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Whether you’re streaming music from Spotify, listening to the radio, or watching movies on Netflix, you rely on having a speedy and stable connection to the internet. Most of the time we don’t even think about it – online content has become as easily accessible as that stored locally. Until, that is, things go wrong. Whether your ISP suffers an outage or, as BT customers experienced at the end of last year, DNS problems, or your own Wi-Fi network stumbles and fails, it’s a frustrating and, if you rely on it for work, potentially costly experience. The good news is that there’s a great deal you can do to improve the performance of your Wi-Fi network, and even mitigate the risk associated with a failure beyond your control, thanks to…

The first thing to check if you notice a sudden slowdown in Wi-Fi speed is that you’re connected to the right network. There are so many Wi-Fi networks around, and Windows is not particularly good at choosing the ‘right’ network when presented with several options. Go to the Wi-Fi symbol in the System Tray in Windows 10, click on it and click on your network, if it doesn’t have ‘connected’ next to it. One common example is where you use a BT Home Hub as a broadband router. The Home Hub, as well as acting as your router, also advertises itself as a hotspot. Click on the Wi-Fi symbol in Windows 10 and you’ll see the SSID of your Home Hub, as well as ‘BTWifi-X’ and ‘BTWifi-with-FON’. The latter two…

Introducing HomeGroups HomeGroups were first introduced in Windows 7, and have proved very popular with people looking for an easy way to share files between their different computers. To set up a HomeGroup, type ‘homegroup’ into the Search box on the Taskbar or select ‘Start > Control Panel > HomeGroup’. Create a HomeGroup The HomeGroup Control Panel will check your network to see if a homegroup exists elsewhere – if it does, you’ll be invited to join it (see the following step). If not, click ‘Create a homegroup’ to open a wizard. Click ‘Next’, then choose what libraries and devices (printers and so on) you’d like to share with other Homegroup members. Click Next, then make a note of the password others will need to use when connecting to your…

There are several ways in which you can extend a wireless network. The simplest – and potentially most effective – is to move your router. If it’s positioned in the corner of a room at one end of the house, near the floor, move it higher and towards the middle of the house. If this isn’t possible because your router is also your DSL or cable modem and needs to be close to a telephone or cable point, consider buying a separate router, and, ideally, connecting it to the modem/router by Ethernet. Equally, if your modem/router is more than a couple of years old, the chances are that it uses an older Wi-Fi standard than many of your devices. If you have an 802.11b or g router and have Macs…

Every router has a port labelled ‘WAN’, which stands for Wide Area Network. It’s the port used to plug into your phone line or cable socket to connect it to the internet. For all our attempts to maximise the performance of your network, if all you do with it is connect to the internet (rather than, say, stream video around the house or mirror an iPad over AirPlay), it’s that connection that will be the bottleneck. While 802.11n has a theoretical maximum throughput of 450Mbps (that’s megabits; equivalent to 37.5 megabytes/sec) your internet connection is likely to have a maximum data rate of somewhere between 2Mbps and 120Mbps. Most of us have connections at the bottom end of that range, and like Wi-Fi, the real-world figure is much lower than…

GENEVA S WIRELESS DAB+ £329 Geneva Lab, genevalab.com If you want to enjoy the convenience of Bluetooth without sacrificing too much audio fidelity, the Geneva S Wireless DAB+ is your answer. It combines a DAB+ receiver with a topnotch Bluetooth speaker. STELLÉ AUDIO PILLAR £249 Stelle Audio Couture, stelleaudio.com Need a Bluetooth speaker that won’t look out of place in your chic kitchen? The Pillar offers sleek good looks as well as excellent audio quality over Bluetooth. One for the fashionistas SONOS PLAYBAR £599 Sonos sonos.com As well as allowing you to play music wirelessly from your Mac or iOS device, or directly from the internet, the Playbar connects to your TV using an optical cable and takes care of its sound, too. There are a different ways for you…

