Pajama Entrepreneur

Here’s a little tip I’d like to share with you. If you live in a city and use Wi-Fi at home, you will probably encounter interference from a lot of neighbors’ Wi-Fi networks. The intereference can have a significant effect on the performance of your network, slowing down the speeds at which you send files around (internally among various devices in your house or office), or download/upload files on the Internet.

If you upgrade your Wi-Fi access point to one that uses 802.11n and upgrade your computer and other devices to ones that have 802.11n (or at least get an 802.11n adapter card for older devices), then set your new 802.11n base station to use the 5GHz frequency, you will find that your network’s performance will improve because there’s very little interference on that frequency. Most people do not have 802.11n yet.

My setup: I bought an Apple Airport Extreme base station (with 802.11n) two weeks ago. The Mac Book Pro that I bought last June already has 802.11n built in, so all I had to do was to set the base station to send and receive at 5GHz. The network is now very fast because there’s no interference from my neighbors who are all using 2.4 GHz.

Glenn Fleishman, who wrote the book Take Control of your 802.11n Airport Extreme Network, says he is still waiting for inexpensive 802.11n adapters for the older devices (laptops, etc.) in his house so he can have all of them use 5GHz. I’m waiting, too.

Think Secret, the popular Apple rumor site that once ruined Steve Jobs Mac Mini surprise, is shutting down after coming to a settlement with the company. Apple claims Think Secret violated Apple’s trade secrets by leaking out news of upcoming products and sadly, a judge agreed with Apple two years ago when the ompany sued Nick Ciarelli, who runs Think Secret. Ciarelli says that under the settlement, *at least* he does not have to divulge his sources. At least. Yeah, at least he isn’t in prison getting his fingernails pulled out.

Apparently, bloggers like Ciarelli are not entitled to the same protection that journalists have under the California reporter’s shield law (which says journalists do not have to divulge their sources).

What does this mean for bloggers who do investigative reporting on corporate fraud or dangerous materials in the things that corporations sell, the environmental damage they do?

It’s a tragic day for freedom of the press and investigative reporting, but will anyone in Mac-obsessed Silicon Valley even notice?

Farhad Manjoo, Salon’s tech columnist, did quite a bit of research and showed that Macs are indeed cheaper than PCs. Moreover, their eBay resale value is higher:

Even for computers, brand matters. This week I compared prices of several machines from Dell, Gateway and other PC vendors against Apple’s lineup of Macs. In most cases comparable Macs sold for within $100 more than the PCs. But the Apples had something extra: that logo, the design, the history . . .

I switched to the Mac in 2002 and I don’t understand why people still use Windows PCs.