My earlier issues with my router have been fixed! But I’m not quite sure what it was.

Last night, after having done some research on the ‘net, I decided to try and sort the problem out. First of all I removed the WEP security (yes, WEP) and tried the Wii… still not connecting. So I turned WEP back on, but at the same time turned the wireless off and on again. I then changed the channel to 11¹.

I then tried the Wii again… success. And the SoundBridge came on too.

Ok, so it sounds like there was interference on the channel I was on. Except, according to NetStumbler, nobody was and I was getting a clear frequency before. I think when I got my new router I set it to channel 3, but having looked at my past post on changing channels I think I was on 4. Now that might explain why the problems have only started since I got the new router, but I don’t understand what the channel issue was.

Oh well, NetStumbler shows channel 11 to be coming in loud and incredibly clear and all now appears well. But still, all a bit strange.

1. There are other people nearby on this channel but I know the Wii is supposed to connect quicker on this particular channel [↩]

TomTom have introduced a great new way to update your maps. Using their PC application, TomTom Home, you can pay a quarterly fee and this will ensure you have all the latest maps.

Prices apparently start from £7.95 a quarter – UK maps for my TomTom One (v2) cost £15 per quarter.

Considering last year I was awaiting their Christmas sale and managed to secure a yearly map update for, a then, bargain price of £40, this is an excellent deal.

And I don’t have to faff about waiting for a sale

Ok, it’s going to get technical.

Although I’ve recently bought Photoshop Elements, Picasa used to be my photo browser of choice (in fact it still is as I get used to Photoshop). Therefore when I wanted an easier way to add photos to the BMTG website, I developed it with Picasa in mind.

Apart from the site generating its own thumbnails, it also gets its description from the embedded Picasa data. I found out the data after reading on the PHP site about looking at EXIF and other image data and writing a program to display it all – this revealed the Picasa caption field.

However, it did seem to have an anomaly in that it ended with a null character. I therefore coded around this. Unfortunately¹ with Picasa 3, this appears to have been fixed and so recently described photos are being truncated on my site. It’s not too much of a hassle, though, to detect for this. The code I use is as follows…

list($width, $height) = getimagesize($full_filename, $info);
$iptc = iptcparse($info["APP13"]);
$description = $iptc["2#120"][0];
if (ord(substr($description,-1))==0) {
   $description=substr($description,0,-1);
}

Simply populate $full_filename with, well, the filename of the image. At the end of it all the Picasa caption will be in $description and the image width and height in $width and $height.

The last line of the code is where I’m working around the null character at the end of the caption (or not).

1. depending how you look at it [↩]