For Windows 10 users, OneDrive is transparent as long as you’re signed in with a Microsoft Account. Running automatically in the background, backing up your documents and settings, you may never even know it’s there. Bring up the Start menu, and start typing OneD... by the time you’ve got that far through its name, Windows will have found its sole option -opening the OneDrive folder. OneDrive options are spread around Windows 10 rather than existing as a dedicated app, but pay a visit to the System Tray, and you’ll find a OneDrive icon there which allows access to settings and help if you right-click it. Click on ‘OneDrive Storage Space’, and you’ll open a web page dedicated to your OneDrive. First up is your free space. You get 5GB by…

OneDrive for Business can be seen as a company’s fileserver, but online and accessible from anywhere. This enterprise version of OneDrive is fundamentally different to the consumer edition we’ve discussed in the rest of this feature, though. Although they’re both available under the same OneDrive banner, OneDrive for Business runs on Microsoft’s older Sharepoint application framework, first launched in 2001. This means that if you use OneDrive for Business, you won’t be able to use the same username and password to log into a standard OneDrive account. The two services have different development histories and different ways of working. In general use, OneDrive for Business looks and acts just like the consumer version, with integration into Office Online and the desktop Office apps available as part of Office 365. Teams…

The default location of your OneDrive folder is in C:/user/name/, but Windows 10 removes the ability to move it to a more convenient location – perhaps on a larger hard drive if you’re running short of space. In Windows 8.1 you could move the folder by right-clicking the OneDrive folder and selecting ‘Properties’. From there click ‘Location > Move’. Point the following window to the new location you want, and click ‘OK’. The folder is then moved, without having to redownload the files. A workaround from the days of Windows 7 and 8 works in 10 though: right click the OneDrive icon in the notification area, select ‘Settings’ and click on ‘Unlink OneDrive’. You’ll go through the same setup procedure you did when you first started using OneDrive, and will…

Apple's iCloud is one of the simplest, best value and most flexible online services going. It’s more than just a space to store your files, but a series of apps, a robust communication system and an ever-expanding set of features that enhance our daily lives as Mac and iOS users, wherever we are in the world. Getting here has seemed a long, hard slog, though – with several false starts. Apple’s innovative eWorld service lasted less than two years, MobileMe was poorly received, and iCloud, MobileMe’s eventual replacement, didn’t seem to offer that much at launch. But now it’s the thing that binds the iPhone, iPad and Mac together, and with the advent of Apple Watch it underpins a vast range of under-the-hood services that we barely even think about.…

SKILL LEVEL Straightforward IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU’ll NEED Windows XP or later Providing troubleshooting support over the phone or by email can often be difficult and time-consuming. Experts will often diagnose and fix the problem in minutes if sat in front of the troublesome PC. And now, thanks to TeamViewer, you can invite experts to do just that… except the difference is they don’t have to be sitting in front of your computer! TeamViewer allows one person to view another’s desktop from the comfort of their own computer – and if the recipient is willing, they can even hand over control of their PC to the expert to help them investigate and fix the problem. Don’t worry – you can revoke access at any time. But that’s not…

We’d like to think that common sense kicks in when it comes to making personal information public online, such as never giving out any of your account passwords – after all, you wouldn’t divulge the code for your house alarm or allow a stranger to cut a copy of your door key now, would you? However, there is plenty of other information about you that, although it might appear totally benign to the innocent eye, should be treated with just as equal caution. Many sites use specific personal information combined with a password to verify your ID. That means personal data such as your mother’s maiden name or your favourite colour could be far more valuable than you think. As we’ll see later, pets’ names and favourite holiday destinations are…

