Sunday, May 10, 2009

The Portable Wi-Fi Booster – Four Simple Items To Make Your Own, Even While Travelling!

I prepared this piece first, because I needed some portfolio pieces for Odesk to show buyers what I am capable of. Most of my earlier work is covered by contracts and non-disclosure agreements and other nasties that come with being a writer-for-hire. New content was in order!
Of course when figuring out what to write about I chose something that was of interest to me. That doesn't narrow it down very much because there is seriously little that doesn't interest me.
Anyway I came across several plans for parabolic boosters for wi-fi antennas. I even examined and tried the famous cantenna, I found it was a bit more complex than the average traveller or aged geek-want-to-be might prefer. I finally found a video on youtube and modified the instructions (a lot) to suit what I wanted and needed.

Unless you are in the perfect spot in your home with nothing between you and your router or maybe you are wired with cable then you have probably experienced weak signals and unreliable wi-fi connections.

I own a home pc in the perfect spot in my home, unfortunately it is also the spot with the weakest signal from my router, and I also have a laptop with an external antenna which was not doing the job while travelling. I tired of buying $50.00 boosters that did not seem to work, or worse worked and then broke quickly with continued use and dismantling (pigtail connectors are delicate, expensive, and with continued use from insertion and removal as in the case of a traveler with a laptop, they will wear out speedily).

Oh yes, one more detail, I could not build a simple lever even if provided the pre-cut part! Does this sound like an impossible situation or even worse, a familiar one?

The situation wasn’t hopeless though. I found the answer for me in the parabolic antenna booster! The name sounds a bit intimidating and strange, doesn’t it? It’s actually a home-made wi-fi booster that can be built by even the clumsiest of people (that would be me). If I can, then you can too, given only a few minutes and some very simple items. There are a number of variations and of course levels of skill in building boosters but when working with the technologically impaired (myself namely) then simpler is always better.
The wi-fi booster I chose to explain today is a easy one perfectly suited for travelling – the simplest I could find – in terms of tools and skills needed. I discarded the idea of a cantenna for today, because the tools required are a soldering iron a Pringle’s can, a pigtail (pigtail weaknesses have already been mentioned) and some heavy wire, and these are not items the run of the mill traveler might carry about or care to obtain routinely.

If by chance you don’t happen to have these simple items they can be picked up cheaply if you are travelling. If you are home, the chances are you have these items already on hand. Also you will need to be able to print out a template available from freeantennas.com. This is important in that it will make your job easier and your booster more efficient (someone has already done the math). The template I used is EZ 12 Parabolic Reflector Template.

The equipment list is as follows:
1. Scissors
2. Adhesive – Elmer’s glue or contact adhesive, contact adhesive is somewhat less messy.
3. Tin foil of any sort, though I used the heavy variety.
4. Thin carboard – a cereal box, manila folder, or even a couple of microwavable popcorn boxes. Use your imagination as long as the cardboard is pliable and yet has some rigidity, and will fit at least one segment of your template, it should do the job nicely.

The steps are easy after you gather your materials. Print out your template and place the template upon your cardboard and glue in place. I glued the entire sheet of paper to the cardboard ( I told you that I was construction impaired) when the pieces had dried I cut them out carefully (this gave me a more rigid surface that could stand some handling than the plain printing paper would have) If you have a steadier hand than mine you can cut the template paper and trace to the cardboard and avoid gluing the template to the cardboard, or if you don’t plan using the amplifier with a laptop and traveling, which requires dismantling frequently, you can use the plain paper version and skip the cardboard.
The square piece I then glued to a matching square of tin foil. After it was dry, I trimmed it out and cut out the slots, those are the six holes you see on the template.
It was home free after that, after folding the curved segment of the template over to fit into the slots in the square segment and give it the proper curve – voila I had an quick and very cheaply made wi-fi booster that can stand some handling and travel!

