Movember

In other news, I'm doing the whole Movember thing. I've helped raise a bunch of cash for men's health, and I like the way it looks.

For those of you not familiar with Movember, it's all about raising much needed cash for men's health. You can grown your own tash (it's not too late), or sponsor someone who already has (like me).

Now, I get that women can't grow a tash, but if you want to feel the awesomeness of being a Mo-Girl, then hurry up and sponsor a guy. You can even create a profile on the Movember site, take a photo of yourself, photoshop on a fake tash, and go to town with it.

Movember raises funds for research in prostate cancer and depression, so it's a great cause. Here's some facts for the detail oriented:

* In 2010, more than 3,300 men will die as a result of prostate cancer.

* Depression affects 1 in 8 men during their lifetime.

PS3 on a D-Link DSL-2740B

Okay, so I bought a brand spanking new D-Link DSL-2740B router to solve all my problems, except it created a new problem for me. :-| I like to play games sometimes (like the thoroughly excellent Red Dead Redemption) and it seems my PS3 just couldn't figure out the NAT type. I configured the access point as usual, yet each time I went to Test Internet Connection, bammo - it failed on testing NAT.

This was confusing because my old Belkin didn't need any special configuration to work with my PS3, it just seemed to work. So, with the usual hesitation, I set about googling to find some answers.

After trying a few keywords, I came up with the usual rubbish suggestions, everything from disabling UPnP and putting the PS3 in the DMZ with a static IP to putting my router in bridge mode. Clearly, there are a lot of people out there in Internetland who like to give advice (and kudos to them) but unfortunately don't really know what they're talking about and only succeed in muddying the waters.

So, here is my solution to solving the NAT problem with D-Link routers. You have to manually configure the trigger ports so the D-Link will let the PS3 open the ports it needs. This page on the Playstation Network site actually tells you the ports you need to set up.

Here's some instructions to set up your D-Link properly:

1. Go to the D-Links web admin page and log in.

2. Go to the "Advanced" settings.

3. Pick Port Triggering from the menu.

4. Pick Custom Application, call it PS3, and put in the ports from the page on the PSN site.

5. Click Apply.

When you're done, you should see something like this:

Now, with these settings in place, I re-hit Test Internet Connection on the PS3 and I got the much coveted NAT Type 2, which basically means your PS3 things it can open ports at will. Of course, it can only actually open the ports you've allowed it to, and only if no other app / device is using those ports, but you should have no trouble connecting to the Playstation Network and playing games. Now, back to hunting down outlaws in the Old West... :-)