Monday 20 May 2013

Reliable? Yes!

Last month I reported on the installation of a TP-Link TL-WN751ND wireless adapter in my mongrel 12.04 workshop setup. There's no doubt that it was a serviceable if not perfect solution to my telephone installation problems. Although I continued to experience the connection drop-outs during the period they were less frequent than with my Belkin dongle and, in defence of the card, it has provided (significantly) faster speeds.

Now that I've got my own broadband, I've had a few days to test the card on a dedicated network. Since the installation of my service, the card hasn't dropped the connection at all, so my problems on the public network were probably related to signal strength and user activity (that is, the network, not detecting any user activity, dropped the connection automatically) issues. Surprisingly, the reported speed on the private network has dropped to 65Mb/s. I say surprisingly because the wireless AP is directly above the antenna, separated from the PC by only a wooden desktop.

Nonetheless, I've decided to leave the PC on a wireless connection for now. Sure, it's probably not as fast as a physical Ethernet connection, but it is reliable and it saves using up a port on the router. If you buy sensibly (which I did not), this card offers a reliable wireless connection and I find myself recommending its use on Ubuntu machines.

Sources & References:

Finally!

It's been a challenging couple of weeks: the business has started (slowly) but is starting to come together. However, the hardest part of starting a business in the UK is getting a damn 'phone line installed!

After weeks of trying, I've finally had my service connected and the broadband speeds are not too shabby - 10.23Mb/s. OK, not ultra-fast, but slicker than my home service.

Sources & References:

  • None

Bling for 13.10?

Joey-Elijah Sneddon has reported that Chromium is the likely replacement for Firefox in the 13.10 release of Ubuntu.

I haven't used Firefox for a while: I find it slow to open and flaky to use. In fact, the only time that I use FF now is when I'm testing changes made to the Komphix website from Bluefish. I'm not sure that it will ever be my favourite browser again as it once was.

Sources & References: