I’m really amazed at how much free, legal music is available on the net. I have been listening to almost 100% free, legal music for the past few months and have found MANY groups/artists that I really like. What amazes me even more is how many of the MP3s are not tagged correctly. Usually I download MP3s off the net in batches – many times from 3hive.com. When I go to play the songs (sometimes a week or two later), I have no idea who the artist is when the MP3s are not tagged. How does that help sell albums for the artist? It doesn’t. For example, I have this MP3 I have had for a few months and it is named aces_160.mp3 but I have no idea where I got it or who the musician is. Oh well.

So, a hint to musicians:
TAG YOUR DOWNLOADABLE MP3s!

Geek Tags: geek, mp3s, id3tags, indie

A GREAT source for the latest mashups – http://mashuptown.com

Geek Tags: geek, mashups, mp3s, freemusic, podcast

So, I finally got my WiFi working at home. I had tried it before but ran into some problems. You see, I already have a wired router hooked up with all sorts of filters and redirects since my websites are run off a server in my closet. I didn’t want to trash that router and redo all of those settings on the wireless router. So I wanted to keep my existing router and just add in the wireless one. That was not easy to figure out.

I finally figured out how to do it today so I am writing it up for myself and any future internet travellers looking for this info. Here is how I did it:

For reference, I have a wired D-link DI-704 (router1) and a wireless D-link DI-524 (router2) but from here on out, I will call them router1 and router2 because the principles here should pertain to any routers (wireless or wired).

router1 was set to have an IP of 192.168.0.1 and was already working fine. The new router2 was also set to have 192.168.0.1 by default so the first thing I had to do was change router2’s address to be something else – I chose 192.168.0.2. You do this in the configuration webpage for your router. Now hook up router2 to router1 by using a crossover cable connected from any of router2’s LAN ports (NOT the WAN port) to any of router1’s LAN ports. This was my first mistake when I tried this before. I connected to router2’s WAN port – don’t do that.

On router2, disable DHCP. On the computer(s) you want to connect to router2 (wirelessly in my case), you have to set them up to have a static IP address. My router1 gives out IPs in the range of 192.168.0.200-192.168.0.205. 202, 203, and 205 were already taken so I assigned the new computer (the laptop using wireless) an IP of 192.168.0.204 (subnet mask 255.255.255.0). On this computer I also set the Default Gateway to be the IP of router1 (192.168.0.1) and also set the DNS server to also be the IP of router1 (192.168.0.1).

That’s it. Of course there are some other steps involved if your router2 is wireless, but those steps are the same regardless of how you hook them up (don’t forget to turn ON encryption!).

Hopefully this will help someone in the future.

Geek Tags: geek, routers, wifi, howto, tutorial