->Improving Your Home Network

Understanding Your Computer

• What is a GPU all about? A simple explanation of what your computer’s graphics subsystem is all about and the different varieties that are being offered for this subsystem.
• What is your computer’s file-storage system about? Knowing where your files go and how your computer’s operating system looks after the files that end up on the system’s hard disk or solid-state storage, including the role that Windows (File) Explorer or Macintosh Finder perform in this task. This underscores the difference between the logical volume which represents the storage devices and the folders or directories where your programs and files are stored. It also includes what the main or system disk is about and which drive is it.
• What’s Inside Your Computer – An infographic that illustrates the key parts that make the typical personal computer work, as found in a typical desktop computer’s system unit.(SlideShare)

Your Small-Business Computing Experience

Also see more of these articles at the Small Business Technology page that is specially created for those of you in charge of your small business’s or community organisation’s communciations and information technology

• Moving your closed-circuit TV system to IP technology – Understanding IP-based video surveillance and how to go about upgrading your video-surveillance system to this technology.
• UPDATED DLNA And UPnP AV In The Business – An article outlining the relevance of UPnP AV / DLNA multimedia network setups in the business
• Basic Information About Provisioning Public Wi-Fi Hotspot Service – What you need to know about providing a public-access Wi-Fi hotspot for your customers or guests.
• Buying A Printer For Your Small Business – A buying-guide article about printers specifically targeted at the small-business owner
• Using QR Codes to promote your organisation – How you can get going with QR codes as a tool to promote your business or organisation to the connected mobile generation.
• Making sure your small business is ready for IPv6 – How to make sure your small business’s technology path is ready for the up-and-coming IPv6 Internet standard.
• What are the multiple drive layouts available in your NAS –  Understanding the different ways you can set up your multiple-bay network attached storage to make best use of the hard disks installed in it. This focuses especially on the RAID options that these NAS units offer.
• How to look after your video projector properly – A list of tips to make sure that the video projector that you use in your business or other organisation for those presentations or video display will last a long time. (PDF)

Printing in the Small Business

• Colour laser printers – Are they a luxury or not? – an article on considering and choosing colour laser printers for your business
• Considering printing on A3 in the office – Using the A3 or Ledger paper size in the small-business office and how to choose equipment that will print on this paper size
• UPDATED Expecting your printer to be the home or small-business printing press? What does it need – An article about putting your home or small-business desktop printer in to service as your business’s only printing press. It also covers whether you should really outsource that job or use the printer.

Computing Setups Integrated With Your Lifestyle

• Using an ex-business laptop computer as a kitchen PC
• Repurposing that ex-business laptop for home use – how to go about setting up a laptop that was used as a business computer as a home computer
• Having The Online Life In That Private Space – What online IT setup to go for when you want to integrate the online life in your private “den”, “man-cave” or similar space.
• Legacy analogue audio to today’s needs. Can this be done? – This article highlights how you can bring vinyl or old tapes to your home network such as recording unforgettable recordings to your computer or playing records via that new network-based multiroom speaker setup.
• Should I buy a secondary printer for my home network? – Situations where another printer with different capabilities can come in handy for your home network, whether as a machine that is more locally placed or one that offers complementary functionality. Examples of this can be a small printer in the kitchen / family room or bungalow; or an inkjet printer that offers complementary printing abilities to your laser printer.
• How To Effectively Establish That Wi-FI-based Mobile Network – Setting up a mobile wireless network to allow you to run two or more mobile Wi-Fi-based mobile devices like wireless network-attached storages or Wi-Fi-enabled digital cameras together.
• Chromecast or Apple TV within a public-access Wi-Fi network – Different ways to have that Chromecast, Apple TV, smart speaker or similar network-capable device working with your hotel Wi-Fi or other headline public-access Wi-Fi network. This includes how to purpose your Windows or Mac laptop to work as a wireless hotspot for these kind of devices.

