Digital convergence is the latest and greatest techno-buzzword. It promises us a world where all our disparate consumer electronics and personal computing devices coexist peacefully, communicate, and seamlessly integrate to serve all our entertainment and informational needs. This begs the question: When will it arrive? Some convergence is so intuitive that it’s hard to imagine [...]

It’s true: a wireless network will have less capacity than a 100 Mbps Ethernet LAN. However, unless you regularly move huge files around on your WLAN, or back up large disks, you aren’t going to notice a difference. Your Internet connection won’t be any slower, and gaming, file sharing, and printing won’t be either. Depending [...]

Even though X10 units communicate over wires they can still suffer from interference. The power lines that XI0 uses as its communication medium are anything but quiet. Normally the interference isn’t enough to cause problems but some devices in your home can introduce RF interference onto the line, making it hard if not impossible for [...]

Chat takes place in real time just like IM does; the main difference is that chat enables more than two people to interact at once. There are several chat clients available for mobile devices. Many of them integrate with Internet chat servers and enable you to use an existing chat account. The type of chat [...]

In addition to labels, there is special software available to actively track stolen or lost computers and recover them. Often thieves will be unaware that this software is running, and will be unable to delete or disable it even if they notice it. The tracking software connects to the software company’s server whenever the laptop [...]

Perhaps you have a laptop that you want connected wirelessly, or maybe you don’t want to run an Ethernet cable to connect your kid’s Xbox for Internet gaming. If you have an existing Ethernet network you can easily add wireless connectivity for a few devices. You also may want certain devices connected via Ethernet cable [...]

Apart from the “big three” 802.11 protocols, users and installers of WiFi really don’t need to worry about many other protocols (except for Bluetooth, which can prove useful in many products that connect with your WLAN, such as personal digital assistants or smart phones). I present just a few of the more interesting standards here [...]

You can share printers on your WLAN in several different ways. Perhaps the easiest is to attach the printer to one of your WLAN client PCs and then share that printer with the rest of the network. Although this approach is simple, it has three potential drawbacks: – The computer physically attached to the printer [...]

Chances are that you won’t have to install any antennas for your access points or NICs. Most come with antennas already attached and ready to go. However, if you purchased external antennas to increase the performance of your WLAN, you have to properly attach and position these. Whenever you purchase an antenna for an AP [...]

Because most of us can’t type 80+ words a minute, we need some way to make IM and chat more enjoyable and less like a Mavis Beacon typing exercise. The Internet community slowly evolved its own shorthand to deal with this, which resulted in a collection of abbreviations and emoticons, also known as smileys. According [...]