Well, some time ago I showed some photo of my geek-palace at work. Kind of geeky.

Anyway, it’s now time for home. There’s not a huge amount of kit on show - most of it is either bundled away in the loft or on shelves somewhere. Never-the-less. So here’s my gallery (cue music)…
First off, this is a kind-of tower that’s at the side of the desk. At the top is an old Lexmark printer/scanner. I intend to replace this with a new scanner soon. Under that is my Netgear wireless router with a VOIP phone converter sat on top. To the right of that, a 300Gb USB hard drive which is connected to the 500GB Maxtor NAS to the right of that. At the bottom of the tower is a Mono Samsung lazer printer. That too is connected to the NAS. On the floor, looking very dusty, is the bass speaker for my speaker set-up.

Next up, we have my desk. Starting from the left we have a Hawking Technology antenna (for my wireless network). The silver box on a cable is the control for my Creative I-Trigue 3300. Next up, in shiny black, is my iDECT phone (working via VOIP), followed by my classic Sony Clie PDA. My I-Trigue speakers can be seen flanking my 17″ Viewsonic monitor (a few years old now, but the best at the time). My Logitech webcam is perched on top and my Hiper metal keyboard is in front. Resting on the desk in front of the keyboard is my Streamzap remote control and my Logitech wireless mouse. Moving on from the right of the monitor is the dock for my mouse, which you can’t quite see in the photo, a SanDisk media card reader and Belkin USB Hub. After the lamp is my TomTom One sat in a desktop dock, followed by a cheap Logitech microphone and, finally, a USB connected Competition Pro joystick. Oh yes.
Finally, my PC. The last time I showed a picture is was my lovely metal cased home-brew PC. But after it never quite working, I bought one from Mesh. It’s plastic, loud, but it’s warranted! On top of it, apart from all the dust (and a well placed hand-print), is my 60Gb WD Passport. This is the hard drive I shift around from work and home and has most of my web development code on it. It gets regularly backed-up, not surprisingly. However, only about 11Gb on it is used, so the next time it fails (and it does after about a year of my wrenching it about) I’ll probably change it for a 16Gb USB Key (about the same price). The PC is plugged into an energy monitor, as I’m keeping tabs on how much power I’m using (I’m good like that).

These days the popular thing to do is to release software in Beta status, the Beta being more of a status symbol (and to cover your back in case the software doesn’t work) rather than anything.

Unfortunately, it appears to be making companies sloppy. Beta is one thing, but a lot of this software is more alpha quality. In fact, in some cases I’d argue it’s not even that - it’s blatantly not been tested at all before being released.

The latest of these is Apples Safari 3.0.4. Promising lots of improvements, many, many XP users are finding it constantly crashed when being launched. The Apple forums have a “workaround” which many are finding doesn’t work. And I’m one of them.

In fact, I decided to re-install 3.0.3 and found that too crashed. This time, however, the workaround worked and I’m happily working with that version for the time being.

Let’s see how long it takes Apple to fix the issue….

And here’s another. Netgear released a firmware update for a range of its wireless routers on the 3rd November. It worked in so-far as that it stopped most wireless connections from working. So, well tested, eh?

The Netgear forums were a hive of activity, with lots of users having problems. The workaround, as with the Apple issue, was to roll back to a previous release.

Except that today - 16 days later - the same broken firmware is still on their website for download.

Maybe they don’t read their own forums and don’t know about it? Except I reported it a week ago to their technical team and they advised me it “had been passed to the appropriate department”. Hmmm.

And that’s not even masquerading as a beta release!

What’s going on here?

Netgear has recently released a firmware upgrade for its DG834GT router. I have that modem and one of the enhancements was to VOIP, which I’ve started using in the last week. Ideal.

Except I spent many frustrated hours yesterday wondering why the wireless connectivity on my daughers laptop wasn’t working. Then I tried my work laptop and that didn’t work either.

Both are on WEP security (insecure I know, but I also have a Nintendo DS on the network and that doesn’t use WPA). I found that switching to WPA temporarily worked (as did turning off encryption). Eventually I rolled back to the previous version of the routers firmware and it worked again.

Having read about other people having this issue on various Netgear forums, it would seem to be a problem impacting Super-G and G wireless - hence why the Nintendo DS continued to work even with the new firmware installed.

Meantime, Netgear continue to have the firmware download available on their site. I can only assume they don’t read their own forums, so I’ll be submitted a fault report to them. Hopefully they’ll then pull the link.