Use an encrypted connection where possible – certainly when partaking in online shopping The NSA and Britain’s GCHQ “have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – ‘the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet’,” according to documents leaked to The Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Check for the padlock What this means, in effect, is that either of these agencies – and likely their counterparts in other countries – can now intercept your credit card details and other personal data, even over an encrypted connection. Before you panic, though, this is only possible because they have billion dollar budgets and banks of supercomputers, which…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU’ll NEED Windows 7 or later Using your laptop to share its wireless network connection – turning it into a wireless hotspot – is easy. It means you can connect other devices to the network via your laptop – handy if you’ve an ageing router. Most laptops have decent Wi-Fi adaptors, and by hooking your laptop to a router via an Ethernet cable, you can create a powerful Wi-Fi network that can reach all corners of your home. Likewise, if you’re in a hotel that offers a wired internet connection, you could create a hotspot and then connect your smartphone, meaning you can browse the web without incurring roaming charges. Best of all, it’s not only easy, it’s also…

Even if you take precautions to minimise your footprint on the internet and only access encrypted websites, you are still exposed. You are still broadcasting your IP address to anyone who’s watching including the websites you visit. Additionally, since not all websites use SSL you’ll end up transmitting login credentials and other details over unencrypted channels. These can be intercepted easily by packet analysis tools such as Wireshark, (see p130) especially over non-secure networks like public Wi-Fi hotspot. There are a number of solutions to help cover your tracks and disguise your digital footprint, bypass censorship and keep you invisible when online. This is especially advantageous as some websites and services block access to visitors from specific countries. The most common is the Virtual Private Network or VPN. It’s primary…

SKILL LEVEL Could be tricky IT WILL TAKE 20 minutes YOU’ll NEED Raspberry Pi, powered USB disk and USB hub, TV tuner Many of those set-top boxes hidden under televisions across the world are running Linux. And despite their lack of CPU power, they’re all more than capable of recording and playing several channels at the same time, as well as streaming the data across your local network. The Raspberry Pi is perfectly suited to this, too, and with the appropriate hardware the diminutive computer can be turned into a powerful low-cost digital video recorder, complete with media streaming, scheduling and time shift. The ‘appropriate hardware’ bit is the key phrase in the previous paragraph, because a painless installation is mostly dependent on your television-grabbing hardware ‘just working’. Fortunately, Linux…

SKILL LEVEL Could be tricky IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’ll NEED Raspberry Pi 2, microSD card, powered USB drive Traditionally, servers are great big devices that consume vast amounts of power and generate a considerable amount of heat. That’s why data centres are huge, airconditioned rooms full of racks that can house multiple units. But for home or small business use, they don’t have to be that way, and with the Raspberry Pi, which needs no cooling fans, we have a small Linux computer that consumes very little power and generates only a small amount of heat. In this tutorial, we’ll be using a Raspberry Pi 2 to build a small, powerful and energy-efficient server that will be a handy remote backup location and will serve files over SSH,…

Mhen you access a website, your computer, phone or tablet sends the request in the form of a web address to a domain name server (DNS), which then translates the ‘http://xxxxxxx’ into an IP address and forwards it to the relevant server. The server then displays the page you’ve requested in your browser. Domain name servers are specified by your ISP during the set-up process, but you can bypass them and use any DNS you want, such as Google’s name servers or those operated by OpenDNS. In order for any of that to happen, however, data has to be transmitted between your device, your ISP, and the wider internet. The data sent between your router/modem and your ISP travels on either copper wire or optical cable or, more likely, both…

Not so long ago, configuring a couple of computers so they could talk to each other meant buying expensive hardware, hooking it up to a serial port, or, if you were lucky, Ethernet. But you couldn’t just cable them together, oh no. You needed a router, or was it a hub, or a switch? See what we mean? Those days are long gone, and for that we’re all very grateful. That doesn’t mean networking is completely free from problems, of course. But at least most of us can set one up and connect to it, and be reasonably confident that it’ll still be there in the morning. While for most of us networking means radio signals rather than cables, there are some occasions when that old Ethernet cable comes in…

