Here’s a wireless utility with a difference. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor generates a radar-like display to show all of the wireless networks in range of your laptop. By translating relative signal strength into range it shows, in a rather eye-catching way, which ones are likely to give you the best connection. For obvious reasons – unless you have a rotating and highly directional Wi-Fi antenna on your PC the display cannot tell you which direction the access point actually is, but it looks great. Versions of Wi-Fi monitor are available for Windows Mac and Linux, and the only catch is the XP version requires that you install Yahoo Widget Framework, which adds another 15Mb to the download, (the Vista version installs as a sidebar Gadget)
Google’s entry into the web browser market should liven things up; it will certainly give Microsoft and Mozilla something to think about. If you haven’t already tried it then I suggest that you give Google Chrome the once over.. It’s early days yet, and this is the Beta version so take the usual precautions of setting a new Restore Point, but so far it looks quite promising. My favourite feature so far is the integrated address window/search box, naturally it defaults to Google but you can change it to Yahoo, MSN, Ask or the search engine of your choice on the Options menu. It imports all of your bookmarks and quick links so installation is smooth and quick, though I’m not so happy at the way it also seems to know all of my passwords, I would have preferred it to ask before importing those. Read the rest of this entry »
Most of the Firefox users I know have a lot of addons, no matter if they’re running Firefox 2 or Firefox 3. Now, the problem appears when some of those addons start crashing, or when Firefox ends up eating huge amounts of memory. Yesterday, I read an older article on CybernetNews about having 200 addons installed in Firefox, and this made me think about taking things to a whole new level… Since all that was happening back in 2006, when Firefox 3 was not ready yet, and to have 200 addons installed and notice how the browser behaved with one or two sites opened is already a bit outdated, I decided to try and go for a new Firefox 3 world record as of 2008!
Obviously, things are not that easy as it seems, because I have a really rough ride in mind for Mozilla’s pet, my computer, and myself as a user. Here’s what I want to do: Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a wireless utility with a difference. The Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor generates a radar-like display to show all of the wireless networks in range of your laptop. By translating relative signal strength into range it shows, in a rather eye-catching way, which ones are likely to give you the best connection. For obvious reasons – unless you have a rotating and highly directional Wi-Fi antenna on your PC the display cannot tell you which direction the access point actually is, but it looks great. Versions of Wi-Fi monitor are available for Windows Mac and Linux, and the only catch is the XP version requires that you install Yahoo Widget Framework, which adds another 15Mb to the download, (the Vista version installs as a sidebar Gadget)