Geekdom For The Old And Infirm

In this blog I am not obliged to assume any voice but my own. My own is a rather opinionated older woman who came to techdom as well as writing later in life.
My first computer (I shudder at the memory) was purchased by me shortly after my husband's death. I actually used a 28.8 modem and had aol (hides from the screams that are sure to come from the purists who remember what aol was), but not right off the bat, and certainly not in that order because you see, I had no idea you needed an isp to connect to the internet or that a modem was in turn used to connect to said isp and hence to the mysterious but mightily desirable internet.
I was determined to master this beast, and it was delivered to my house and set up on a brand new computer desk fresh as a daisy, a plastic enclosed daisy. I followed the instructions faithfully, inserting cord A into slot B on piece C.
I stood back and surveyed this wonder of modern technology and was inordinately proud of myself. However there remained some questions that the beginner's book on windows and the compaq (yes I cringe to say I owned one even way back when) computer manual did not answer.
For instance:
Do I leave the plastic on the mouse to protect it from dust? I heard that mice wore out? Or was that meeces or something even more disturbing?
Seriously. I had to figure out where the ON button was the book did not seem to say. I mean. there was an on off button on the monitor but that did not make anything happen.
Those books really should include a section for the clueless on WHERE to turn the computer on at.
I had my computer on though after some trial and error, mostly error I admit.
Great! Now I was ready to connect to the internet.
Now. please forgive me or at least don't spit your coke out at your screen when I tell you that to me the internet was a wonder that must surely come packaged with a computer, after all the t.v. advertisements said "internet ready" and here I am with an internet ready computer all plugged in and no internet. I was not prepared for the complexities of plugging in a modem to a phone jack.
I did eventually find those instructions.
Fine...the phone jack was in the modem which was in the mysterious back of my new computer but WHERE was the internet?
I played happily on my new toy for a while, it came with some pool game or other, and pondered this question while browsing the help files in windows 95.
I also had finally unwrapped the mouse from it's plastic packaging when it failed to respond no matter what I did while it was wrapped (I swear to you the book did not cover that). It was some days before I removed the plastic from the monitor screen though.
It took a house call from the technician at our local computer shop to teach me to actually shut down windows properly and not to unplug it or push the power button he also said the mysterious words "modem" and internet connection and even asked me "Who is your service provider".
Oh yes and during this several weeks learning period i reinstalled windows via the restore cd some four times much to the technician's amusement.
I am so happy that it never occurred to me to call the toll free help number included with windows and with the computer. I would have been some tech's nightmare call of the month.
Those were the early days. What I discovered in the process of learning was a dogged persistence in myself that I wasn't aware I possessed. I refused to give up on a problem until I found the answer. It was like a mission and I could not seem to stop.
The computer became a hated and beloved friend of sorts in those early and lonely days after my husband's death.
Learning about it and how it worked was accomplished first, by reading the manuals that came with the computer, then going to our local computer shop and asking incredibly stupid questions. Then, finally when I found that to connect to the internet, an isp was required, I used online search engines.
As I said even the old and infirm can come to a sort of geekdom albeit somewhat limited.
It's now 12 years later. My hard drive blew last week and I managed to get the old one cloned onto a new and much bigger drive, upgrade my memory from 2 gigabytes to 3 and install a new nvidia video card that was long overdue and could handle a dual monitor system.
Yes, I did that. I purchased and installed the hardware myself. Sometimes I really do surprise myself.
I am actually using this somewhat lengthy post as a lead-in to an article I recently wrote on a wi-fi antenna. I not only wrote this article but built the antenna myself and am currently using it.

Monday, May 4, 2009

My First Post On My New Blog

Everyone should have a little bit to say about themselves and in my first post that seems a good place to start. I am a widowed female who loves to write. How's that for a complete picture?
No...probably not yet.
Ok, let's try this. I am a "mature" middle aged widow who loves to write and came by it later in life.
I began my academic studies concentrating on of all things I could have chosen, accounting. With my slightly skewed viewpoint on what work should be and how numbers SHOULD be variable, this was not a good mix.
I switched majors to psychology and this worked much better for me. Numbers are not so much a variable but people are infinitely so, and fascinating as well.
I married late and have no children. After my husband passed I changed my focus from others to myself.
This might sound a little selfish, it surely does to me even now, but it worked for me at the time and is working for me still.
I began freelancing some three or four years ago. It began innocuously enough with a simple blog. Not a personal one but a professional blog where I had chosen to write with what was to me a wildly different an interesting voice for the blogger. Nothing like myself, this blogger was young and rather indiscreet and very self absorbed so not only did one get the information they sought on the blog but a glimpse into a person's life and thoughts (albeit a made up personality).
People who had read the blog and knew me and believed in the young blogger voice, began asking me to post to their blogs and that's when I began to write for pay.
I learned a lot during that time about how wordpress works, which templates are good for SEO and which ones are harder for the spiders to index. I learned about keyword density, as well as keyword stuffing and why and how to avoid it.
This entire new career has been an adventure. I view it more as a pleasure than work though it can provide a decent income.
Freelance writing is not easy and nothing I have done before in my life prepared me for this adventure. I have times of self doubt and still don't believe I can turn out good ad copy though I am told otherwise by persons I respect. It is however immensely rewarding and allows me to indulge this passion I have found for expressing myself via the written word.