You could be forgiven for thinking that wireless networking is a breeze, if all you want from it is to connect your PC, tablet, and smartphone to the internet to surf, email and download apps. But if you live in a house with thick walls, need access from different rooms or an outbuilding and regularly transfer large files, you’ll know that optimising your network is essential. So should you keep the router your broadband provider gave you or invest in a new one? How do you extend the network’s range? Should you set up and bridge up a second network? What about security? One addition to consider if you’re having trouble accessing your router wirelessly from a room or section of the house is to use Powerline to bridge the…

We’ve already seen that there are a ton of Bluetooth speakers available for your computer, smartphone or tablet, but those only scratch the surface of available peripherals. Aside from the audio space – that includes headsets and headphones as well as speakers – there are keyboards, mice, trackpads, printers, drones and helicopters, a variety of health and fitness gadgets, and even lightbulbs – all of which connect wirelessly either directly to your device or to your wireless network. In addition, Nest’s smoke alarm is already available in the UK, and its thermostat is due here soon, too. It’s not all good news, however. The much heralded ‘Internet of Things’, a term used to describe the fact that all sorts of mundane appliances will soon be connected to the internet, can…

Streaming games from your PC to other devices. It’s a crazy idea, right? It is if you really think about the nuts and bolts. Start with a control input from your client streaming device, whatever that may be. A precision flick of the mouse in reaction to gunfire behind you. That kind of thing. The signal has to be processed by the client box and then sent over your network to the host PC. That PC then processes the input and updates the game state by rendering new 3D frames, calculating some AI, number crunching the audio and everything else that goes into a modern game engine. The result of all that is thrown together, encoded into a video stream and bounced back over your network. The client box then…

Since 2010, Microsoft has offered a cut-down version of its Office suite that runs in your web browser and saves its files to OneDrive. Office Online is completely free to use, and for general word processing and light spreadsheet use, it’s the only office suite you’ll need (as long as you’re connected to the internet). To use Office Online, head to www.office.live.com and click the tile for the application you want to use. You might have to sign in with your Microsoft account if you haven’t already done so. You’ll be offered the choice between templates or a blank document, just as you would in the desktop version of Office, and the apps behave very like their full-fat cousins – the ones Microsoft would like you to pay for. Office…

OneDrive’s integration with other apps is one of its most powerful features. These apps come in two guises: those that use OneDrive as a storage area, allowing your data to appear on every device running the same program, and those that add OneDrive functionality to devices that otherwise wouldn’t have it. To get OneDrive on your mobile device, head to the appropriate app store. For Apple devices that’s the iTunes App Store, where you’ll find a OneDrive app that’s designed for use on both iPhones and iPads. For Android phones and tablets there’s an app on Google Play, and Blackberry users will find one on Blackberry World. Windows Phone users can get it from Apps+Games if it’s not installed already, and Xbox One gamers can install OneDrive on their consoles.…

One of the greatest services to have emerged from the Google workshop is Google Drive, a cloud-based storage facility that enables you to upload your files to the internet so they’re available anywhere you have access to a PC and an internet connection. It gives you 15GB of storage space for free, which should take care of the majority of your day-to-day file storage, although it’s not a longterm storage solution, unless you upgrade to the 100GB or 1000GB version, which cost around £1.50 and £6.75 a month respectively. There’s even an option to get 30 terabytes of storage for those who are thinking about ditching conventional local storage – it’s very pricey, though, so consider whether you really need it. The beauty of Google Drive is that Google Docs…

Family Sharing allows you to share your apps, iBooks and iTunes downloads with five other people You could describe iCloud as the hub of your online life, and it’s fair to say that your Mac and iOS devices would not be nearly as flexible or useful without it. Find my… Tracking services like Find My Friends and Find My iPhone (the latter of which can also locate a Mac, iPad or iPod touch) would be a security risk if the data wasn’t transferred securely. That’s why it’s processed by Apple’s servers and only available to those whom you’ve granted access. Invitations and follow requests are sent from one device to another via iCloud, and must be authorised using an Apple ID to secure the system from end to end. To…

