A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the importance of WAN to LAN speeds in routers. Since then I’ve replaced my DrayTek Vigor 2910G with a Linksys E4200. Time to share my impressions so far.
More Linksys E4200 impressions

Converting video files from one format to another has always been a pain. You’re dealing with large files, tons of different formats and software that offers more settings than mere mortals can possibly comprehend. Programs like Handbrake work well and offer useful presets, but Miro Video Converter goes one step futher. It offers the simplest possible user interface, making transcoding as easy as it possible can.
More Miro Video Converter strips it down to the basics

A couple of days ago, I had an interesting dicussion on Twitter with Dutch media guru @erwblo. He noticed a trend at SxSW, where all exciting new developments seemed to be centered around apps. I tried to argue that apps are “evil”, but found that I needed a lot more than 140 characters to explain myself. Hence this post.

Right now, there’s a war raging. Apple, Google, RIM, Microsoft and others are caught up in a bitter fight over supremacy on the mobile internet. And the stakes are high. The web is about to go mobile. Smartphone sales are up, and dumbphones are getting smarter. Tablets are replacing part of the laptop market, and will soon represent a big slice of overall internet consumption.
More A dystopian future of the mobile internet

Last year, @BruceJillis and I created Gunfollow. Recently, there seems to be a renewed interest in this Twitter hitman of sorts. So we’ve been thinking of ways to make Gunfollow even more fun. The easiest way to do that seems to be to add more messages. Gunfollow uses a predefined set of “semi-rude” tweets that it sends to its victims. But not all of them are as witty as we’de like them to be. And that’s where you could come in .
More Help us add more messages to Gunfollow.com

When I ordered a new router last week, I decided to also try and tackle a networking issue that had been causing me headaches for a while. My wife’s network printer is located in her study, and we were using powerline adapters to connect to it. This would usually work just fine, except when we needed to print something important, or quickly. That’s why, with a strong wireless-n wifi signal now available in said room, I added the C150APM to my order.
More Conceptronic C150APM first impressions

Recently, Picasa started serving its RSS feeds over https. From what I can tell, this has caused quite a view “clients” to fail. Digital photo frames seem to be affected, and so is my Flickr widget. Fortunately, there’s a quick fix.

I’ve run a few tests, and it seems that simply removing the “s” from “https” fixes the issue. Every feed I tried could be called up over regular old http as well, and all of them worked with my widget.
More Getting my Flickr/Picasa widget working again with Picasa’s new feeds

I’m writing this post hoping it’ll save someone the trouble I went through last night. After I’d installed my new Linksys E4200 router yesterday, all of my gadgets connected to it as expected, except one. My wife’s HP Compaq Presario C700 laptop would connect, it accepted the WPA2 passphrase, but connectivity would be limited to “local only”. I assumed it was having trouble connecting to the new wireless-n network, so I tried to see if there was a driver update for the Compaq’s Atheros network card. And thus, I entered the incomprehensible maze called hp.com…
More Quick tip: Atheros AR5007 wifi and Linksys routers