Archive for October, 2005

Everyone agrees that security is important, no one agrees on how much effort should go into securing your home wireless LAN. The good news is that there are some basic steps you can take that require just 5 minutes of your time. In this article I will show you how to add various layers of security to your home wireless LAN. The specific wireless router I will be using is a Linksys WRT54G, a popular 802.11g (54 Mbps) device.

If you are running a wireless card on Windows XP and have experienced problems maintaining a connection to your wireless router, I highly recommend that you disable the “Wireless Zero Configuration” service.

Headphones are an often overlooked and underrated way of improving your music listening experience. There are several types of headphones that work best for different situations. Most people will just use whatever headphones come with their portable music player, or will “upgrade” to very inexpensive headphones from manufacturers like Philips or Sony. If you want to really get thumpy bass, keep earbuds from falling out of your ears, or get any sort of noise dampening or noise cancellation, the headphones that were included with your portable music player just won’t cut it.

Smooth, rounded corners in Photoshop is a typical desired effect, but one that is difficult to achieve for many beginners.

Rounded corners can actually be implemented rather easily. The trick is to use pre-defined shapes, and simply contain your artwork within those shapes.

Photoshop CS comes with some basic pre-defined shapes that will help create smooth, rounded corners.

First, we start off with our image:

Making the transition from PC to Mac has not been very difficult for me, but this is likely due to some familiarity with OS 8/9 in the 1990s, and some experience with Unix. Nevertheless, some advanced functionality of Windows that I have come to use on a daily basis, I expected to be able to “port over” to OS X immediately, and was not able to. On top of that, my first exposure to OS X is on a notebook, where the complexity of keyboard commands increases due to multi-functional keys.