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Finally I got 300Mbps Wifi speed at home between my laptop and the router. This means a theoretical 30MB/s for file transfer with other computer or with the NAS. In reality I get 16MB/s instead of the 5 or 6MB/s I was getting before. It was not easy to understand all the components that made so difficult to get it working. Here are my collection of tips for configuring the router:

1. Use WPA2-AES encryption

This type of encryption seems to be needed to have speeds above 54Mbps. But I could not find information if you can also get higher speeds by removing any encryption. In some forums say the 802.11n specification obliges the use of WPA2-AES encryption, but here it seems to say that you can get a 5 to 10% gain by removing encryption.

2. Use 40MHz bandwidth

It means it bonds two channels of the spectrum to transmit data. I did not knew about this until I saw the option recently on the router of my new internet provider.

3. Set the router to use a channel with free adjacent channel

This was the most difficult to find out about and the reason why I was on 144Mbps for long time. As I live in city center there are more than 10 networks on the range. Also I had always read that it is good idea to choose either channel 1, 6 or 11, not to have overriding channels. It comes out that every network in range uses one of those three channels. When I moved my network from using channel 11 to use now channel 8 (plus channel 7 or 9 as adjacent channel, the configuration does not allow to choose), my connection changed from 144Mbps to 300Mbps!

I belong to the group of people who does not have a Facebook account. However, unfortunately, several companies now do only publish information on their Facebook wall.

I’m already happy that most of them have their wall public, so I can check it without account. But in some cases I would like to follow the company wall with Google Reader.

So, to find the good RSS feed to subscribe, you need first to find the Facebook id of the account you want to follow. This information you can find from the like button of that company. The like button sends you to an address like:
https://www.facebook.com/ajax/timeline/sign_up_dialog/?page_id=376807926448&next=XXXXX

So the RSS feed to subscribe is:
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=376807926448

Hope that helps someone that, like me, doesn’t have a Facebook account.

After working more than 5 years with either an US or English keyboard, I find very difficult to get used to a Swiss keyboard. This is not the case for writing e-mails, but mostly for working. Unfortunately by being a consultant now I’ve often to work on clients terminals and their installed keyboard, not giving even the opportunity to hang around with a US keyboard for my pleasure.

Why the US or English keyboard are better for computer scientists?

– you have easy access to the brackets (), [], {}, which are always in two different keys and not hidden away with AltGr;
– you have easy access to <> in two different keys, not needing to make sure the shift is pressed or not.
– Also comma ´ and ‘ are different keys;
– The slashes / are both in logical places
– The @ is accessible with a simple Shift key, like is the pipe |

And you can also easily use the US-International keyboard to write in many languages, including the portuguese where you have ã,à,é,ç…

I hope that soon will be easier to change keyboards on the OSes and also that a better universal standard (at least for roman alphabet based) appears.