T e c h n o b a b b l e

I'm sure like many people, you want to be able to use your BT Home Hub with the free VOIP calls and still get a good wireless signal around the house. This can be a problem if you live in an old house with thick walls, a house with a lot of walls, or just a very big house!

I was recently given a free Home Hub by BT as compensation for problems I had with one of their VOIP routers. Anyway . . . . to cut a long story short, I wanted to be able to get a decent signal over a 200m area for 3 houses. With the conventional aerial ( 2db I believe ), this was going to prove impossible . . . . so, I decided the only way was to take apart the Home Hub and see if I could add an external aerial in some way.

After taking apart the hub, I quickly discovered that it would be relatively easy for me convert the unit to a single external aerial, which was exactly what I wanted

So, I ordered the bits from the States ( which only took a week to get here via normal snail mail ), carried out the conversion and did some testing.

BINGO : We now have a wide(ish) area wireless network via a BT Home Hub with a 12dbi external aerial attached.

All in all, a reasonably easy conversion to carry out and very effective.

I have also tried the unit with an indoor 5dbi, 7dbi and 9dbi aerial attached, and made great gains on signal quality and distance.

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT UNLESS YOU BUY YOUR BT HOME HUB, YOU DO NOT OWN IT AND THEREFORE DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO DISMANTLE/MODIFY OR UPGRADE IT IN ANY WAY. PLEASE CONSULT YOUR CONTRACT WITH BT.

Pictures and more details to follow later.

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One of the things that I try to do when I get images from clients, is to make sure they are named correctly. By that I mean that instead of sending your web designer images straight from your digital camera named " DSC145.jpg " or anything similar; name them specific to the item/product.
If you've got a large silver necklace, call it "large_silver_necklace.jpg " or "large-silver-necklace.jpg". Don't leave gaps between the name as some web server operating systems do not like that
Use either hyphens or underscores to fill the gaps in any name.

This is very good practice for both your website/designer and for your images being picked up on image searches by Google and other search engines.

Using a sensible naming convention for all your images will increase the chance of inclusion when someone carries out a Google image search.

If designing your own site, you will want to include relevant alt and title text for your images.
The alt attribute is designed to be an alternative text description for images. The alt text is often displayed before the image is fully loaded in your web browser and is used instead of the image in text-based browsers. The alt attribute is a required element for images only and is a needed to meet with current HTML and XHTML web standards when validating as per W3C.

Alternatively, the title attribute can be used for any page element, but is not actually a requirement . You can use it to describe links, images, and other page elements.

Don't forget to include the title attribute in your image element.

e.g.

<img src="diamond_silver_watch.jpg" alt="diamond silver watch" title="silver watch encrusted with diamonds">

<a href="index.html" title="Technobabble - the home of the Twighlightzone blog">Blog</a>

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Yes I know I know . . . . . I never covered the online backup option when talking about backups

Well for those people that want to be able to access their info on the move from multiple computers, or share their pics, files, videos or music, then you could always use an online backup service such as BT Vault. The key down side of the BT service is the fact that they don't offer a configurable auto backup option on their free 1gb service; which can be a pain if you want to sync and automatically backup certain folders/files.

However . . . . . . you could use another service that is even better!

BeInSync do offer an auto backup service with their free 1gb service and you can use this on several machines.

It's also a good option for people who want the auto backup to just keep a bit a critical data secure with the free 1gb service or for a £75 one off fee, you can have 5gb of data for life ( or until the world crashes into the sun or we get sucked into a black hole or wiped out by a passing comet/asteroid .

It's a very good deal and I'm sure there's many small office/home office users on fast broadband connections that could make excellent use of an online auto backup service like BeInSync's.



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Well I had an email from someone yesterday asking about Outlook Express and how to back it up. Rather than me go through the list and detail how to do it, I'm just going to post the " official " link from the Micro$oft site which not only covers how to backup your emails, but also your address book and mail accounts as well.

Outlook Express backup and restore

This really does cover it in pretty simple English, and is very easy to follow.

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Over the last couple of weeks, I've had someone who's laptop was stolen with lots of their work on it and another person who had a hard drive failure and lost everything .

You never realise how important your work and personal data is until it's gone!

I guess the key to happiness, piece of mind and no sleepless nights really is BACKING UP YOUR DATA. Despite saying it often . . . . . people still don't seem to be taking it on board.

Well I thought I'd help out with a few tips and pointers in the right direction.

Try and keep all your important data in one folder as backups will be easier to perform. ( My documents folder is a good place to start! )

Most people's laptops and desktops nowadays have a cd burner ( cd writer ) or DVD burner. Often you will get cd/dvd creating software with your computers and you can very easily create weekly backups of the " My Documents " folder and any other folders you need.

Pen drives and very large external drives are dirt cheap now and you can pick up a 320gb external hard drive for about £50 from PC World or on the web. With such a huge drive, you could organise weekly backups through Windows XP. Click here for backup instructions

If you only have a small amount of critical data, then you could use a pen drive/flash drive to keep copies of your data, as these can be picked up from about £12 for a 1gb drive.

Anyway the moral of this posting is BACKUP, BACKUP and BACKUP some more if your data is important to you and you want to keep it.

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