We’ve all learned to think before we click. Will we really end up where the URL implies? Does that address look a bit suspicious? Is this form safe to complete? They’re all questions we’ve become accustomed to asking whenever we’re browsing the web, checking our mail or scrolling through a column of tweets. Yet the threats we face in our daily online lives are many and varied, and it’s all too easy for one or two to slip under the radar. As the world’s most widely used desktop operating system, every new version of Windows has seen massive improvements where security is concerned, much of it built in at the core. At the same time, add-ons such as Microsoft Security Essentials, phishing detection for Internet Explorer and an improved permissions…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 15 minutes YOU’ll NEED An iPad running iOS 7 or later. Computer running Windows XP or later or OS X 10.7 or later Most of us use cloud computing services such as Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive to sync files, but what if you’ve forgotten to upload your work to the cloud and the only way to get that precious file from your PC is to access it remotely? Don’t worry – with the brilliant TeamViewer, you can access your PC from anywhere with an internet connection. But what if you can’t get to a computer? No matter, as long as you’ve got the software installed on your home system, all you need is the TeamViewer app for smartphones and tablets! In…

When you are engaged in a conversation with another person, you are exposing a lot more information about yourself, about the person you are talking to and the nature of your conversation. The only way to fox the snoopers is to encrypt all your communications. This way even if they are able to intercept it, they won’t be able to make out its content. PGP (or Pretty Good Privacy) is the most popular mechanism for encrypting data and communication. One of the methods that PGP uses for encryption is called Public Key Cryptography. Instead of relying on a single password, this method employs a combination of a public key and private key to encrypt and decrypt the data. In essence, the sender uses the recipient’s public key to encrypt the…

Best codec for high definition H.264 & MKV Before we start, we need to first make a distinction between the codec used to store the video data and the container used to encapsulate everything else. The most popular container for HD content, for example, is called Matroska, as denoted by its MKV file extension. Matroska isn’t a codec itself, because it doesn’t define how to encode and decode the video data – it simply stores the bytes from a codec so that MKVcompatible applications know where to find everything for playback, like video, audio and subtitles. That’s why you always have a choice of which video codec to use with a container. With MKV files, for example, the choice is usually between H.264, MPEG-4 and VP3, the latter of which…

As storage gets ever cheaper and appetites for data become ever more voracious, more and more people are looking to NAS (network-attached storage) boxes to store their bits. All manner of off-the-shelf units are available from myriad manufacturers at a variety of prices. Two and four disk setups are the most common, offering a simple and compact out-of-the-box solution to home storage. It may come as no surprise that Linux is at the heart of many of these technologies, since they are just modestly specified x86 or ARM boxes belied by fancy web interfaces and easy-to-use configuration software. Indeed, the impecunious can save a few pence by making their own NAS device. There are a few purpose-built open source NAS distributions, the most popular trio being connected in a confusing…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes YOU’ll NEED Windows 10 With the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft has taken (almost) everything we knew and loved about Windows 8 and given it a new lick of paint. And although it looks lovely on the outside, it could potentially confuse you if you’re used to the traditional control panels and networking options found in the earlier versions of Windows (especially seeing as these connection menus haven’t really changed since the dawn of Windows XP all the way back in 2001). In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to connect to a wireless or Ethernet-based network, figure out how strong your signal strength is and how your network is performing. We’ll also show you how to connect a…

Most of us only ever give a thought to our Wi-Fi network when something goes wrong. That something might be a sudden drop-off in signal strength, a reduction in speed, or an inability to connect to the network altogether. Each of those problems can either be caused by the device you’re using, or by the network itself. You can easily check for the former by testing with different devices. It’s worth noting, however, that just because you can connect to your Wi-Fi network with one device and not another, this doesn’t mean there’s a problem with the device. It could just be that, say, your iPad is more capable than your Android phone when it comes to hooking up to a Wi-Fi network with a less-than-perfect signal. Nevertheless, given that…

