Christopher Craig -

Links for the Week Ending October 05, 2008

Oct.05, 2008 in Links Leave a Comment

Links for the Week Ending September 21, 2008

Sep.21, 2008 in Links Leave a Comment

Creating a Wireless Bridge Between Two Routers

Sep.21, 2008 in Technology 1 Comment

I have a network in my house with a lot of devices connected in different ways. I have a Linksys WRT54G wireless g router as my access point. Plugged in to that is a DLink gigabit switch. Plugged into that are 3 Macs and Linux server. I also have a Windows laptop connected to the router via Wi-Fi.

This all worked great, and I never had a wiring issue because all of these computers are in the lower level of my house, and I have a utility room that is located in such a way that it shares a wall with almost every other room on the floor. I ran into a bit of a problem when I wanted to connect my first-gen XBox to the network and use it in my home gym upstairs to watch TV shows stored on the server.

I didn’t want to drill a hole in the floor to get a network cable upstairs. I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to because of where the gym was. So, I started thinking of buying a wireless adapter for the XBox, but that was going to be about $75 bucks. Then, I started thinking that I might be able to create a wireless bridge between 2 routers.

A wireless bridge uses the Wi-Fi capability of two routers to connect them instead of using an ethernet cable. This is easily accomplished using 3rd party router firmware from DD-WRT and following these instructions.

There are a couple of things to consider before trying to do this:

Installing 3rd party firmware on a router can void your warranty, and if not done correctly, can brick it.
Not all routers are supported by the DD-WRT firmware. Check their hardware compatibility chart.
You’ll be limited to one device connected to the second router. If you add more, it’s the router’s mac address that gets stored in the routing table, not the end device. This will definitely cause problems.

I wonder if there’s a way to overcome the last point? It would be great to be able to use the second router to extend wireless range.

Links for the Week Ending September 14, 2008

Sep.14, 2008 in Links Leave a Comment

Links for the Week Ending September 07, 2008

Sep.07, 2008 in Links Leave a Comment

Fire Maker

Sep.02, 2008 in Photography Leave a Comment

Over the Labour Day weekend, some friends and I got together and we were playing around with light painting and long exposures. Here’s one of the shots we got. I was holding a sparkler in my hand and we used a 10 second exposure time.

Links for the Week Ending August 31, 2008

Aug.31, 2008 in Links Leave a Comment

Get Push Email with Apple Mail & Gmail

Aug.27, 2008 in Mac 1 Comment

Apple Hearts Gmail

I came across this tidbit of information at macosxhints.com that shows you how you can get push email functionality from Apple’s Mail client using Gmail.

the only things you need to do are:

1. Go into Mail » Preferences » Accounts (Advanced) and make sure that Use IDLE command if the server supports it is enabled (it’s enabled by default).
2. (This is the fun part) Again go into Mail » Preferences » General and set Check for new Mail to Manually.

Now send yourself a new message (preferably from a different account) and watch the fun.

This is great! I know there have been times where I was expecting an email, and I was so impatient to see it, that when clicking ‘Get Mail’ produced no results, I just logged into the webmail client instead. This way, my Gmail is pushed to Apple Mail, and I’ll never have to wait again.