Asus RT-N16 router review: nice performance, poor with handling bad network lines

By Giedrius Majauskas on April 6, 2010

Recently I had to buy a new router for my apartment. My old router Speedtouch was rebooting constantly when third wireless device connected to it. After some testing, my theory is that it cannot handle lot of concurrent connections at the same time.

For router, I have picked Asus RT-N16 router. The key features that won me was support for 802.11n Draft, which allows communication at speeds up to 300 MB/s instead 54 MB/s. Also, gigabyte Ethernet support is nice too. Additionally, it claimed good support for concurrent connections e.g. during torrent download. RT-N16 has 4 LAN and 1 Wan sockets, which is enough for home environment, though one would need a hub or two in bigger office.

Asus RT-N16 came packed with 3 antennas, power supply, network cable, instruction manual and useless installation CD. The CD is useless as router can be configured through network interface. Default IP is 192.168.1.1 (like usual) and login/password is admin:admin. This should be changed, even if the router cannot be accessed from WAN side by default. I would strongly recommend going through network setup wizard to set passkey for wireless network. Also, I changed network type to WPA2-PSK with AES encryption for better security.

Not everything went seamlessly for me. I had several problems connecting to administration interface and connecting to WAN (dynamic IP). Apparently, router lags when it tries to connect to WAN interface and will not respond to LAN during that time. After some changes, I got an error message like this:

You have set the wrong dynamic or static IP address for your RT-N16. Refer to the diagnosis.

Sure enough, the IP was dynamic and received correctly. The problem was in faulty Cat5 cable in my apartment, so I had to move router into another place which is not as convenient as old one. After that the problem disappeared and router worked as expected.

Another issue is that you got single field to enter DNS addresses that are passed through DHCP server to client PCs. Personally, I do not want router to cache DNS requests, so this caused me some headache. I will see if I can enter 2 IP’s into single field there.

Overall, I can recommend ASUS RT-N16 for people that like having fast wireless and ethernet network at home for reasonable price (~95 USD at amazon at the moment). You might get some quirks, but I think they will get fixed with firmware upgrade.

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Ndrive – a navigation for Android phone review

By Giedrius Majauskas on March 24, 2010

NDrive is a Portuguese GPS navigation software with Android version available in Android Market. It can be downloaded for free, also there is 7 day free trial for all of the maps.

Ndrive Installation is quite straightforward. One downloads application from Android Market, and then selects maps one needs. I would recommend downloading maps using Wireless network rather than 3g as it would be (probably faster). Ndrive East Europe maps – 300Mb, West Europe – 2Gb, so it takes a while. Afterwards you are ready to use it. I assume that all software versions (Iphone, windows Mobile and Android) uses more or less same maps as long as you got latest software version.

Most of the settings can be controlled in Ndrive settings menu as well, including voice used, what is shown in maps and so on.

Here is my experience with Ndrive on my Nexus One phone:

The good:

1. Ndrive is the most easy to install and use Android navigation application outside USA and couple other selected countries (11) due to fact that it is free (only maps are paid). One does not has to deal with Google Checkout.

2. Works quite fast on Nexus one – no crashes, no problems for now.

3. Speed camera location integration is very nice feature.

3. Strangely enough, Ndrive price for East Europe (30 E) is smaller than any of the single maps of East European countries (45-ish ). I guess there is mistake in its Android purchase interface, as in website the price is bigger.

4. Seven day trial is a very nice thing.

The bad:

1. Poorly updated maps (at least for East Europe) and speed camera locations. Camera map is 1-2 years old, other maps are about the same age as well. This might be an issue for people that rely on GPS navigation only.

2. No good enough way to temporally silence the navigation without silencing anything else on the phone. There should be an icon to stop all sound from navigation.

3. Had problems on finding a way to fast-forward simulation mode. It is not very well done.

4. (UPDATED) There is a lack of routing modes. 2 times I were routed through roads that are not asphalted. This means that the travel was slower than anticipated (Non-asphalted road speed limit is 70, however it is highly non-recommended to drive at 7o km/h on most of them). These routing modes Ndrive should address.

I still need to test if Ndrive works well with trapster running, as Trapster speed trap database is much better. As it is single commercial navigation available for download here, I can not compare it to other Android applications except hacked Google Navigation which would not be fair. I would like to try Copilot as well, but if they do not want me to buy their software – oh well. I am perfectly happy with Ndrive for now.

You should give Ndrive a try if you are looking for Navigation on your Android phone.


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Want to get navigation on Android phone outside US for free?

By Giedrius Majauskas on March 20, 2010

One of the most important drawbacks of my Nexus One is the limited choice of applications if you are outside US and couple other countries. Android Market sells for couple countries only, and native free Turn by turn navigation application is available in USA only. That is a shame, as I need navigation in my country as well sometimes.

There are some paid alternatives. For example, CoPilot by ALK Technologies is quite good and reasonable application for android. The single drawback is that it is not available in my country.

