As i posted yesterday, i had to buy a new wireless router because my two years old Belkin F5D9230-4 started to give me problems 15-20 days ago. My HTTP traffic (mostly when browsing) was very intermittent and sometimes i had to hit F5 or Refresh many times in order to display a web page.

I began researching the new models from the most popular brands and i was pondering to buy a new pre-N router or an old one which costed much less. I have planned to build a HTPC (Home Theater PC) in the near future so i will eventually need a draft-N or pre-N router in order to stream content from my main PC to the HTPC i will have in the leaving room.

But as the N standard isn’t approved yet, i resolved to buy a cheaper one and when i need a new one, then i will buy it. This way i save save money now and i hope than when i need N speeds the standard will be certified already (or at least the price of routers will drop considerably).

It comes to Linksys (Cisco) faced some problems back in 2003 when they used open-source code in their routers and they didn’t make the code public, which was against the GNU General Public License.

I ended buying a Linksys WRT54GL because it allows me to install a variety of open-source firmware if i want to.

I stumbled upon a site where the author develops a firmware called Tomato for mainly a few Linksys and Buffalo routers. In that website were links to other open-source firmware projects. I learn about them all and choose to install Tomato in my new router.

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Comodo Firewall Pro is a freeware full-fledge firewall for Windows. It has the options you expect from a decent firewall as well as some advanced rules or configurations only found in paid software.

The tests i have read ensure you get a great firewall that can protect you from the latest trend in atacks as well as any other type of spyware.

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My Belkin wireless router started to give me problems about 15-20 days ago.

After some research i ended buying an old Linksys model, but with many advantages. I will make a post later today to talk about it and the open-source 3rd party firmaware that are out there for a variety of models and makers of wireless routers.

Sev7en, a guy from Micropctalk.com managed to install Apple OS X into a Sony VAIO UX and posted the instructions about how he did it.

This is something more people are trying to achieve, get Mac OS X to run on generic Intel/AMD hardware.

There is another guy from jkOnTheRun.com that installed it on a Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium and posted about this experience.

Despite all the claims and statements made by Apple, that their Mac OS X will only run on Apple hardware, people are trying to circumvent TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in order to isntall it on generic hardware.

If you are interested in this topic, please visit the OSx86 Project wiki to learn more about it.

Xvid.org has released an updated 1.1.3 version, dated 12.04.2008. This update contains a fix for a security vulnerability, so it is a must to update to this version.

For those of you who don’t know nothing about Xvid, it is a codec (Encoder/Decoder) for playing or converting avi files.

This is the most popular video codec today. If you download movies or videos in avi format, you need this codec in order to take advantage of its features.

To read more about video codecs, here is an article in wikipedia that covers the topic.

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The monthly release of ATI’s Catalyst drivers was released today. Read the release notes of version 8.4 to learn what’s changed/improved and to see the known issues in this release.

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A new version of JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is available. The Java RE is used by many programs that are written in java and you need it in order to run programs, among others, like LimeWire, RSS Owl, etc.

Also, JRE is used by web browsers to run java applets (programs) in web pages. Sun, the developer of JRE makes important security updates constantly. It is advised to run the latest vesion of JRE.

The Release Notes mentions all the changes in the new version.

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Today Mozilla released a new version of Firefox. The latest changes are not available yet.

There a few security issues that has been fixed. If you want a link to the release notes, check the link later when Mozilla updates it to see the complete changelog.

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