Tin Wifi booster.

22C, soft breeze, sun.
Mid-summer’s day: a day of rest and fixing stuff about the house. Take time out with a cup of tea and watch YouTube. Found by chance, a video claiming to cleverly fix Wifi reception problems.
I certainly do have patchy signal reception in this house. The idea is to partly cut open a drink tin and shape it round the aerial to focus the emitted signal from the router.

I used a Wifi app on my phone to measure the result. The theory sounds likely, but I saw no change in any way.
There was a more measurable result when the phone is put inside the tin. Gain was about 6Db, and turning the tin changed the result too. Perhaps the signal from the router is polarized. The tin is curved in only one direction, it’s not like a satellite dish. This could be useful, if it worked, to get the best out of a mains powered booster, a repeater. That device relies on reception from the router, then re-transmit it at higher power. Trouble is, the connection between the devices does fail sometimes. So, repeater does not offer much reliability.
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Posted from a mobile.

Router (dsl-g624m) dropouts

9°C, calm & grey.
Still ill as the line in the Smiths song goes, but I’m bored with talking about it.
My router is probably the cause of poor internet connections at home. The latest stage in this sorry, tedious saga is a new firmware.
Every time I try something, the smartphone & laptop connect and I am filled with optimism. Then after streaming media, like a online video (my favourtite is Vimeo), the waiting sign comes up and it eventually time-outs.
Another idea is that the routes is failing, perhaps a mechanical failure. Often the connection fails after some time watching BBCi Player. Perhaps the heat can stress a weak component or solder joint.
The only solution to that is a full replacement.

Calamity day

12°C, light cloud

On this day, things went wrong. Firstly, my modem/wireless router has partly failed. There is no response from it via the network cable link that my desktop PC uses. Wireless internet access still works, but if any router settings need a change, then I may not be able to get back into the preferences page. So the wireless works, so does the WAN side, but the LAN cables don’t; that suggests it needs a firmware update, but will that leave it locked in.

Have you ever misplaced your bank cards? Mine are probably at work but to be safe the bank have disabled them for me. Yesterday, I spent 2 frantic hours searching, finally cancelling my weekend plans unable to buy petrol. I know they haven’t been used…

That’s the second time this week that valuable time has been lost to manic searching. The other at work wasn’t my fault but probably looked that way to the class. There, valuable marking time was lost in the face of a looming reports’ deadline. the more you try to get done, the less…