Wednesday, December 29, 2010

The real social network

Catfish, a documovie about virtual relationships on Facebook.

Catfish  movie

"They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with this idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them. And the catfish would keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes, they keep you guessin’ they keep you thinkin’ they keep you fresh."

Catfish Facebook family
Megan Faccio

Netgear DGND3300 a lemon?




I bought the NetGear DGND3300v2 RangeMax Dual Band Wireless Router in the beginning of the year wanting a router with a range greater than the Netgear DG834 to cover all the rooms in the house. I saw the youtube video of the smart antennas and fell for all the marketing gimics. Surely a wireless router from a manufacturer which is more expensive than the entry level model will have a better range.

Wrong. I have tweaked all the setting and tried all the possible permutations for the Wireless G. There is nothing I can do to make it work with a proper range. The range is just as the same or worse than my 10th of the price Linksys router. So I bought a Wirless N stick but the range for it is worse than the Wireless G. Go figure. 





Hoping that a future firmware update would improve range.
So in December 2010 firmware V2.1.00.46  came around via an auto update and suddenly wireless range decreased to a maximum of 2 meters. Manually reverted to V2.1.00.42 firmware again after scratching my head wondering what happened. Seems like Netgear support put a faulty firmware update on their server and only removed it after a week despite knowing about the problem due to so many users reporting it. Some users even reported Netgear was asking for paid support to look at the issue.
Here is a forum post on the Netgear support forums describing the issue.

This device is much better than the standard Billion router however I would suggest for a large house to buy a router that has removable antenna which you can adjust, replace or hack with your own.