly with Nokia 6670. I haven't been able to find a good generic text editor for S60, therefore I have been forced to use the notepad. The Nokia Lifeblog could be a good candidate for writing journal, if it didn't have limitation of the text note length.. I am hacking my own editor application for the purpose, but it is not ready for publicity 8)

The plastic stand - which appeared a bit lightweight to start with - did not stand the constant usage. It seemed that the spring part did dig its way out, which snapped the stand. Superglue fixed this with ease.

BTW I am still using the first set of batteries (!) Maybe using it just my journal is not heavy duty usage after all.