It's always a nice thing to find an open WiFi hotspot when you're out and about and it would be swell to play that forward and setup an open, informal WiFi hotspot of your own. Your visitors will appreciate it, certainly, but on the other hand you don't want to open your own LAN for just anyone to access.

It's pretty easy to set up an informal, but separate, "walk-in-and-use-it" WiFi hotspot that vistors can use to connect to the internet but that won't overtly expose your LAN connected computers, servers and printers to your guests.

All that you need to do this is a WiFi router set up to run a WiFi LAN that is separate from your home or business LAN.

Note please that I'm not using the word "secure" for this. If you truly require a definite and secure separation between your main LAN and the one that your guests will use, you'll need a more rigorous, complex and costly solution. But if "separate" is OK for your need, then this is the way to go.

Parts needed: an extra WiFi router. That's it. 

Fancy or cheap -- doesn't matter. In fact, it may be easiest and cheapest to buy a surplus "B" class router on eBay or Craigslist. "B" class is fast enough for casual internet access to check email or make a Google search.  Setting your guest LAN to run as class "B" has a couple other benefits too, but we'll touch on those later.  

No; really. Playing this video can calm the savage kitty. Or, at least, calm the one that wants to walk on your keyboard while you're trying to compose a witty blog post.

Not very techie, but definitely a cool thing that works.

You may already have a portable, personal WiFi hotspot in your pocket.

A nifty piece of software called "PDAnet" ($29 at JuneFabrics.com) can turn just about any WiFI equipped smartphone into a WiFi-tethered datanet share. 

OK; it's not truly a mutli-connection "hotspot" nor is it as flexible as, say, the MiFi or some of the other devices mention in the earlier article but, if you're the only user for your 3G connection, then this is a swell way to get rid of the USB tether.

PDAnet seems to have the bases covered to work with just about any WiFi-equipped wireless datanet-connected device: smartphone, PDA phone, iPhone, gPhone. If you have one of those in your pocket then with the easy addition of "PDAnet" software you have your own private, portable, cable-free Wifi hotspot.

Nice.

The quick answer if you've been forced to "kill" the Windows core "explorer" process and can no longer see the "Start" menu or the task bar: Open the task manager (with ctrl-alt-delete) and use the "run" command to start "explorer".

If you had to do that, its probably because you had to kill a runaway app.  That used to be a pretty rare thing until web 2.0. Now its a couple of times a week -- if not a couple of times a day -- that some crazed web monkey takes over your computer and won't give it back until you kill the process -- and probably a bunch of others that it has kicked off.

Sometimes you have to crush the Windows core "Explorer" itself. Boo. It doesn't kill Windows, but it pretty much closes off your access to doing anyting useful with it until you restart Explorer.

It's sort of like restarting Windows without really stopping it in the first place.

We got'cher good news and yer "what the heck?" news.

The good news: Alltel, the wireless telecom giant, has introduced 1-year contracts in the US.

That's right; 12 months. You get a new phone and everything!

This is counter to the wireless telecom industry's insistence to Congress that 2-year contracts are required to recoup the cost of the phones they give out as enticements. Alltel says that's not the case and, further, says that the new contracts won't change the price of their phones.

The not-so-good part of the news is that you probably can't get the deal. 

Alltel sold most of its US assets to Verizon a few months ago so, except in 22 states where Alltel still sells contracts, you can't get the deal.

Can I get a "WTF"?

I used to put up with those scripts that automatically highlight words on a webpage and then attach pop-up ads to them. You could tell which ones they are (not counting the pause before the web page paints) because they usually have a distinctive marking -- most often it's a green double-underline.

And, whenever your mouse cursor gets within an eyelash of the green line, an ad pops open on your screen. No more.

It used to be that the ads were just text and they were few and far between. But they're getting more aggressive, it seems, and now I've started seeing self-starting video in them. A line has been crossed.

The number of links per infected page has been growing and sometimes you can just feel the web browser grinding to a halt while the Intellitxt script scans and processes the page.

But the videos are virtual straw that tipped the scale, broke the camel's back, stepped over the line. 

When Intellitxt decided that it could make me wait for   Enough! Intellitxt is now and forever banned from my browsers.

It was easy to do, so I'll pass it on to you here.

I'm showing only the Windows XP dialogs here, but the concept and the technique is quite similar in both Mac OS-X and even in Vista -- just find your internet security &/or firewall preferences for the OS and follow the directions to block a wildcard URL.

In your OS's internet security settings find the tab, button or section where you can "block" or "restrict" sites. In the Windows XP dialog, click the "Restricted Sites" icon, then click the "Sites" button to add a restricted site.

In the next dialog box you'll have a list of sites that you've already blocked or restricted (if any) and a field for adding more.

In the field for adding a restricted site, type *.intellitxt.com. Be sure to include the asterix-dot at the beginning. That tells the site/URL filter to block anything in the intellitxt.com domain. They put lots of variations on the front, so this is important. (If you're using OSX or Vista, it's probably the same but check the "help" to be sure.)

In this box, in Windows XP, you need to click the "Add" button after you type in the wildcard+URL. If you're using a different system, then click "Ok" or "close" or "Save options" or whatever you need to click to save the new restricted URL.

Then "close" or "OK" your way out of there and "Refresh" or "Reload" the web page that you were on. It should come up with no (zero) Intellitxt links on it. 

Intellitxt should provide a way to opt out of ever allowing their script to run. But that would be in a perfect world.

No big fanfare or anything, but the low-end (if you will) Mac laptop got a tiny little makeover during the night on Tuesday.

The $999 MacBook White base system got a tinsy bit faster with a 2.13 Ghz CPU replacing the 2.0 Ghz of the previous round. (FYI: "tinsy bit" is Mac tech jargon. Sorry.)  The hard disk grew from 120 to 160GB.

Big whoop, you say?  Me too. No wonder they did it quietly. 

But it's all still just $999. No; really. And it comes in that pretty pearly white case with that cute little -- I mean, "tinsy" -- 13" screen. 

Tell you what, Apple; I'll give you $450 for the Monday version.  Deal???