Safe Home Computing And Networking

• Making Sure Your Home Wireless Network Is Secure
• Tips to avoid those mistakes that can easily happen to tablet ultraportable comptuers in the living room
• Keeping Your Portable Equipment Safe During Summer – Avoiding unnecessary damage to your smartphone, tablet and computer when you engage in outdoor activities.

Home And Small Business Computing Trends

• What is the “New Computing Environment” – Explaining the laptop-based wireless-network-driven computing environment that is becoming the norm and advising how to get the most out of this trend.
• Achieving the goal of a competitive Internet service – Why there needs to be a competitive Internet service market and what is being done to achieve that goal.
• Building out a desktop space for your laptop computer– How you can connect and use full-sized screens, mice, keyboards and the like with your laptop computer to build those desktop workspaces where you do most of your work.
• How to adapt to multiple-screen computing – Some information about moving towards a multiple-screen computing setup. This could be a laptop or all-in-one connected to an external monitor where you use both the computer’s internal screen and the external screen at the same time. Or it could be you connecting two monitors to that traditional desktop computer of yours.

Older people and the connected lifestyle

• Is it worth it to put full broadband in the “family house”? – An article putting forward the idea of equipping your older parents’ house or other “family house” with full broadband Internet service
• Retirement – no need to leave your computer skills at the office — an article directed at retirees who have just left the workforce informing them that they can keep their computin skills alive in their new life

The DLNA Media Network and your network-attachd storage

WD MyCloud EX4100 NAS – the mid-tier variant

• Getting Started With DLNA Media Sharing – Setting up the DLNA-compliant network media client device for the home network
• Setting Up PC-Less Network AV – Using a dedicated device as a DLNA media server
• Integrating Classical Music Into Your Digital-Music Collection – Integrating serious classical music, especially complete works like symphonies, in to your digital music collecton and making particular works and movements easier to find.
• The 3-box DLNA Home Media Network – understanding the ability for a network media control point (as a piece of network hardware or a program running on a computer) to control a network media player rather than the network media player’s control surface.
• Making cloud-based file-share services work with your DLNA-capable NAS – Using your DLNA-capable NAS to make media content hosted on a service like Dropbox, Box.com or SkyDrive available through your home network to our DLNA-capable smart TV or Blu-Ray player.
• Legacy analogue audio to today’s needs. Can this be done? – This article highlights how you can bring vinyl or old tapes to your home network such as recording unforgettable recordings to your computer or playing records via that new network-based multiroom speaker setup.
• You can rip CDs to FLAC using Windows 10’s Media Player – How you can set up Windows 10 for high-quality sound when you rip your audio CDs to file-based audio for your home network.
• Using audio-editor software to salvage legacy media – How you can use a sound card or sound module along with audio-editor software like Audacity to salvage old familiar audio recordings.
• What are the multiple drive layouts available in your NAS –  Understanding the different ways you can set up your multiple-bay network attached storage to make best use of the hard disks installed in it. This focuses especially on the RAID options that these NAS units offer.

->Basic Computing Skills, Hints and Tips

Network and Internet Activities

Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites

At the moment, these articles pertain to Facebook because of its preference as a social-network site by mature-aged and older people, many of whom are likely to be computer or Internet novices.

• Facebook – Fighting the battle against money scams – How you should handle “419-style” money scams that manifest on Facebook and other social networks as “calls for help” from distressed travellers.
• Someone saying things “off the wall” on the (Facebook) Wall about you – assessing the impact of a comment left on a Facebook Friend’s Wall about you
• Facebook – Where should I write and where do I write that post – A table about where you should write a message or comment whenever you use Facebook
• Twitter – Who sees what and when – A guide to understanding Twitter and being able to write those Tweets smartly..

Videoconferencing

• Video Conferencing and your Home Network – Setting up your computers and home network for long-distance video conferencing

Journal Articles

Assistance Journals

These are articles about where I have been with particular home and small-business IT-support situations.

