Vacation, digital entertainment and my experience this week. I thought I should write about my families trip and our technology gear experience. We are not frequent long-distant travelers but we wanted to take our digital entertainment along the way. Music, movies, books, etc. It was a big trip for us. We drove 625 miles from our home to Deb’s brother’s home outside Buffalo, New York. 465 miles from near Buffalo, New York to Mystic, Connecticut. And finally, 385 miles from Mystic, to home.
My wife, 5 year old daughter and I traveled with a 1st generation iPod Touch, a 2nd generation iPod Touch, a Sandisk Sansa e280, a portable DVD player, and two MacBooks. The iPods and Sansa were used often while on the 11 hour drive to Buffalo. My wife has become a fan of reading books on her Touch with the Amazon Kindle App for iPhone. Plus her music, of course. Erica’s Sansa was loaded with her music. And my Touch was loaded with podcasts and audio books from LibriVox.org. This routine happens even on short trips. We don’t fight about the radio, only about how loud Erica is singing. Also, Erica will switch back and forth between her music, her DVD player and coloring.
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Michael Johnson Hardware Double Twist, Handbrake, iPod Touch, iTunes, Kindle, Librivox.org, Linksys, Sansa e280, wifi
You do backup, right? Do you backup everything and maintain an offsite copy? Excellant!
I keep meaning to write up my backup routine. But in the mean time, one area that I am weak in is backing up my Google Docs documents. There does’nt seem to be an automated way at this time. But there is a simple manual way with the use of Firefox, Grease Monkey, a Grease Monkey script called Google Docs: Download and DownThemAll.
Google Docs has become my primary suite for word processing and spreadsheets. Those things need to be backed up too! If Google turns evil or dies just when I need a document then I want to have my work available somewhere. Check out Google Docs: Download for instructions on how to get all this working together to backup your Google Docs.
Once DownThemAll is complete, all the documents are local on my computer and then get backed-up by my regular means and copied offsite.
SO the next time you are checking your backups, make sure you backup the stuff you have in the cloud too!
Michael Johnson Security backup, DownThemAll, Firefox, Google, Grease Monkey, Security
For 31 days now, I’ve been running a wireless distribution system between two Linksys WRT54GL routers over 500 feet apart through a wooded area. I’m using the Tomato Firmware on the WRT54GL’s. So far it’s been rock solid and very stable. It will be interesting to see if the network stays as stable and reliable as the leaves come in and the forest between the two devices thickens.
I’m not going to go through the settings and specifics of this setup.The setup was very easy. All the references and instructions I needed were at PolarCloud.com website.
But I did want to share my experience that it truely is possible to get 802.11g over a great distance. The speed to the internet is not as great from the far end as it is from the head end. Averages 1.4MBps download speed. The ping rate floats between 65ms and 110ms.
It’s been a fun experiment. I’m considering trying it over 802.11n but am not satisfied on what routers to buy that are supported by an open firmware.
Michael Johnson Hardware Cisco, Hardware, Linksys, network, Software, Tomato, WDS, wifi
