I’d run into a problem this week with the wifi in my home. I have a mixed network, some wifi, some wired for a total of about seven or eight computers in my home. The problem was with my HP laptop and it’s cheap Broadcom wifi adapter. In my usual morning writing spot, I had limited, or very slow, Internet access.

I have a widget on my desktop that shows me my wifi strength but it registered 62%, even though I had incredibly slow access to the Internet from the dining room. On the weekend, I moved my Dlink 615 router upstairs, partially because I wanted to surf and write on the back deck, and partially to solve the dining room problem. No go!

That’s when Heatmapper came in to save me. Heatmapper is a free bit of software that you can download here:
Heatmapper download

Once you get it downloaded, unzipped and installed, run it and you’ll see a simple screen, graph paper one one side and some writing on the right. Basically you want to map out your house on the graph on the left. Walk to where you normally use your laptop. Imagine the room on the graph paper and left click on the graph. Move slowly to another spot, keeping in mind the spatial relationship to the first point, and left click again. Walk around the house and click now and then to get a complete map of your house, according to the wifi signal strength.

Once you are done, right click and Heatmapper will display a kind of topographical map of your home. How cool is that? Very cool in my case since I saw that I didn’t have a lot of signal strength in the dining room.

My next step was to drag out my old Panasonic Toughbook and do the same thing with it. In this way, I was comparing apples to apples. If Heatmapper saw something different on my Toughbook map, then I knew that the Broadcom adapter on my HP was screwed up. Turns out it was totally out of whack. I disabled it, installed a cheap TRENDnet USB adapter and, voila, I had good access everywhere in the house.

Who knows what’s up with the Broadcom adapter in my HP laptop? I don’t. I have uninstalled it and will look around the net for driver updates, troubleshooting charts, etc. but, for now, my old USB adapter works just fine, thank you! And thanks to Heatmapper, I know where to get the strongest signal in my house. Check it out. It’s free and very, very helpful.

I’m sure everyone has heard about the people who are making a fortune on the Internet ‘sending links to google’. All of the ‘work at home and make a fortune’ scams that are around these days are all based on this. Listen for a while and you’ll see that it might be possible for you to make some money on the Internet but it’s probably very unlikely that you will make a fortune.

The Internet is based on numbers. There are millions of websites and millions of users. Put those two groups of millions together and you have untold millions of searches and millions of pages viewed. At the top of EVERY search category there is a number one website. If you search for ducks in molasses, you only get 68,000 sites in response. If you search for ‘making money on google’, however, you get 189,000,000 responses. The ‘making money on google’ search is the one I will concentrate on for today.

People search for certain keywords. I guess sex, drugs and rock and roll are popular searches but there are others. Diet and weight loss is a big one. Movie star names are popular too, Brad Pitt, Brangelina, etc. If you were to make a website and tell a little story about these topics, then people would come to your website.

Google makes a bit of money if people come to your website and see the ads that you put up there, as long as they are Google ads, of course. The more people that come to your site, the more money Google makes and the more money you make because Google pays you a very small amount of money for each 1000 people, as an example, who come to your site. Google will pay you more if someone clicks on an ad and even more, I think, if they buy something from the ad.

The whole basis of this way to make money is numbers. If you can write, which many people seem to find impossible, and if you can create a website like this, which is very challenging, then you might be able to make a few bucks.

Here’s a tip. If you look around the web you will see many pages such as this one, some quite well done and some very badly done. It’s the badly done ones that you want to study so you can learn how not to do it. As an example, if you don’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ then you probably should keep your day job.

Besides knowing how to create a web page you have to also know how to get a Google Adsense account as well as knowing how to set up their ads in your html. If all of this is Greek to you, again, don’t quit your day job.

Finally, there is no easy way to make money on the Internet. No one, and I mean no one, is making a fortune by doing nothing. It takes a lot of work and a lot of skill. If you are up for it, then give it a shot. Good luck to you! I think it’s probably easier to make money on Ebay but that’s just my stupid opinion.

If you’ve ever tried to rid your computer of some software that you’ve installed…and failed…here is the solution you need. Revo Uninstaller grabs those pesky apps and rips them out, including the roots, for free!

Here’s the link you need to download this free bit of genius software :http://www.revouninstaller.com/

Install it. Run it. Almost immediately you’ll have a screen full of things that you can delete. I chose The Sims Life Stories on my current computer. I also chose SAFE, which is the screen that comes up next and has to do with the level of operator skill (this means you!) at the controls. Safe will weed out the bits and piece of the app and remove them PLUS it will look for stray wisps of detritus in the registry. If you don’t know what the registry is, DON’T CHOSE SAFE, just choose Built-in which ensures that only the app will be removed, not all of the registry things. Hint: The registry is the brain of Windows, the heart, blood and nerves, too. If you screw it up, you’re lost!

Revo then scans, deletes and waits until you choose something else to install. Once you’re through with deleting anything you don’t want, shut Revo down and reboot your computer. I usually reboot after any major uninstall activity, just to clear any temp files that might be in use. It doesn’t always work but it’s a good suggestion.

That’s it! I’ll keep my eyes open for cool apps such as this. Comments are welcome.

