The Cynic Says……

Yes, I’ve purchased some new “geek stuff” lately that I’m rather happy with.

First off, I got a new router. Mind you, I didn’t NEED a new router, but I wanted one. I was using an older Netgear WGR-614 for my home network, which did the job fairly well. I had a few issues with it here and there where I would have to reboot it after some heavy bittorrenting and the port forwarding functions completely stopped working until I reset it to factory defaults and set it up again but other than that, it worked fairly well. However, I figured it was about time to upgrade despite not really having a NEED to do so.

This time, instead of going with previous-generation wireless I decided to go ahead and jump into the next-gen stuff. I opted for the D-Link DIR-655, which is a Draft-n router. Admittedly, I don’t have any draft-n equipment yet but I figured it’ll be nice to have when I do decide to get the card for my laptop and the home wireless media extender to go with it. In any case, the router is pretty fucking pimp. It supports Draft-N, which has a theoretical max speed of 300mbps (though closer to 100mbps in practice), has 4 gigabit ethernet ports (most only support 100mbps) and supports “Intelligent QOS” which allows latency-sensitive packets (gaming & VOIP) to be passed through first-priority over other things such as FTP downloads and bittorrent. In practice it seems to work, as I was uploading around 45kB/sec on bittorrent from my desktop pc and not causing undue lag for my friend playing counterstrike. The router has quite possibly the most configuration options I’ve seen on a router so far, even allowing you to manually specify packet priority in the options for the intelligent QOS. It does support automatically updating dynamic DNS services, automatic firmware update notification, along with WEP, WPA and WPA2 encryption. It has 3 external antennae which should in theory boost signal strength but with my internal Centrino wireless it doesn’t appear to have made much difference so far. I mean, maybe a little bit but signal has already been so good in my apartment that any improvement in signal strength wouldn’t net any sort of performance improvements. In any case, I’d like to get the wireless media extender to hook up to my TV in the near future. Then I could just download movies to my PC and watch them on my TV, thanks to Windows Media Connect. I’d also like to snag the 2-bay Network Storage Enclosure and stick a couple of SATA hard drives in it (two of the new 1TB drives from Hitachi, perhaps).

Also, I decided it was time for a digital camera. I found a great deal on a Panasonic Lumix TZ-1 camera for $199. It’s a 5MP camera with a 10x optical zoom, which is pretty much unheard-of in such a small camera.  All the reviews I’ve read of it have given it high marks and I thought having a 10x zoom and anti-shake technology would make taking nice pics even easier. I haven’t gotten to test it out yet since my SD card hasn’t arrived yet. However, I’ll be sure to report my findings once I get the card. So far from toying around with it, it appears it’ll be a sweet camera. More to come on this one later.