However, recently I found a free solution for this problem. The application is called Nav Launcher . Apparently, Google maps do not work in Canada as well, so some people there created a version that uses modified google maps. It works worldwide. It does 2 things. First, it creates a nice launcher for custom google maps in navigation mode. Second, it allows choosing which maps to launch : native or modified. Native maps provide navigation in USA only.

To enable installation of Non-USA navigation, you will have to enable installing from third-party sources. To do so, go into settings->Applications and mark Unknown sources checkbox. This will allow nav launcher to download and install Brute Maps, which are based on Google Maps 4.0.

There is another small issue. I am still running Google Maps 3.4 on my Nexus one, as maps 4.1 is available in USA only (maybe in some other countries). This is quite depressing, as I see no reason for Google to limit availability of free applications that should be the same worldwide. I am quite sure that I would be able to install it through VPN if I really wanted that. Though question remains… why such artificial limitation?

Overall, I am unhappy that Google does not want dollars from many world countries though their app store. This limits developers as well, because there is a huge market for local apps outside USA and UK as well. These applications will have different specific country-related needs.

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Social Marketing Fail : looking for numbers instead for audience

By Giedrius Majauskas on March 17, 2010

Each person with Facebook account has met a social marketer (more likely, many). Most of them are total annoying failures as they work using wrong objectives. For example, invites to pages and events that are not relevant to my locality, age or interests.

Looking back, pageviews is a viable objective for some markets that sell main-stream products or try to strengthen brand. However, is it likely that I would go to a club in completely opposite side of the world or that I would do grocery shopping there anytime soon?

This issue affected display advertisement for a while already, and it affects social marketing even more so. People will not speak positively about unnecessary service that is pushed to them . More than likely they will laugh at it. And that will reduce credibility.

Back to real-world example. I have a marketer in my friend list that tries to push me a DJ fan page and events that are never close to my location. The marketer found me by inviting fans of other DJ’s that play internationally and reside in my location. Do your research, people. I see no reason to become fan of page that is not relevant.

How to remedy situations like this? Invest some time into looking for related local groups. Local clubs the DJ plays would be good start instead of international DJs themselves. That would lead to fans that are relevant and (maybe) interested. Simple, eh?

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7 things to make me happier with my Google Nexus one

By Giedrius Majauskas on March 12, 2010

I am using my Google Nexus one for one month already, so I got quite used to it. I would not change it to Iphone (at least not to any existing model), nor I would change it to Symbian/Windows mobile or other smartphone. At the moment I am Android convert, and there are reasons for that.

However, there are aspects of my phone where I see large possibilities towards improvement

1. Data exchange over USB. I needed whole month to make it work with drivers I had to download and using USB debug mode. This is not something end-user should do. I have read that Nexus one is quite sensitive in respect of USB socket, however that is not something that should concern end users. This should be not a beta – product.

2. Touch screen sensitivity. It is too poor for high end smartphone. Droid gets much better touch sensitivity than Nexus one. Also, nexus one scree is almost unusable in sunlight, although I can survive with that.

3. Sound quality. Sound quality is lacking in HTC phones. That is one of the worst drawbacks of HTC overall, after owning Sony Ericsson especially.

4. Please, Google, open paid apps worldwide. I am happy to pay dollars for apps. May developers would be happy to develop paid local apps.

5. Internet tethering. Should work without any paid apps, as I get that on my 3-year old phone without any paid apps as well.

6. I can live without flash as long as you provide html5 video play work on android. Not only in full-screen, but in window mode as well… or at least clickable. One has to use workaround for now – javascript or serving specific code for android users.

7. I would like to choose which contacts I want to see in my nexus one contact list. This is especially important for Buzz users. Also, skype integration would be kinda nice, but I guess it is asking too much.

Thats all I am asking for now… Is it too much ? :) I do not know.

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Content popularity versus content engagement: why you have to monitor both

By Giedrius Majauskas on March 8, 2010

The web is all about conversions and users. Long gone are days when one measured earning potential of website by earnings, total visitor count and home page pagerank alone. These metrics are simple and easy to understand. Sadly, they do not give real useful information.

Earnings are not necessarily the most informative metric of the website. Some websites do not earn money directly. The same amount of money earned might suggest good or bad website performance depending on investments done, visitor count, market or advertisement type used.

It is even more difficult for websites whose income sources are advertisements or which advertise main business indirectly (for example, using branding). The conversion might be long process and you see increase in sales or conversions, but it is hard to estimate the performance of content.

However, you have to analyze the content. There are information that can be extracted from both statistics and user-generated content related to the original content. These things might not correlate!

For example, we post articles in our local fashion magazine and publish excerpts in facebook pages. Most viewed content not necessary is most commented one! Why it is so ?

  1. Content that appeals to main auditorium of website is more engaged. Content that is related to auditorium is most interesting.
  2. Shocking content would be more viewed one. They are interesting for broader spectrum of people.
  3. Shocking content has more viral potential as it might be redistributed by non-members. That is why single-time visitors are useful as well.