This is the point in the feature at which we’re supposed to take you step-by-step through all the things you should consider when buying a new wireless router. And we will, but before we do that, let’s be clear: if you’re a Mac user with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch and those are the only devices you’re going to connect to a wireless router, there’s really only one game in town: AirPort Extreme. OK, two games in town: if you want the extra features, consider a Time Capsule too. The reasons are many. Firstly, when hooking up wireless devices, sticking to one vendor is generally a good idea (WDS implementation varies between vendors). And while we can’t guarantee that the original manufacturer of the wireless chip inside the latest…

ELGATO EYETV NETSTREAM DTT £200 Elgato elgato.com Plug the Netstream DTT into your TV aerial, hook it up to your wireless router and you’ll be able to watch TV from computers or mobile devices on your Wi-Fi network. Up to two computers can watch or record simultaneously. NEST PROTECT SMOKE AND CARBON MONOXIDE ALARM £110 Nest nest.com This clever gadget monitors your property and when it senses either danger, alerts you with a spoken alarm. It can also send an alert to an app so you’re notified when you’re not at home. FITBIT ARIA £100 Fitbit fitbit.com The Aria does a double duty as a set of scales and a body fat monitor. Once it’s set up, every time you step on it the Aria will recognise you, measure the…

If This Then That (www.ifttt.com) is an extremely handy online service that can automate the interactions between other online services. This sounds like madness, but a simpler way of thinking about it is that, if you want, all the pictures you’re tagged in on Facebook can be saved directly to OneDrive. The service keeps running until you tell it to stop, so any pictures you’re tagged in future will be saved to OneDrive too, and from there appear on your hard drive. IFTTT uses ‘recipes’ to do its work, and at the time of writing there were 643 available that make use of OneDrive, from saving all your Instagram photos to OneDrive, to Gmail attachments (useful for immediately opening Office documents in Office Online), to Bing’s image of the day.…

While Microsoft, at the time of writing, has yet to announce a music streaming service that includes OneDrive, the functionality is there within its mobile apps. If you upload your legally acquired MP3s to a folder on OneDrive, taking careful note of the recent changes to the UK’s copyright laws, which came into effect in September, and then access the folder from one of OneDrive’s mobile apps, you’ll find you can play the files from within the app on iOS, and using the builtin Sound Player app on Android. Of course, Microsoft has a full streaming music service called Groove Music that you should probably use instead, since it’s free for the basic version. You can find out more about it on page 60 this issue. You can also use…

Customise it You can make a couple of cosmetic tweaks to make Google’s services feel more like your own. In Domain Settings, visit ‘Appearance’ to upload a custom logo for your users, as well as altering the colour of the sign-in boxes they see. Google Apps is the professional side of the services that you already know – a way for businesses to run through tools such as Gmail; to make it easy for everyone to chat via Google Talk without having to use third-party services such as Live Messenger; to make sure everyone’s calendar is kept in sync; and many more useful things we’ll get to later. You don’t, however, have to be in charge of a business to be able to make use of it. If you run…

SKILL LEVEL Anyone can do it IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’ll NEED A Dropbox account Most of us know that Dropbox is a cloud storage service that syncs files in a folder on your Mac with your account in the cloud. There is, however, a great deal more to Dropbox than just storing, syncing, and sharing files. Firstly, there’s the ability to use the Dropbox iOS app to automatically upload photos taken with your iPhone or iPad to Dropbox. You choose which photos or other files to upload and where in your Dropbox account to store them. Then there’s copying a Dropbox link to your clipboard with a click, and thanks to iOS share sheets or the Android Share button, you can push files to your Dropbox account from…

