I am working out of the Pittsburgh office leading up to the holiday. Found two good free software utilities today.

I was having problems with intermittent wifi drops from the AP here.  A cursory look at settings didn’t reveal any glaring configuration errors and the WRT110′s firmware version wasn’t to blame.  I needed a better look at the “air traffic” to determine if the nearby 5GHz wireless phone or perhaps the microwave in the vicinity was causing enough noise to drop my connection (a PITA in that I had to re-VPN after each drop/reconnect).

Unfortunately, the tried and true netstumbler program hasn’t been actively updated in years.  This means it doesn’t reliably run on my Asus 1000HE PC’s built in wireless card.  A few searches took me to a page that described a new alternative, MetaGeek’s  inSSIDer.

Great program and a workable replacement to netstumbler for my needs.  A few hours with the program and watching signal graphs roll by and I was able to determine that another AP on the same channel, coupled with some use of the wireless phone was causing enough noise to drop my connection.  Changing to a lesser used channel frequency (from 6 to has maintained uninterrupted wifi for me.

---

Next was a request from a friend on a means to copy music off of his iPod.  I typically deal with this via Linux and sort out the mess iTunes makes of your music with a music tagging program that will rename and organize by album/artist the music.  He wasn’t able to make the pieces fit together on his work setup so I found references to ESC Soft’s free utility, iDump.

From their website:

What is iDump
This program will allow you transfer your songs from your iPod to a PC, iDump does come wrapped in installer but you can simply drop the .exe in the root directory on your iPod and run it from there.

Connect your iPod and run iDump and you’ll have access to all your songs, select the songs you want to transfer then pick a destination directory and how you would like your songs to be named. And then sit back and transfer all the selected songs to the PC.

Tested OS: Win2k, XP, Me, Vista (not compatible with iPhone or iTouch)

Didn’t try iDump myself, but he was quite pleased and I’ve added it to my arsenal of good software utilities.