The Lance J. Technoweb

802.11b and 802.11g are utterly obsolete and must now be disabled by all access points, routers, and clients. 802.11b first emerged in 1999 - a hot new standard that provided inexpensive networking over the air. But by January 2003, a faster standard became commonplace - 802.11g. And since 2006, 802.11n based products have been on the scene. Both 802.11b and 802.11g are inefficient.  These protocols consume valuable wireless bandwidth and manage to slow everyone down. And therefore, I proclaim that 802.11b and 802.11g must be immediately banned from the world. Doing so will speed access for everyone. So log into your access points and disable the mixed modes that support anything below 802.11n. Throw out your old interface cards and routers. You, and 99.99% of the rest of the world will see much better performance.  Never buy a product that doesn't support 802.11n or better. Upgrades are very inexpensive: 802.11n USB client interfaces are available for under $15 ...

Some folks are under the mistaken assumption that Chicago is not actually a windy city.  They look at the NWS weather data and see that Milton, Massachusetts is the windiest city, and that Chicago is a bit down on the list. The problem with this logic is that NWS weather stations are often not actually in the cities themselves, or at least not downtown. The Milton, Massachusetts weather station is on Great Blue Hill (the namesake of WGBH), the highest prominence on the coast of Massachusetts.  In contrast, the Chicago NWS station is at O'Hare International Airport, which is far west of downtown Chicago and as far away from the shore as one can be and still be within the sprawling limits of that city.

For years my cousin was suffering with the WIFI of his MacBook. His MacBook would drop its WIFI connection every few hours (or minutes), and he'd have to manually stop and start the WIFI on his MacBook to fix it. The bad behavior made web surfing, Netflix, and anything else on-line quite unpleasant. The Bad WIFI card, as pulled from my cousin's MacBook. I tried everything to try to fix the problem. I replaced his router, tweaked OS settings, and even re-installed the OS. The on-line forums weren't particularly helpful - a lot of people had a lot of ideas how to fix it with software, but ultimately none of their suggestions worked. So I concluded that the problem was with the MacBook's WIFI card. Some of you might think that the MacBook has its WIFI chip soldered onto the MacBook's main board, but that's not the case - the classic MacBook uses a fairly common WIFI card. Getting access to that card isn't trivial, but if you're able to drive...