Is engagement more important that visitors? For membership sites, definitely. You grow your crowd and your influence in them. However, a single non-related re-share of content might increase your site visibility further than in-door engagement. Thus in many cases you have to vary your content enough to attract more diverse crowd to your site.

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Stop torturing yourself with Mcafee and uninstall it

By Giedrius Majauskas on February 10, 2010

Recently I got new dell XPS 16 with I7 processor. I am really happy with it ( I guess a post comming soon), however I want address a problem I had to solve.

You see, each time I scroll or type something, my PC froze for couple secs each 10-20 sec apart. The drivers were ok, windows 7 install is fresh as well. So I could not pinpoint the problem. I ruled out hardware malfunction as there is no custom hardware (except blueray and more ram) in this Dell XPS model. Speaking about the Blueray/dvd writer, the freezes might have affected writing process as the single dvd I wrote was unreadable.

Lastly, I found the problem. My laptop came with Mcafee preinstalled. Even if I had no plans on buying it, I havent removed 14 day trial at once. Well, that was the mistake. Apparently, Mcafee was behind PC freezes all along.

I am not planing to leave my dell unprotected though. I will go with ESET smart security probably, as I have good experience with it. Its detection rate is better, and I expect my PC to be more responsive than with Mcafee. There are other good software around too, like Kaspersky, Avira, Avast.

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Unboxing Google Nexus one – my impressions

By Giedrius Majauskas on February 4, 2010

I had received my brand new Google nexus one finally! As it is not available here, I had to buy it through ebay and send it by post. I had additional week to wait because of slow postal service here – they had to send information to customs and so on. I haven’t replaced my last phone for 2 years or so, thus it was a quite big change.

Nexus one box included the phone itself, 110v charger, usb/htc connection cable (can be used for charging as well), headphones and case for carrying. The phone is shipped with 4G sdcard.

The first impression – it rocks. I am not a big fan of Iphone and nexus one is just my kind of phone: good design, I can easily operate it in one hand (most of the time), very fast and lots of applications. The camera is very good as well. Additionally, the Android os will get multi-touch support as well soon, which will be quite nice add-on for galleries and browser.

Additionally, I like the contact management in my google account. This saved a lot of time – I exported my contacts to vcf in my old phone, uploaded to PC and imported to my google contacts. As an additional bonus, Android offers nice integration of contacts from various sources : google addressbook, facebook, etc.

There are still some glitches that should be fixed:

a) Sometimes touchscreen is not sensitive/wont work, especially on edges. After couple of tries it starts working again. Annoying, though.

b) There are major issues with bluetooth connections – it pairs, but fails to connect with some equipment, including handsfree in my car. I’ll have to read about it more and maybe I’ll get it to work. Maybe there will be an update by android team.

c) There is not a big choice for some niche applications, like GPS ones. But Copilot looks promising (if they got good Lithuanian maps for Android).

d) Sound quality is slightly worse than my old K800i.

Now I just need to wait for OS update to get multi-touch and I will be really happy :) .

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How to remove Antivirus Soft rogue antivirus

By Giedrius Majauskas on February 1, 2010

Antivirus Soft

Antivirus Soft is a rename of rogue Antivirus live. The crooks had not bothered to change much, the most significant change is in name only. Antivirus soft uses same means to reproduce : fake websites, malicious ads in social networking sites or good old fake codecs and movies.

After the download, your PC will stop executing other programs becouse they are “infected”. Usually, it is not true as single infection is Antivirus Soft  itself. They expect you to agree paying for it and funding these scammers.

The Antivirus Soft removal process is quite similar to antivirus live :

1. Reboot into safe mode

2. Remove proxy server from IE settings.

3. Search your user directory for file ending with sysguard.exe. Delete it. If you cant, press ctrl+shift+esc and stop process with same name and repeat deletion.

4. Reboot and scan with spyware doctor to make sure you got everything out.

I recommend having an anti-malware with real time protection running all the time to avoid problems like this.

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SLOW PCfighter review- another registry cleaner

By Giedrius Majauskas on January 28, 2010

Slow PC Fighter is a registry cleaner from same family as Spam Fighter or Virus Fighter. Registry cleaners allow fixing errors and inconsistencies in PC’s registry making PC boot and operate a bit faster. Many of them are made by security companies.

Slow PC Fighter website claims that running Slow PCFighter will increase PC speed up to 40%. That might be true on really badly supervised PC, but I would not expect such things on each PC.

Slow PCFighter free scanner installation was quite quick and easy. The download is around one megabyte. What impressed me, it recognized my Windows as 64 bit one and installed correct version of application itself.

The scan is was quite quick and found around 2000 errors, mostly missing files or empty registry keys. It had not shown any false positives, which is good.

The free version of SLOW PC Fighter removes 25 registry errors, which is quite little compared to errors it found.

Verdict: I would definitely give it a try to see if there are lots of errors in the PC. It might be useful and safe to have this product if you hate reinstalling windows like I do. The downside is that you would have to purchase full version as free scanner is not too useful except for trying the product out.

You can download Slow PCFighter here.

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