I have a few notes on home networks, which notes come from recent experience with some network setup issues.

Encryption: How to secure one’s network — or whether not to — continues to be a point of debate. I favour some of the arguments for being a “good citizen” and leaving your network open, and then making sure your computers are secure. Still, that works best if you don’t want to communicate between computers within your network, and can just wall each one off.

It’s managed to stay out of the general press, mostly — probably because it’s geeky, it’s hard to explain what it really means, and it’s not likely to affect anything any time soon — but the tech press has been covering the cracking of the HDCP master key. But even PC Mag got it wrong at first, having to correct their article.

To see what it does mean, it helps to back up a bit. If you have a TV made in the last few years, look at the back, where all the associated components can plug in. Especially if your TV is high-definition, you’ll have quite a mass of sockets back there.

Originally, televisions just got their signals “off the air”, using antennas.

Last week, I talked about Amazon’s email-in service, which lets you send documents to your Kindle by email. The nicest part of it for me is the PDF conversion feature, but you can, in general, sent any personal documents you like, with or without conversion to AZW.

The way it works is this: