• January 10th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Nonsense
  • Shameless Promotion

Last Christmas I was given AntWorks. I was excited (I wanted it) and I immediately sent my check for $6 off to a company (forget who) to get my ants. I eagerly anticipated their arrival, but alas it was not meant to be. My $6 check was cashed, but no ants ever came.

It took me a year to get over this betrayal. AntWorks was gathering dust on my shelf and I never really gave it a shot, so shortly before New Years I search for and found the best site online to buy ANTS - AntsAlive.com. I was kind of worried if they’d actually show up alive but they came today in a vial, 25 in total. Awesome! ANTS!

I got them into AntWorks as soon as possible because they were probably starving, but they all made it through alive which was good news.

I’m planning on cataloging my ant farm as time goes on. They’re supposed to tunnel through the gel in the AntWorks enclosure - it actually doubles as their food, so it should end up looking pretty cool when it’s illuminated.

I’ll see how this first one goes. Down the line I’d like to wrig up a time-lapsed movie of the ants tunneling. There’s definitely some cool AntWorks videos on YouTube already.

Checkout my flickr photoset - ANTS! for updates.

Popularity: 5% [?]

• January 9th, 2008
• Filed in
  • Networking

Ever since my girlfriend got her new mini I took the opportunity to beef up our wireless protocol. Bye bye WEP.

I decided to go with the strongest encryption that my router (Linksys WRT54GC) allowed, WPA2.

I noticed a couple days later that my internet speeds were crap and suspected the usual suspect - my isp Comcast.

After a couple days I suspected wireless was my issue so I ran some bandwidth tests. WPA2 performance was deplorable. I jacked in a lan cable and speeds soared. Upon further research I found that WPA2 encryption is just too much for consumer devices. To which I post the question, “Why even package a feature into your product that’s going to cause shit performance?”.

Bandwidth Test Results

WPA2

LAN

WPA

So I’ve switched to WPA and things seem to be speedy again. Wonder when I’ll officially break down and get an Airport Extreme. Maybe I’ll wait till 802.11z comes around.

Popularity: 12% [?]