via Josh Lowensohn at CNET I found out this morning that YouTube is quietly rolling out the High Definition option for their videos Long expected, and finally here, it’s not “public”yet, but this can be achieved with a simple URL hack by adding the “&fmt=22” string to the end of the video URL string.

Meghan Keane from WIRED also speaks about the soon to be available option of downloading videos as mp4, and of course this will be available for non copyrighted material I suppose, but who knows? another day, another hack!

Sources: CNET & WIRED

.

More and more people ask me for tips and tricks to improve their WiFi setup in their homes. People that recently moved in a new flat and want good coverage all over the place, which includes the living area, sleep quarters, kitchen or even bathroom, and people that just built a new 3 story house or the likes of it.

The first mistake that everyone makes is to place the router exactly where the internet connection enters the house, and that’s usually one of the corners where flats are concerned, or the basement for multistory buildings. Almost any decent WiFi router on the market today can cover an 80 to 100 square meters flat, so I won’t go into much depth on that situation, but when large houses are concerned, you need to have in mind that the best place to position your WiFi router is at the center of the structure. So, if you have a basement, ground floor, and 1st floor, you would be better off placing the device on the ground floor instead of the basement, where the internet connection is made available by the ISP. This way, you will get good coverage on the ground floor, and the adjacent floors, without the need to scale the network up to more than one router. If you have your office in the basement and your rest room on the 1st floor, it would be probably a good idea to have two separate access points and use an Ethernet connection between them. However, placing your only router in the basement is never a good idea, and should not be tried. The easiest way to test everything is to plug in a router with no WAN connectivity and walk around the house with your laptop to see where the weak points in the WiFi network are.

Feel free to post comments about your setup, or your needs based on your new home, and remember Wireless Is Fun to play with and it’s darn useful to have all over your property! Garden included ;-)

.

About a year ago I used to tinker with RF, exploring ways to make it more ubiquitous, friendly, widespread and easy to use. Great material for WiF:)
I’ve slowed down.

Either wireless tech got so much of the above or I’m just comfortable with my setup.
I still have a whole closet of c*frees Merakis, Foneras, Airports, Linksys, Asus and 3G all-in-one-office boxes and various antennas, mostly WiFi tech. But I only employ a simple Airport Express ‘n with AirTunes.

Somehow it all worked out and the iPhone with its GPRS/EDGE/3G+ took over my connectivity white space.
All this is not to say that my wireless saga is over. It’s more like a new chapter. A bump up in usability and solutions that just work got me closer to connectivity nirvana, having to seek more enjoyable experiences than raw hardware solutions.

Frankly I don’t even know or care what firmwares my routers have installed. I just plug them cables or modems in and there, we have a nice working wireless link.

But all that tech in my closet is probably waiting to be employed. I suppose I could WiFi my whole neighborhood with them.
Listen! Maybe you have an idea on how to mix such a multi-skilled equipment in an ingenuous wireless project. I’ll do it!
Sound it off in the comments.

.