New Home: New Home Network...

Here's a little bit of home networking history for my household. Somewhere around 1998, I had the opportunity to switch from using a Dial-Up Modem to a Cable Modem, and as with most people, the world became a different place. When I met a nice lady kind enough to consider marrying me, and we bought a house (in 2000), I used the awesome Internet Connection Sharing feature built into Windows (98 and/or 2000) to get the second computer we had onto the internet. This quickly became a problem, so we went and looked for an appliance to manage the internet connection for both computers.


We found the SMC Barricade, device for which there is no elegant way to physically arrange (due to its having connections or switches on ALL 4 of it's shorter sides), but was well equipped for the time and I still have in case of emergencies. Not only was it a capable network router for broadband applications, it was also equipped with a parallel port for printer sharing and a serial port that you could configure for a Dial-Up Modem (which we did use for a stretch when our first child was on the way). The Barricade saw us through a brief stint with 802.11a wireless networking, when we bought an SMC access point and PCMCIA wireless card to get our laptop connected from the living room, when we had all of our computers and other devices in the bedroom previously. Sometime around 2003, when these early wireless devices became a little too problematic, and everything seemed to be shifting away from 802.11a, we went looking for a router that not only was faster, but had an 802.11b/g access point built in.

Enter the Linksys WRT54G. Not only was this a very capable router right out of the box, but it ran Linux. There was a growing number of people dedicated to making it better and adding new capabilities. This router saw us through our times with Vonage after we dumped the local POTS, and helped us fool our DirecTivo into thinking it still had a phone connection to connect back to DirecTV. Later it moved with our cable modem from our bedroom/office to the entertainment center in the living room, where it could be directly connected to our Tivo HD ,XBOX 360, Powerline network adapter (for our other PCs in far reaches of the house), and Home Theater PC. The WRT54G served us for many years and still hasn't completely croaked on us (even though it tried to on a few occasions). Currently, it serves most of those same devices, in addition to a number of laptops, Android devices, a network All-in-One printer, a Blu-Ray Player, and occasionally our TV. It has had a long and full life.

Now (2013), on the verge of us moving to a new (bigger) house we are probably going to need a second access point to fully blanket the house with our WiFi signals. We would also like to be able to take advantage of the HUGE speed increases we have been largely ignorant of in both wired and wireless networking. So we're getting a new router, but one that can run the same custom firmware as the trusty WRT54G, called DD-WRT. The new router is the TP-Link TL-WDR3600, and not only is it bigger/faster/stronger (gigabit Ethernet and dual band 300Mbps wireless), but it adds back some expandibility we've been missing in the form of 2 USB ports, which can be used for printer sharing or storage right out of the box. We'll see what other tricks I can set them up for later on. For now, it will become our main router, and the WRT-54G will retire to a lighter load as auxiliary access point and network switch. We'll be able to have the same interface to administer both, and shouldn't have any issues connecting to WiFi at the end of the house furthest from the router any more.

The Internets, Complacency, And Me.

This entry has been baking for a long time, while I have been gathering evidence against myself in observing my lack of new adventures on the world-wide-web.  While my writing upon the subject may not be all that lengthy, I think it bears some scrutiny even if only for my own self examination.

The leading indicator of my home-grown personal epidemic lies in the lack of new bookmarks and websites I actively use to check the pulse of the Internets.  There was a time when I would check in on up to 20 different websites in the course of a single day, and most of those were "news" sites, featuring a short blurb and a link to the actual content on other websites.  Now?  I only have 3 sites I chick with any regularity:

• CNET's News.com
• The Inquirer
• My personal iGoogle page.

Granted, my iGoogle page has multiple tabs, and each tab has lots of gadgets and feeds, but there are only a few links from there that actually get clicked on in any daily fashion.

A lot of the reason for my compressed internet schedule is due to my own changing habits.  I no am no longer worried about how to get the ABSOLUTE MOST game out of my computer.  I'm wowed more by the new tricks on the TiVo and XBOX 360, for which my computer may be considered a conduit, but other than that isn't really used with the same regularity.

Another reason for the lack of adventurous reading comes from many of my former favorites either being bought by other sites (possibly changing the style), disappearing off the map, or maybe I just don't feel I need it any more.  For instance, I used to check PCMag.com (when I wasn't subscribing to their magazine) on a regular basis, but then CNET bought them.  I had already been a regular user of various CNET sites, so with the exception of checking in on John C. Dvorak on occasion I don't have much use for PCMag.com any more.

So tell me, Internets, where my new adventure?  What's the next Holy Grail for me to search for?  I'd like to know. 

Blogged with the Flock Browser