We’ve all seen them, and we’ve all probably received one. The so-called 419 scam – named after the article of the Nigerian penal code that deals with fraud – is perhaps the most infamous of all phishing scams. It offers the recipient untold wealth, if only they’d allow an even larger sum of money to rest in their bank account temporarily on its route out of a distant nation – oh, and of course, to wire over a small amount to cover the sender’s expenses. It might sound tempting, but the reality is that no one, not even a desperate prince, is going to give you money for nothing. PhishTank, a collaborative clearing house for information about phishing on the internet operated by OpenDNS, had registered 1,198,703 verified phishing sites…

Understanding the URL – uniform resource locator – is key to keeping yourself safe online. More commonly known as a web address, the URL is the friendly, human-readable equivalent of the numeric location of every device, folder or file on the internet. The first part, running up to the first single slash or port number (see below), is converted to a string of digits by a domain name system (DNS) server and is entirely case insensitive. Everything else is handled by the host server, which, depending on its configuration, may be case sensitive. This could allow hackers who gain access to the server to insert a malicious file called, for example, INDEX.HTM alongside an existing index.htm. Being directed to the capitalised file by an email, instant message or another web…

Social media Beware of hijacked Twitter accounts, and don’t click links in random spam mentions. These often come through immediately in response to something you’ve posted, and include your username so they appear in your mentions and are visible not only to you, but also anyone following your conversation. If your Twitter client lets you report spam directly, get into the habit of doing this right away, and the sender will be simultaneously added to your block list. Beware shortened links Keep in mind that shortened links with obscured URLs like those appearing in tweets won’t always take you where indicated, so click with caution if you don’t know or follow the person who sent them and, if necessary, copy the link and paste it into a browser using Private…

SSL Tor OTR TrueCrypt GPG CryptoCat Tails Are you fed up of being tracked online? We show you how to take control of your online privacy. You are being watched by three-letter organisations (sorry, GCHQ) and billiondollar corporations. They can read every email you send, every comment you post and every photo you share. They know what articles you read, what videos you watch, and where you like to shop. These people know you don’t like being monitored but the truth is they don’t care. Your online activities are tracked in the name of national security and under the garb of targeted advertising. This Orwellian loss of privacy has its roots in the unbridled exchange of electronic information over that there internet. There’s no omnipresent ‘Big Brother’ as such. Instead…

Fou probably have at least one router in your house. They perform the not insignificant task of routing data from one network, eg the internet, to another, such as your home wired/wireless network. While in theory you could build on this tutorial and replace the box your ISP gave you, it’s probably not the best idea – getting a Linux box with a DSL or ADSL modem in it to talk to your ISP can be tricky. Besides, many of these hubs already run Linux, and many more allow you to install a DD-WRT or OpenWRT image, both of which handle much of the ugliness for you. But there’s lots of other routing that’s useful... Suppose your wireless card breaks, or needs some new firmware, leaving you without connection or…

SKILL LEVEL Could be tricky IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes YOU’ll NEED Raspberry Pi 2, powered USB drive Do you want the convenience of an omnipresent Dropbox-like storage service without doling out wads of cash and your data to a third party? OwnCloud is one of the best pieces of open-source software to help you create your own private and protected cloud-sharing service. Using OwnCloud, you can sync and share your private data, and access it from any device connected to the internet. For added security, OwnCloud can also encrypt your files. The software can handle files in a variety of formats and you can extend its usability by adding a number of other apps. As with other online cloud storage services, you can sync files on OwnCloud either using…

Due to property Development rights, you can add an outbuilding without planning permission Babies might not appear all that big, but they take up a surprising amount of room and sometimes a treasured computer desk has to be moved out of the way. There are other reasons for shifting your house around, though. You might be downsizing, going freelance, or your better half might just be fed up with you plonking away in Adobe Audition when they’re trying to watch Game of Thrones. Whatever the reason, the result’s the same: you suddenly need to find a new place to perch. So what do you do when there’s no room for you and your Mac? The answer’s simple. Get yourself a Mac cave! While this feature concentrates on Macs, it’s perfectly…