Although the telephone company has many tools to troubleshoot problems with their lines and equipment, they cannot help you much with the phone wiring in your home. A weak DSL signal inside your home can be caused by long wire lengths, poor connections, multiple wires, multiple connectors, improper grounding and other variables. Your DSL speed will be better if you eliminate these issues. DSL modems are good at working around noise on the line, but do so at the expense of top download speed and latency (delay). DSL technicians tell us that many line problems originate from bad inside wiring, so splitting the DSL signal from the telephone line as early as possible would certainly eliminate this problem.

To do that, you can install an inexpensive pots-splitter where the telephone line enters your home or garage at the box called the Network Interface Device (NID). By installing a pots-splitter at the NID, the DSL signal from the telephone company to your modem is as short and uncluttered as possible. No longer does the DSL signal wind through your home over internal phone wiring — even though most telephone company installation instructions tell you to do that. Why do they recommend that? Because installing pots-splitters yourself inside the home saves the telephone company the expense of making a trip to do the installation right. Those “pigtail” pots-splitters you self-install don’t offer the optimum DSL signal path. The excess in-house line length, the phone jacks and the additional phone equipment in your home all contribute to noise and attenuation of the DSL signal — and therefore slower speeds.

Instead, to achieve the shortest, cleanest connection, you should buy a pots-splitter and put your DSL modem next to the pots-splitter at the NID. By installing the pots-splitter at your NID, you keep your home telephone wiring out of the DSL signal path, and consequently your line condition is now the responsibility of the telephone company. The telephone company can then easily use their central equipment to monitor and troubleshoot the condition of the DSL line to your home. They otherwise cannot do the best job troubleshooting the line if the DSL signal also runs through your house. With the DSL signal terminating at the NID, they have no excuse to deliver speeds less than the one offered under your service plan. If the speed is much less than promised, ask your telephone company to fix their line until it comes close to the DSL rate offered under your service plan.

Once you’ve installed your pots-splitter and modem next to the NID, you also need to install your Ethernet router there too. You might wonder how to use your computer when the Ethernet router is in the garage. There are a couple of solutions. You can use a wireless extender or use HomePlug devices. Although these add a little cost, your improved DSL speed should be worth it. If your wireless Ethernet connection is blocked by the walls, HomePlug devices offered by many vendors provide a fast, reliable Ethernet connection to any room in your home.

The most likely people to use an e-pass are travelers who carry a PDA like the Blackberry. On the road, they want to get assigned seats and flight confirmation using online check-in. Since hotel rooms don’t have printers, a traveler can elect to have the boarding pass emailed their PDA. Being able to check-in electronically and get an e-pass is also convenient from bus, car or taxi, or in an emergency. But most travelers who use e-pass should still prefer to print a paper boarding pass as backup, if they can, just in case the electronic boarding pass doesn’t scan at the airport.

Agents Get Busy With New Procedures

A traveler with an e-pass arrives with the electronic boarding pass and reservation on their mobile device and can go straight to the security checkpoints. Secondary ID like a driver’s license or passport is still required. Instead of handing a paper pass to TSA security agents at airport security, a passenger shows the e-pass image on the screen of the mobile device.

When it’s time to go through the TSA checkpoint, the screener scans the mobile device with a handheld scanner. The scanner beeps when it recognizes the e-pass. At that point, the TSA screener can see the passenger name and flight information on the scanner. They next look at the passenger’s physical ID and compare it with the electronic boarding pass information on the scanner.

When it’s time to board, passengers queue up to the boarding checkpoint and point the mobile device image into another scanner. The scanner again beeps an all-clear signal, and the agent allows the passenger to board.

Passenger Feedback Is Mixed

The success rate of using the e-pass on mobile phones is mixed, because most mobile phones have a low screen resolution versus PDAs. As a result, there can be problems on mobile phones, with the scanners not scanning correctly at security and boarding.

There can also be hitches in procedures. With paper boarding passes, the passenger shows the TSA agent the pass before entering the metal detector. But since the e-pass is on a mobile device, it goes through the x-ray machine. So what happens when a screener asks to see a boarding pass? Some agents just let the passenger through. Other screeners require that the passenger get a token from the TSA agents who are examining the carry-on luggage.

Not all airlines offer the e-pass and not all e-passes display passenger seat assignments. Rules about advance check-in vary considerably, although most airlines allow online check-in 24 hours prior to departure. Continental has set up a webpage where a passenger can login and get the boarding pass image. iPhone users report that this works well. Other airlines email the image, so a passenger needs to know where email attachments are stored the mobile device, and then open up the boarding pass image on the screen.

Technology Meets International Standards

The Transportation Security Administration has been testing the e-pass system since 2007 at number of airports throughout the country. Nationwide expansion is now underway. Once e-pass scanners are deployed nationwide, the TSA plans to track wait times using e-pass data collected at checkpoints. As a safety advantage for all passengers, the new technology reduces boarding pass fraud, provides enhanced security, and improves customer service to passengers, says the TSA and the airlines.

The International Air Transport Association anticipates that its 240 members will be saving about $500 million annually with electronic boarding. Currently the e-pass works only for U.S. domestic flights. Passengers flying from an airport that doesn’t handle the e-pass will still need a printed pass. International adoption is eventually expected. The TSA paperless boarding passes are consistent with the global standard in the International Air Transport Association for bar coding of passenger boarding passes.

Google may be the best search in terms of relevancy and speed, but some people are concerned about personal privacy. In this case you can follow the money to Mozilla. With the help of Mozilla’s default Firefox settings, Google builds a profile database about you. Since online privacy is an evolving area of the law, in the United States there are very few Internet specific boundaries about how your activity online can be discovered, saved, analyzed and exploited by Internet-based services. So for now, you have to watch out for yourself. 

CustomizeGoogle does a number of useful things to help. It makes your web-surfing and search activity useless to Google by anonymizing your cookies. People who are concerned about Google’s tenticles reaching into their privacy should be thrilled about this feature. 

Google remembers your search settings by placing a cookie on your computer. Some people don’t like Google profiling. They can forbid cookies or delete their cookies at the end of each session, but pay a penalty by losing all their preferences. With CustomizeGoogle, your personal Google preferences are enabled automatically each time you start Firefox, so there is no need to disable cookies or delete cookies at the end of each session.

CustomizeGoogle also makes your connections to other Google services like gMail more secure, by enabling HTTPS protocol. HTTPS prevents snooping by others when you use unsecured wireless connections to check and read your gMail. You might be asked by Google to change to more secure password if you enable HTTPS (secure hyper-text transfer protocol) as the default for services including Google Reader. 

CustomizeGoogle is easy to install, simple to configure and transparent to use. If you’re tired of fighting to keep your privacy from Google by automatically deleting cookies after each browser session, try CustomizeGoogle.