I don’t know if it’s that we have thick walls in the house or i’m just unlucky with routers, but after my Linksys WAG-54G router’s 4 port hub died I decided it was time to upgrade. I went for the Belkin Mimo G+ Router.
It’s been generally good with one exception – the wireless part of the router is a pain in the neck. It’s as if it goes to sleep. Having tried everything in the settings, forked out for something they’re now calling a range extender.
They’re clever gadgets that piggy-back off the ring main electrical circuit, essentially turning any plug socket into a network point. They’re not cheap, and the one i’ve gone for is the wireless version, so doesn’t involve any change from a user end.

It works like this:

So what you do is plug a cable from the router into the XE102 plug which is plugged into the mains
Then you simply plug the WGX102 in in the room you want to get the access and you have wireless networking in that area. Takes a bit of configuring to get all the settings synced up but is pretty easy.
So far, it seems to be working well.

On another subject, I thought I’d seen every video format that’s out there from mpg, avi, divx, qt mov, asx, wmv, mp4 etc… the list goes on. But I came across one last week that had me completely baffled: MKV
And the reason for it’s appearance: Hi Definition TV recording
It’s a container format similar to avi, asf, mp4 so will play in MPlayer, Perian for OS X