Just found out that the reason my wife’s PC wouldn’t connect to the Internet is that I had entered the WEP password wrongly. But Intel’s software reported a good connection to my router! Would it have been so hard to code in a “physical connection good but password is wrong please try again” dialog box? Billions of blue blistering barnacles!

Later And to compound the annoyance, I nearly thought my connection had broken again but then I realised that if you fix the password on one user account it doesn’t fix it on any of the others. Mightn’t it be a good idea to allow administrators to change all the passwords for wireless access to a given point at the same time?

I just found out that The Avengers was called in France Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir – bowler hat and leather boots. Which if you think about it is probably a more descriptive name. I know at least one person who probably only ever watched it for the leather boots…

After spending much time with a friendly but unable-to-help Dell technician I seem to have figured out the problem with my wife’s laptop myself (or at least found a way around it). It seems that for some reason her wireless driver crashes the whole system when trying to handle WPA encryption but it can handle WEP encryption fine. So we’re using that now. Not too elegant, but if it works don’t mess with it as I said earlier!

Here’s a radio series I am going to have to record – Meet the bloggers – mostly A list British personal bloggers but also featuring an interview with the ubiquitous Instapundit.

For ages now I have only been able to connect two of our three computers to the network at the same time (though there were four addresses available via the DHCP server on our Linksys router). So I upgraded the router to the latest software and reconnected everything. The Mac and my desktop connected fine. My wife’s Dell laptop? Blue screen of death with a helpful “driver IRQL not less or equal” message. I upgraded the Intel Pro 2200BG wireless card software in the Dell (which was two years old) but still no joy. Now waiting (in the doghouse) for a call from Dell tech support. I wish I could say this rarely happens but in my experience wireless networking almost never goes smoothly – and if it does, G*d help you if you change anything!

I just finished writing this post on the LSE group weblog which looks at the low number of Wikipedians editing non-English language articles and the dangers this presents to the credibility of Wikipedia (such as it is). I also tied it in with the recent announcement that the OLPC consortium would be bundling selected Wikipedia articles with its $100 laptops. Take a look at it and see what you think. Have a look at some of the other recent articles there too for that matter – most of them are also written by me (I will start adding bylines from now on).

(Well, my computer is). A little while ago I heard about Malariacontrol.net, part of the Africa@home project. You download an application (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing – Boinc – available on PC, Mac and  Linux) and instead of donating spare processing power to the quixotic search for extraterrestrial life you can use your computer (when it is turned on but not doing anything else) to help scientists better understand how malaria spreads. Or at least you could until recently – at the moment they have all the computers they need for that project. But keep revisiting Africa@Home as they plan to publicise more projects soon. Meanwhile there are several other projects that use Boinc.

This is the last Google Ad I ever expected to see – and it doesn’t seem to have been sent to me because of any particular email as I didn’t have any emails open at the time I read (or does Google Mail present ads based as well on some kind of aggregate of all of your mail?)

Alas the only languages other than English of which I have a useful knowledge are French and a smattering of Latin so I may not be much use to them. Then again, perhaps if you believe Yes Minister the French are our real enemies all along?

It’sa pity – I was a big James Bond fan when I was a kid…

London Walks for your MP3 Player is what it says – there 15 areas of central London covered (so far). So much more handy than carrying around a guidebook. For an alternative – a single downloadable package of 15 sites plus a map – see iaudioguide (which covers a number of other European cities as well). I heard about it via a roundup of such guides at Londonist – a (rather patchy) commercial blog about all things London.

I thought I should remind you that I store almost all the new useful web bookmarks I come across using Netvouz which lets me (or you) display and search them several different ways. In my sidebar at the right (further down the page) you will see my five most recently added links but by visiting Netvouz you can see more in date order or grouped by category, complete with descriptions and (often) star ratings. And yes if you are weblog-savvy there is an RSS feed for my whole collection or for any of my tags or categories that interests you – cool web services for example. Quality links, updated every day. Enjoy!

P.S. I do most of my academic weblogging (which is most of my blogging these days) over at the Media@LSE group weblog which I set up.