The desktop computer in the living room wasn’t connecting to the Internet. Kathleen was home for a few days from her summer job, had left her laptop at camp and was kind of lost without a connection to FB and whatever else she uses on the Internet. Dad sprung into action!

We’re not wireless everywhere yet. I like to keep the desktops wired for security, although all of our laptops are wireless. James uses his laptop in his room and, to start my troubleshooting, I asked him if he was connected ‘wire or wireless’. He says he told me ‘neither’ but I heard wired. Since he was wired and he seemed to be on the Internet, I assumed that the problem was the computer itself. Reboot a couple of times, no go. ‘IPCONFIG’ at the command/dos prompt, no go. Typing the router IP address into a browser, no go. Must be the network card.

I have a couple of spare computers so I lugged one upstairs and was all ready to fire it up but I realized the it only had digital out for the video. When I went to get an VGA/digital adapter, I passed my desktop and decided to see if it was online. No go for it either. My son was at work then so I didn’t have a chance to ‘talk’ to him about his mumbling and I headed off to the network mess in my workroom. All of those desktops are fed from a switch in my incredibly messy workroom. The switch was alive but had orange lights across the bottom row of LEDs. Turned out that these were fine, thanks to checking the specs on my laptop which was still on the Internet.

Hmmmm. That switch is fed by another switch in the laundry room. It took a few stops and starts of the power bar to figure out that this other switch, that I got for a dollar at a thrift store, had given up the ghost after three years of hard work. God, you can’t get good stuff for a buck anymore!

The troubled switch had 8 ports, the good switch had 5 and the router itself had 4. Somehow I had to rewire everything to bypass the big, dead switch. I had 5 computers to feed and I desperately needed to sort out the wiring mess.

Half an hour later, all network cables were disconnected and piled in a heap. I had 5 good 50 foot cables and I spent a lot of time sorting them out into neat rows across the basement. Hey, why not label them so I know which cable is which? Good idea, Brian. Masking tape and a Sharpie did the job, lickety scoot. What a genius I thought I was!

Now to get the bundle of wires over the center hallway from the laundry room into the workroom. More masking tape. Wind, wind. Oooops! I had two ends of one cable taped together with the single ends from four cables. Unwind, unwind, get the right ends, rewind, rewind the tape.

I had to take a ceiling tile down in the downstairs washroom for access to the space between the joists. Dust and crap falls down on my head. I can see the workroom through the joist space so I get a long piece of molding, tape the ends of the cables to it and pass the whole thing through the gap. Then I race around to the workroom and tug the molding and attached cables through.

Happy as a pig in poop, I unwind the tape off of the piece of molding and unwind the tape that holds the cables together. I didn’t see that the tape I was taking off of the cables was stuck to the tape that had the cable names on each piece! All of my genius was lost at that point. Thankfully two cables were still named and I was able to identify the ends of the others because the connectors were different. No big deal. I had a big laugh about it, though.

Next step was to pass the bulk of the cable through the joist space so that only a bit was in the workroom, just enough to connect to the router/switch combination. Tug , tug, suddenly it was easy. Suddenly ALL OF THE CABLE was in the workroom. I had pulled it all through. Second big laugh of the day at my stupidity.

Out comes the piece of molding again and the rest of the day went well. I have a definite talent at making simple things very complicated. I figure that if there are two ways to do something, I will always do it the wrong way first. Trust me on that!

For about a year, since the last Summer Olympics in Beijing actually, I’ve had some Hauppauge HD video stored on my computers. Why were they stored? Simply because they were too large to put on a DVD, for one reason. For another, I couldn’t do anything with them in order to move them. If I put the raw,  recorded video, which is in Mpeg4 format, onto any other medium, including moving them to another folder on my hard drives, nothing would play them.

I tried many programs in an attempt to convert the files to either DIVX or Xvid or FLV in order to make them smaller which would allow me to archive them. I didn’t have all of the Olympics, mind you, just the equestrian events which I saved for my daughter and the opening and closing ceremonies which I saved for posterity. Say what you will about the Chinese government but the Olympic ceremonies were incredible.

Fast forward to yesterday, July 4, 2009, a day that will rest in memory forever! For me anyway. I followed a link from a forum I am a member of to a piece of software called Format Factory.  Here is the link in proper form : http://www.formatoz.com/

Format Factory is totally free, and works better than anything I have every used before to convert video. It also converts audio and will automatically convert your saved videos to the format which fits your particular mp3/audio/video player, just in case you don’t know which format your player uses. Format Factory has other uses, too, but once you download the software you can figure all of this out for yourself.

If you have any sort of Hauppauge HD video tuner, you’re stuck in the same situation I was in before I downloaded Format Factory. Nothing can touch the recorded HD video. Even the Hauppauge website FAQ mentions that you cannot make a DVD out of the recorded HD video. Well, Format Factory proved them wrong.

Not only is Format Factory free, it’s very fast. I have been using the free DIVX converter in the past and I have also tried SUPER, among others. Super works well but it still would not convert the Hauppauge videos to any other format. Both Super and the free DIVX converter crashed when I tried to convert the Hauppauge HD videos, with no way to resolve the error or find a solution.

From time to time I will rave about a particular piece of software here but I think Format Factory wins as the BEST EVER converter available on the Internet. At 15 megs, it’s not a small download but it’s certainly worth it. Get it. Use it. Love it!