• Dealing with a laptop’s Wi-Fi that failed after a Windows 10 upgrade – How looking for the newest drivers for something like your notebook’s Wi-Fi circuitry can make sure it behaves properly when an operating system like Windows is upgraded.
• HomePlug AV500 – earns its place in connecting that man-cave to the house – An article about how I linked a “man-cave” garage to the home network to facilitate access to “download-to-view” video content in his space.
• Connecting a desktop computer to a home network – This support job for my pastor highlighted the fact that Wi-Fi wireless isn’t the best no-new-wires solution for desktop computers located further from the home network’s router and HomePlug AV500 can answer this need better.
• Using a smart TV to show holiday pictures to an old relative – Setting up a DLNA-based setup using a network-attached storage and a smart TV to show images of a friend’s past business trip / vacation to an old relative.
• Getting the hang of Skype before your overseas-travelling child flies out – This is where I encouraged a mother whose daughter was heading overseas to get the hang of Skype before the daughter left. It included performing “dry-run” Skype sessions in order to make sure it is set up and familiarise yourself with the user interface; and making a call between your computer and the child’s laptop with that laptop connected via its own Internet connection.
• Using a separate network connection to troubleshoot Skype – Here I was using my smartphone that was connected to its wireless-broadband service to troubleshoot a Skype experience for an Italian-migrant when I was doing computer support work for him. I was also using headphones with my smartphone in order to have proper acoustic isolation so I can concentrate on how the sound had come through.

Purchasing And Specification Journals

These are articles about where I have been involved in specifying and purchasing home and small-business IT equipment for particular people and organisations with a task in mind.

• A new playout computer for the church – Specifying and shortlisting a newer computer to replace an existing computer used for AV playout / lyrics-display purposes in the church I now worship God in.

Buyer’s Guides

Industry Interviews and Presentations

Interviews with people who represent companies who provide the technology for the home ans small-business IT market. This also includes reports from product launches and other industry-focused presentations that I attend.

• Brother International (Heidi Webster – Brother, Stephen Bennett – Brother)
• Network Audio And Video (Kate Winney – Hausmann Communications (Sony); Jacqueline Hickmann – Bush Australia)
• Gigaclear (Matthew Hare) – installing fibre-t0-the-premises broadband with up to Gigabit symmetrical (upload and download) throughput in rural villages in the UK.
  • 2011 interview about Lyddington and Hambleton next-generation broadband rollouts
  • 2015 interview about Gigaclear’s increased footprint with 10,000 premises in rural areas passed by their fibre-to-the-premises broadband infrastructure.
• Security Issues Associated With Cloud-based Computing (Alastair MacGibbon – Centre For Internet Safety (University of Canberra), Brahman Thiyagalingham – SAI Global) – Clound-based computing and computing-as-a-service and the security risks associated with it, including the new deliniation of responsibility.
• WD Red Series NAS hard disk product launch – A reseller-based product launch of Western Digital’s latest hard disks that are optimised for network-attached-storage equipment.
• Connecting Up (Mathan Allington) – An Australian non-profit organisation who provides  up-to-date information and communications technology to the non-profit community organisations at a price that they can afford.
• UPnP Forum (Wouter van der Beek) – An interview about the current and future directions of the UPnP concept as the concept of personal computing expands across multiple zones of relevance. This includes factoring in cloud / remote computing setups, UPnP across multiple networks and the Internet Of Things.

Special Reports

• 10 Years Of the UPnP Forum – An article about the UPnP Forum’s 10 years in existence with a focus on how that has helped made the home network easy to use with equipment from differing manufacturers.
• Windows 95 Now 15 Years Old And A Major Change To the PC Computing Platform – A special report about Windows 95 and how it changed the PC-based computing platform forever
• A Celebration of the 50th Internationaler Funkaustellung – Celebrating the 50th time the European “pillar” trade show for consumer electronics has been run and its role in consumer electronics