Category Archives: www

One more down, two thousand seven hundred and fifty-five to go – from my “gadgets wishlist”.

My RCO (residence-cum-office) is now a wire free Internet zone. I am typing this sitting in the house across the street, still accessing my home Internet connection wire free. No no, I’m not trying to impress you. Infact this is so lame and common now that if you’re impressed hearing this, you really need to spend more time getting to know what technology can do these days.

Anyways, I was building up towards the news that I have the Netgear WGR614 up and running. Setting it up wasn’t much of a task once I remembered that I would have to attach the router to my computer the first time via the included Ethernet cable. Though, the included CD did not have a Mac OS configuration utility, the web interface worked just fine for me when I connected my PowerBook to the router. Infact I liked the various advanced options that the interface provided, allowing me to specify exactly the kind of connection and security settings I wanted. I’m not sure how the not-so-technically-inclined Mac OS (or even Windows) users would do if the “auto-detect wizard” failed to detect the network settings properly, which is exactly how it behaved in my case.

Tips:
Before installation:
Enable DHCP on the machine you connect to the router via the Ethernet cable, allowing it to be assigned a IP (192.168.1.2 in most cases). You can then use the software (windows only) or the web interface (http://192.168.1.1 username: admin password: password) to configure the router.

After installation:
Disable SSID broadcast if you don’t want your neighbours (or anyone else around) to detect the presence of your WiFi network. Enable WEP as well (password authentication for your network, simply put) – both of these things might decrease the usability of your network a little bit, but go some way in securing it from unauthorized (or unwanted) access.

PS – Okay, only fair you know, I am not really across the street – I’m only 30 feet away (from the router) infact. But, hey, I could have been (across the street i.e.) !!!

If the admin interface of your b2evolution blog doesn’t allow you to set the time difference field to the desired value or if you wish to change it from the “back end” just for fun, this is how to go about it.

This “hack” is especially useful if the time difference between the time on the server which hosts your site and your desired blog time contains a “non-integer” component. For example, this website is hosted on the east coast (USA) and my default blog time is IST, which is +10.5 EST or +9.5 EST (depending upon DST). Now for some strange reason b2evolution does not allow me to a specify a decimal component in the time difference field from the front end admin interface – atleast not in v0.9.0.10, which is what I use.

Okay, now enough background, let’s get down to the fix. You’ll need phpMyAdmin or any other way of accessing the MySQL database schema being utilized by your blog. Open the table evo_settings and look for the row with set_name as time_difference. Change the value (set_value) to the desired value e.g. 10.5 (+ sign NOT needed) or 3.25 (quarters or any other decimals should work as well, though I haven’t tried them) or -7.5 etc.

Save the changes and you’re good to go with the new blog time!

Caution: Do not play around with the database too much if you’re not sure what you’re doing. You could lose valuable data!