Imagine this: You come home from a day of shooting photos, and while you veg out, your images are automatically transferred from your camera to your favorite photo-sharing site. This is what the $99 Eye-Fi Card does: All you need is a Wi-Fi connection, a camera that accepts SD cards, and a PC or Mac, it’s really that simple.

The 2GB Eye-Fi Card looks like your basic SD card on the outside, but Wi-Fi technology is hidden inside. To get started, you have to install the web based Eye-Fi Manager on your PC and set up an account. First you detect and connect to a nearby wireless network: You can access secure networks if you have the password, but the card can�t connect to public hot spots. Next, you specify where on your hard drive you want to save your images and choose which of nearly 20 online photo sites you’d like to associate with the card. I spent several days shooting images and was able to upload them to a variety of photo sites without a hitch.

There is a downside: The Eye-Fi Card is powered by your camera’s battery and can be a drain during long file transfers. The Eye-Fi is a truly innovative and handy way to streamline the digital photo process and with the right equipment it works flawlessly.

Click for more: Eye-Fi Card, Wireless 2 GB SD Memory Card

If you visit Chicago and you want public Wi-Fi access, you’d better go to Starbucks. Once hailed as one of the pioneers of the citywide municipal Wi-Fi movement, Chicago reevaluated its original $18.5 million plan, citing market conditions, and will redeploy the project in the next year or two. On the heels of Chicago’s announcement, Philadelphia and New York have also reported problems getting their Wi-Fi programs off the ground. In fact, MuniWireless.com has downgraded its growth estimates for the industry from 108 percent to 35 percent. One cited reason is the difficulty of making wireless providers live up to the pricing promises the local government has made to its citizens.

Municipal wireless has become a political football,says Craig Mathias, a Wi-Fi expert at market research firm Farpoint Group. City governments have put a lot of constraints on vendors, in some cases requesting free access for every citizen.

One element that may have kept city residents away is how the pricing model was devised. For most cities, access is free at a very low bandwidth (often 500 kilobits per second). Then you pay a monthly fee for higher bandwidth, which subsidizes lower-income residents. Many residents already have home networks with faster connections and newer technologies, such as 802.11n.

But there is one emerging technology that could salvage municipal wireless: WiMAX. It’s a more robust technology that covers a larger area with relatively few towers, as opposed to the hundreds of access points municipal Wi-Fi requires. (Mountain View, California, has about 380 of them.) Analysts say WiMAX is coming, but there have been no successful rollouts in the U.S. yet, so costs are an unknown. Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia, is not convinced that WiMAX is ready for prime time. WiMAX will encounter the same obstacles and challenges as Wi-Fi in a dense urban environment, he says. It’s still extremely new and is, today, cost-prohibitive.

Meanwhile, as the United States waits for WiMAX to achieve mass adoption, a few cities have already made good on the Wi-Fi promise. In Minneapolis, U.S. Networks built a public-safety network (with the city as a primary customer) and a public-access network covering 60 square miles. In August, when the I-35 bridge collapse killed seven people, cell service went AWOL, but Wi-Fi kept working. Nevertheless, signal reaches only about a third of the city and can be weak. It appears that even the cities that are ahead of the Wi-Fi game still have a long way to go

If you’re lucky enough to live within Verizon’s highspeed Evolution Data Only (EVDO) network, the Merlin V620 Wireless PC Card Modem from Novatel will supply broadband like Internet access.

The V620 card itself costs only a little more than a standard Wi-Fi adapter. Service, however, is quite high per month for unlimited access.There’s also a limited plan that supplies access based on data usage at 20MB for lower cost per month.

To install, just loaded the CD, ran the install software, and popped the card into our notebook’s PC Card slot. The tests in New York showed the V620 to be the fastest and most consistent cellular PC Card. Inside Grand Central Terminal, speed recorded a bandwidth of 1.4Mbps. On a moving train, the bandwidth dropped to a healthy 823Kbps.

