I had a couple of techie things to do this weekend: set up a D-Link DWL-122 USB Wireless adapter and install Skype.

1. D-Link WiFi adapter: Mr. Bsag wants to move the old G3 iMac into his studio so that he can use it to view the reference photographs he takes of an area when he's out sketching. At the moment, he prints the shots out and uses them in conjunction with his sketchbook, but viewing them on screen is easier and less wasteful of ink. We've got an Airport network, but old-style Airport cards are expensive, and we'd need a long, messy ethernet cable to reach his studio. So I thought this would be a cheap way to get around the problem. How wrong I could I have been. I installed all the drivers, rebooted and plugged the adapter in. In the preference panel, it registered the Airport network and said it was connected, but also reported an Incorrect WEP key and so wasn't actually connected at all. After a lot of faffing about and an email to D-Link support, it seemed that the D-Link was expecting a 26 character hex key for 128 bit WEP encryption. Fine. I used the Airport Base Station utility to change the WEP password to a 26 character hex string. Still no dice. It Just Doesn't Work. Bsag 0, Technology 1
2. Skype: I'm going to a symposium in Japan in just over a week, and I thought that it might be fun to set up Skype to phone home while I'm away (assuming I manage to get a net connection at some point while I'm there). I downloaded and installed on both my laptop and the iMac (very easy) and set up accounts for me and Mr. Bsag. I was itching to test it, but Mr. Bsag was out. Feeling a little bit like Milly-No-Mates, I decided to rig up a system to test the audio quality by using a portable radio. I took the laptop downstairs and switched on the radio. Then I called Mr. Bsag's account on the iMac and ran upstairs to answer the call. There was a bit more running up and down stairs as I realised that I hadn't set the audio preferences correctly, but finally I got to have a lovely — if one-sided — conversation with Radio 4, for free! Bsag 1, Technology 0

Full time result: One-all.