22 January 2017 | Computers, Networking |
You’ve most certainly heard about “mobile hotspots”, which is when you connect your smartphone or tablet to WiFi in town, at a hotel, in a restaurant, etc.
Hotspots let you use a local wireless data connection without blasting through the monthly data limit on your mobile plan.
Don’t confuse hotspots with tethering. Tethering is when you surf the net on your puter by using your smartphone as your puter’s net connection. Hotspots are sort of like “reverse tethering”: you use your puter’s net connection to surf on your phone. Don’t miss: All about smartphone and tablet tethering
So how do you set up a WiFi hotspot on your wired internet puter? Actually, Windows 10 makes it easier than ever…
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27 November 2016 | Gizmos, How Does it Work?, Networking |
You may have heard about tethering, but it probably seems a bit mysterious and complicated.
Tethering is when you connect your smartphone or tablet to your puter, and then use your mobile device’s data connection to surf the internet on your puter.
Well, to put it another way: your puter uses your smartphone (or your tablet’s 4G connection) as its internet connection instead of your normal DSL, cable, fiber, etc.
Tethering can be done in several ways, and it’s much easier to set up than you think!
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30 October 2016 | Computers, Networking |
For those of you who don’t like to use WiFi and prefer to run a wired home network (me!), you’re gonna love this.
There is a new standard that was ratified a few months ago that defines 2.5 and 5 Gbps ethernet.
If that’s not got you all excited, how about this:
You can use your existing ethernet cables! 🙂
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23 October 2016 | How Does it Work?, Networking |
If you live in the middle of a big city, chances are you are currently enjoying internet download speeds on the order of 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, or even 1 Gbps in some areas.
But for the rest of us – especially those who live out in the country – it’s often nearly impossible to get any kind of good high-speed internet connection.
Sure, you may have DSL, but it’s very slow. You know the drill: “Yes, we’re upgrading our networks, running fiber everywhere, blah blah blah… Please wait 5 years.”
Well, it just so happens that there is a solution to your internet woes, but a little luck and some homework is needed!
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16 October 2016 | Do-It-Yourself, Networking |
Let’s say you’ve got ethernet cables running all over the floor because you don’t want to use WiFi.
Or maybe you want to install another phone jack, but you want to route the cable nicely along the baseboards.
Of course, routing cables inside the walls is always the prettier option, but it’s also not easy to do in a finished house.
Well, I have a new friend, and she’s a hot glue gun. As her name implies, she’s rather attractive – and very handy when it comes to routing those cables in no time flat!
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4 September 2016 | Computers, Networking |
Aside from all the hoopla about Windows 10 invading your privacy and sending your entire hard drive to Microsoft’s servers, there is another obvious question to ask: Is Win 10 gobbling up all of your internet connection’s bandwidth?
The answer may be yes, especially if you have a slower net connection.
I’m talking about the “Choose how updates are installed” option in Win 10. I did cover this in my post Protect your privacy in Windows 10, but I’m not sure it’s so obvious to everyone what this, “how updates are installed” option means in practical terms.
So, let’s take a look…
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7 August 2016 | Computers, Networking |
Everyone seems to be moving towards using “SSL” (which is actually TLS) so that entire sites load with the HTTPS protocol.
In some cases, this is a rather simple affair. But if you have a WordPress-powered site, it’s a bit more complicated than one would expect.
After all, WordPress is supposed to make everything easy, right?
Well, no.
So, here’s a list of tricks to make your WordPress SSL Conversion go as smoothly and quickly as possible!
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12 June 2016 | Computers, Networking |
I’ll be honest: I didn’t think I had to explain any of this, because I thought it was obvious.
Given the number of recent online security breaches – including the release of really, really bad passwords – clearly it’s not so obvious.
Well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I think about this kind of thing as part of my work. Most people don’t. It’s my job to program things that work, but a big part of it becomes making things that other people will find difficult to exploit.
Otherwise, what’s the point? No one cares if it “just works” if some evil person out there can break it in 5 minutes! The way to go about doing this is to not program a single line of code until you’ve got the whole thing sorted in your head. Then, think about how you would hack it.
You don’t do this by thinking like yourself; you must think like someone who wants to attack you. Unless you’re a Russian chess master, you probably don’t think this way very often.
But, not to worry! The following are a few tips that will greatly increase your online security without making your brain catch on fire. Which is nice…
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17 January 2016 | Computers, Do-It-Yourself, Networking |
Most people these days use WiFi. I’m not one of them, because the idea of being bathed 24/7 in multi-gigahertz radio waves just isn’t that appealing.
If you’re like me, then that means you’re using the ethernet jack on your puter. And if your puter is a laptop, you may run into a terribly annoying situation where your ethernet just stops working one day.
In a laptop, you can’t replace the ethernet jack and internals without replacing the entire motherboard…
Fortunately, there’s a quick and cheap way to get your ethernet back up and running – without breaking the bank!
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12 September 2015 | Computers, How Does it Work?, Networking |
I recently read an article about the Ashley Madison hack. For those of you who aren’t into cheating on your spouse, Ashley Madison is a web site where you can sign up and meet up with other lovely people in order to have an affair.
Anyway, they were recently hacked. More than 11 million passwords were obtained, and the reason why made me fall off my chair.
In short, the users’ usernames + passwords were stored in the site’s database in an MD5 hash – along side a BCrypt hash of the user’s password.
Well, what does all this mean to you?
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You’ve most certainly heard about “mobile hotspots”, which is when you connect your smartphone or tablet to WiFi in town, at a hotel, in a restaurant, etc.
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