With the proliferation of both citywide and neighborhood spanning networks, finding WiFi service is becoming less of a problem. But it can be tough to get a consistently strong signal.

One way to improve reception is to point a bigger directional antenna toward the strongest local network signal. HyperLink Technologies and MacWireless, among others, sell such antennas.

Another approach, especially if you’re hoping to bring the outside network into your home or office and then share it over WiFi, is a WiFi bridge. WiFi bridges are designed to take a signal from one network source and redistribute it. They tend to be pricey, though, costing from $50 upwards, depending on features.

Ruckus Wireless and PepWave both provide bridges designed to improve the performance of your WiFi network when you’re connected to a larger network. PepWave’s Surf AP series, which starts at $180, and Ruckus’s $149 MetroFlex Dual Zone, each create two virtual Wi-Fi networks with a single radio.

Both devices vary in signal strength, using more power when transmitting and having more sensitivity when receiving data from far away, while also dialing down during interactions with computers and devices on your local network.

This is continue of yesterday post.

Upgrade your base station

Routers that are based on the Draft N specification incorporate MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) antenna arrays. MIMO can improve range as well as speed. The Belkin Wireless G Plus MIMO Router released in 2007 use Draft N, and Belkin claims that the standard has twice the range of its predecessor. In the tests, range has improved a lots as other brand, such as Linksys and several other companies sell Draft N routers. Because those routers improve both transmission power and reception sensitivity, you can update just the gateway and continue using the older adapters on all your computers; the range of your network should still improve.

Add an antenna

You could also install a large, strong antenna on your base station so that it could blast out more-powerful signals. Many WiFi gateways have antennas that you can unscrew and replace with another antenna that produces a stronger signal. HyperLink Technologies has been selling antennas, and providing compatibility information about which gateways and wireless cards they work with, for years. The information is a bit technical, but it’s an exhaustive resource.

Apple has always kept its antennas inside the housing of its AirPort Base Stations; just a few of the 802.11g AirPort Extreme Base Stations came with an antenna jack for adding an external one. MacWireless has antennas, tools, and instructions for adding antennas to all AirPort models. MacWireless also offers a High Power 11g Access Point at $180. This unit has a regular-size antenna but a much more powerful radio, which provides more than 10 times the raw output power of most consumer gateways.

There is one downside to upgrading your antenna: while it can help your network, it can also mess up others. That’s because nearby networks may pick up your signals, and their performance will degrade as they try to cope with the barrage.

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WiFi networks can reach only so far.

The range of wireless equipment such as the radios and antennas that are built into consumer equipment such as the AirPort Extreme Base Station can vary from network to network, even minute to minute. But when one node of a WiFi network is too far from another, communications between the two break down, and your network doesn’t work.

While WiFi signals are supposed to reach 150 feet in any direction from a gateway, that optimistic figure is rarely reached indoors. One common cause is absorption. Building materials between two points can soak up so much of the signal that one device can’t detect another. Brick is particularly bad for WiFi because brick retains water, which readily absorbs WiFi signals.

As a result, a gateway that delivers a perfect high-speed connection to a laptop from 500 feet away when it has a direct line of sight might be invisible to a laptop that’s 50 feet away when there’s a brick wall between them.

There are two main indicators that your wireless network is having range problems. First, WiFi networks you know are there don’t show up in the wireless menu. Second, when you do connect to a network, the wireless icon in the system menu bar shows just one or two signal-strength bars and frequently slips to no bars.

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Someone come across a number of wireless headphones in the past, but have rarely been impressed by the sound quality they offer. However, Hauppage’s new XFones claim to offer cinema quality sound for just below $100.

The XFones come with a small USB transmitter that plugs into your computer, allowing it to transmit music or sound straight to the headphones. Installation is plug-and-play with no software required. Unfortunately, the Dolby Headphone feature that aims to reproduce surround sound DVD soundtracks on the headphones doesn’t work on the Mac.