Although I live in a small apartment, I still face issues with my Wi-Fi connectivity. Well not exactly issues but recently I managed to subscribe to TM's Unifi service and all these while, my PC was sitting right next to the router before I moved it to a more permanent spot which was in my small study room (refer to the layout below). Because the Unifi access point was located outside and in the hall (that was where the telephone cable was located), I didn't want to run a 20 metre long network cable through the kitchen and through the toilet in order to reach the router. Hence I decided to buy a PCI wireless card for my desktop PC.

This was the wireless card which I purchased. It took me around 5 minutes to install it on my PC.



I guess one of the mistakes I made was getting one with the antenna at the back. Because of how unique PC's are, most of the time the back portion is faced against a wall or located under a table. Thanks to that, by the time I moved my PC into my room, it couldn't detect the wifi signal from the router. Heck I could get the neighbours signal from downstairs but I couldn't pick the up the wifi signal from a router located less than 5 metres away. At this point in time the wifi signal was a mere 4% strong.



So after being frustrated, I knew it wasn't really my router which was emitting weak signals because my Macbook Pro which I placed right next to my PC can easily detect the wifi signal with ease. So I headed downstairs and found this antenna at the local PC shop. It was the ASUS WL-ANT150 antenna.



After purchasing it for RM25, I brought it back upstairs and hooked it up to my wireless network card and extended the antenna to sit on top of my PC. Basically what it does is that it replaced the black antenna located on the wireless card itself and extends itself outwards in order to receive a better signal.



(image taken with my iPhone)

Thanks to this antenna I am now able to pick up my wifi signal from the router and am able to even write this blog post about it :)



The antenna also managed to boost the signal strength to 58% percent as well from a measly little 4% initially. And to think I almost went to the Apple store to buy an Airport Express. Managed to save some cash there!

Now I am tempted to replace the antennas of the D-Link router outside with this one.

It's currently day two now here at Bangladesh and although I really wanted to write a blog post whilst I was in the airport yesterday, the internet connection at LCCT was horrendous. Anyway its the same here in Bangladesh as well, I hardly get any internet connection so it will be brief posts and updates.

Anyhow, the experience here is a real eye opener! I have never seen so many mosquitoes before in my life. My first encounter with the swarm (yes, thats how many there were) was at the airport. I could literally feel them flying onto me and hitting me whilst I was walking about. Same goes for the place I was staying as well and my left hand alone had more than 10 bites. No worries, we bought (we meaning Andrew and I) a mosquito repellant as well as a diffuser to run whilst we are sleeping. The repellant was excellent, Mortein to the rescue! I sprayed the room earlier and I already see 13 dead mosquitoes lying on the floor.

So much for those bloodsuckers!

Anyhow, the shoot is gonna start soon so I better best prepare myself :)

One of the many questions people ask me is what do I use my iPad for? Well I would love to say I use it to wow my clients and also showcase not just my presentation skills but also some of my photography work as well. And I managed to do just that using a very nifty software called Dropbox.

You see, I have a number of laptops and PCs and a Mac about, each of them having a specific purpose individually. So when I want to share files and work with some files, it is rather cumbersome to keep on using a thumbdrive to transfer the files and after a while I ended up overwriting the wrong versions of documents and this caused a huge nightmare for me.

So when I started looking around for a cloud storage software, I found out about Dropbox. First of all, why I chose Dropbox was because it was free! Yes, absolutely free for 2Gb worth of space. Now if you are thinking of using it for large files then I would suggest another alternative but if it is to sync some of your important documents, 2Gb is more than enough. Of course, if you want more than 2Gb of files then you have to pay for the service.

So how does it work?

Dropbox functions as a specific folder that resides on your PC/Mac which syncs directly with the cloud. It looks exactly like a folder in your PC and you need to do is just treat it as your folder! So you can copy and paste files into it, create sub-folders according to your own liking and drop files into that folder.



Another cool feature about it which I learned about it recently is that Dropbox allows users to share their folders with other people! How cool is that? When I was submitting my photos to be included into The Nut Graph's article (I blogged about it here and view the article here), I worked with Jo-Ann by sharing my photos via Dropbox. This also included me making some changes to the photos as well as include in captions explaining what the photos meant. Now this was extremely helpful for us both as I am sitting here in Cyberjaya while she is all the way in KL.

Now earlier I mentioned that I had a more elaborate setup, well it isn't too complicated as Dropbox makes it so much easier now. So I decided to create this diagram to show you all what I really mean when I use it extensively.



In my work environment, I would also assume that most of our work laptops have certain limitations as to what we can install on our laptops and one of them is iTunes. So thanks to that, I can't really sync my iPad with it and hence I can't really sync files with it. Thanks to Dropbox, that is all in the past. Note that with the iPad, I can't edit files in my Dropbox folder but I can view them. Tip, for best viewing pleasure such as presentations, I would save my presentations as PDF files so that the formatting doesn't run.

Anyway, if you are really interested with Dropbox, you can head over here and sign up for a free 2Gb account now!