Dur­ing my recent vaca­tion I was asked to con­fig­ure the wire­less LAN of a friend. I com­plied and did as I was asked. At the same time I thought I’d share a few of the most basic things with you. Since the most com­monly used routers on the mar­ket today are 802.11g/802.11 draft-n routers, I will focus on them. Most of the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion should be applic­a­ble to older mod­els (802.11b or 802.11a routers) as well, pro­vided the man­u­fac­turer has made the appro­pri­ate firmware avail­able. That said, let’s get started.

First thing you should do is to look for a firmware update, espe­cially if you own an older model. After hav­ing installed the lat­est firmware, you should change your default router pass­word which is almost always some­thing along the lines of “admin”, “pass­word”, “changeme”, “pub­lic”, “pri­vate”, or “1234″. A more com­pre­hen­sive list of default router pass­words can be found at Default Router Pass­words. Addi­tion­ally, most routers come pre-configured with an IP address of 192.168.x.y, where x stands for “0″, “1″, “2″, “8″, “11″, or “15″, and y mostly stands for “1″ or “2″. Note that some routers have an IP address of 10.0.0.z where z often enough stands for “1″ or “2″. A strong pass­word doesn’t really pro­tect your net­work but it should ensure that nobody will mess with your settings.

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Last Decem­ber I had a few words to say about the next install­ment of the very suc­cess­ful Dia­blo fran­chise. Here’s a short recap: Bliz­zard was – and obvi­ously still is – look­ing for new per­son­nel to work on a “Top Secret” title. A few of these job open­ings ref­er­ence to Dia­blo I and Dia­blo II. Every job open­ing refer­ring to a next-gen MMO comes with­out such a ref­er­ence, though. And then there’s the mys­te­ri­ous insider called Surfer Girl who pro­vided the pub­lic with the infor­ma­tion, that the next Dia­blo “will fea­ture a single-player com­po­nent (akin to pre­vi­ous titles) and an MMO com­po­nent (less akin to pre­vi­ous titles)”.

Over the last days there has been a devel­op­ment I don’t want to ignore. Over at Diablo3.com a count­down teaser has been added. It doesn’t say all that much but it deliv­ers an impor­tant mes­sage: “The num­ber of days until half the web links to Diablo3.com. But why???” The count­down points to May 1^st. There has been quite a buzz on what this announce­ment will be about and it has been estab­lished that it’s not the offi­cial Dia­blo 3 announce­ment. Well, Dia­blo II and Dia­blo II: Lord of Destruc­tion have both been release on June 29, 2000 and 2001 respec­tively. It may well be that Bliz­zard has cho­sen to honor the sym­me­try and announce the third install­ment on this par­tic­u­lar date. But then, there may be no mean­ing attached to it.

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Yes­ter­day, the new Han­cock extended trailer finally hit the web. I still don’t know what to think about the movie, espe­cially since I don’t exactly know if it is a super­hero par­ody, a com­edy or a lit­tle some­thing of both. Any­way, it sure looks like fun and that’s what counts, right? You can watch the extended trailer on FirstShowing.net or on YouTube. Per­son­ally, I’d wait for a HD ver­sion but that one will take its time. To my mind, the first loca­tion offers a slightly bet­ter qual­ity. If you’re too lazy to go there, here’s the YouTube version:

Han­cock, star­ring Will Smith, Jason Bate­man and Char­l­ize Theron, will hit the the­aters on the 2^nd of July this year.

That’s right. I’m on vaca­tion for a few days and I’m going to visit my friend Dave in Linz and after­wards I’ll stay with my par­ents for a while. That means that there are no updates to be found here. At least for a week, that is. Well, if I do have some spare time and access to an inter­net socket and if I hap­pen to come across some  inter­est­ing tid­bits – well, I guess I will have to write something.

That’s it. Have a nice time. I will make sure that I do

A new inter­na­tional Speed Racer trailer has been released in Quick­Time – speak: HD – over at the offi­cial site. Con­trary to the trail­ers released before this one offers a bet­ter point of view so that you can see that there is some­thing like a story involved. Of course, there’s new footage in it. You should def­i­nitely check this one out even though I think this a love or hate movie. Heck, I even wouldn’t need a story to watch the awe­some CGI.

That’s right. I absolutely love the super-stylized ver­sion of the old game Dethkarz – well, it’s not based on this game but it sure looks a lot like it – and for that rea­son alone I’m gonna watch this movie. The new footage cuts right to the chase and depicts some glo­ri­ous sequences. I hope I’m in for a wild ride when the movie comes to a the­ater near me on May 9^th.

It’s been a while since I last had some­thing to say about this par­tic­u­lar movie. Ah, well, I didn’t say all that much, did I? Mostly, the last bit of infor­ma­tion has been about the movie posters. Any­way, a review of the film as sur­faced over at AICN. Some guy man­aged to attend a pro­mo­tional screen­ing in Los Ange­les and he has to say quite a few things about the movie. Accord­ing to him the mar­tial arts sequences are breath­tak­ing and there are a lot of dif­fer­ent fight­ing styles involved.

Appar­ently, there are some hilar­i­ous one-liners that are quite mem­o­rable. The most impor­tant infor­ma­tion, how­ever, regards the evenly dis­trib­uted screen time: Obvi­ously, nobody is favored and nobody seems sub­servient. The author’s rec­om­men­da­tion is to get a ticket and I that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. I’m really look­ing for­ward to watch­ing Jackie Chan and Jet Li in their first col­lab­o­ra­tive project.