September 28th, 2007
After complaining so much about my WiFi problems, I decided to do something about it. I read about it.
The channel on my router was set to automatic and it chose channel 1. But I noticed all the routers in my neighborhood were setting themselves to channels 6 and 11. Maybe my Airport Express was smarter than all the rest, I thought. Maybe I was wrong. Can Apple be wrong?
After nearly a week of bad performance and periodic total disruptions, I learned on Wikipedia (is there another word for learned? Like implied but a little more factual?) …
… I gleaned that FCC regulations allow for high power output on channels 1-6 that are normally reserved for individual use in the US and Canada. I might need to borrow some HAM radio equipment to figure out what’s going on, but this could be why I’ve been having a lousy network for a week. It’s a shame the Airport didn’t figure out what was going on and migrate to the other end of the spectrum along with its Linksys and Netgear brothers.
I manually changed the channel to 8 — a little between 6 and 11 — which apparently no one else had thought to do or been able to. The network meter has consistently been at the top and performance is better. I bragged in a screenshot a few posts ago about downloading at 320kbps but now stuff is coming in at 600kbps. Shows what I know about even what level of service I’m paying for. I still won’t mind having a more powerful base station that can share hard drives on its network once it arrives, but perhaps I have found the issue.
This is such a confounding science.
Sure, I knew that WEP was worthless for encryption. And I feel bad that my parents are using it since the only USB-wifi dongle I could find — two years ago for the TiVo I bought them — only supports WEP encryption. But once that all dies I’m sure we can improve.
(Frankly I’m astonished how long the unattended Mac installations I’ve set up can prosper. My parents have no idea how their [a little bit] complicated network is configured and I haven’t even been there in a while. Meanwhile my Mom’s underfunded High School is still letting her Journalism, English, and Debate students use the lab of cast-off first gen Power Mac G4’s that I set up two years ago with the (even then outdated) Mac OS X 10.3.9. With no maintenance at all, and slightly limited user accounts, they were all still going strong when I had my brother check-up last week. Heck, they’ve been saving the day for kids who don’t even have home computers or what they do have don’t work. Just don’t tell the High School Seniors that the groovy Macs at school were manufactured when they were in elementary school. Much of the maintenance I had planned for my brother’s visit was pointless. Yikes for any IT budget that is more than $0.)
But in my own home I have been using MAC Access Control. I thought that telling a router to only trust a client with a specific address programmed into its hardware was a great way to go. No passwords, no live encrypting and decrypting! Just allowed machines and the rest.
Well this has proven tiresome as three allowed Macs turned into that plus two iPhones and a cat sitter’s Mac and maybe his iPhone too and whatever. Plus the generally knowledgeable folks at the Ars Technica Mac Achaia tell me that MAC address spoofing and sniffing is nearly as easy as cracking a WEP network. Meanwhile WPA2 is hard.
So the Mac Know-It-All accedes to the unpaid real Mac Geniuses.
I will use WPA2. My password is my dog’s name plus a description of some activities he enjoys.
But whatever happened to the days when we could connect to “Linksys” without question? When did “Belkin54g” become a bad word? Is “Netgear” something to shy from? If I live near you, will you connect to “Free Porno 4 U”?
The images in this article were blatantly stolen from the contents of the current Airport Admin Utility made by Apple. Alpha transparency in PNGs embedded in a network router admin app. What a goddamn company.
Regarding A Series of Tubes, Apple Computers | No Comments »
September 28th, 2007
Here’s a prospect that scares me. Truly it does, although I’m surprised by it.
People are writing that Vista has failed and Microsoft should give up on it and try again. (isn’t that what they already did?)
“Why Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself”
My entire adult and pre-adult life has existed in the shadow of Windows being the lousy dominant operating system. Sure it’s no fun and when something goes wrong you generally have to give up and start over from scratch, but apparently human progress has continued in the interim. Windoze does often perform partially as promised.
Why can’t Microsoft keep it together? Why did copying the Mac finally ruin Windows? Why can’t they cobble together an update by now? (Mac OS X 10.0.0 was only around for 4 months before an update finally got it on the right track)
No matter how great Mac OS X and Linux are, there’s no way Apple and a bunch of sweaty dorks can power the entire world’s computers. Can they?
Microsoft built a monopoly by replacing every typewriter, adding machine, and nearly everything else in a modern office with a crappy PC and a large IT department.
Replacing all that with something else will be another revolution.
Regarding Apple Computers | 1 Comment »
September 28th, 2007
Here’s another advantage to iPhone software 1.1.1. It works much better with my iPod HiFi.
It still displays the warning about being attached to an accessory not guaranteed to work with an iPhone. I think this is kind of bogus because the HiFi seems shielded enough that it never broadcasts the GPRS interference that other speakers do.
But where in the past I would have to dock the iPhone, unplug it, and dock again for the HiFi to coordinate its volume controls and sometimes even to play the iPhone’s music, now it’s all good on the first try. More improvements you can’t get with an AppTapp Installer.
But maybe I should get this.
Regarding iPhone | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007
Will I ever be a good iPhone typist?
I don’t type on it all that much. Mostly for web addresses and quick emails or text messages. It’s easy to do, but it still feels hard in my mind. Like I have an aversion to it.
The other day we were at Ikea and Holland wanted some bookshelf.
Well you probably know how Ikea works.
I had a moment where I looked at the paper and pencil in my hand, and (x-ray-like) at the iPhone in my pocket, and I wrote down “Lundvarm White Row 18 Bin 24″ or something on the paper.
Typing on a Qwerty Keyboard (and for a few experimental months in college, a Dvorak keyboard) is as easy as talking, and easier than writing longhand. But did I want to break out the iPhone’s much neglected NotePad for this task? Easier than the T9 input on my old LG phone, but Ikea gave me a free pencil and paper too.
I can type pretty fast on the iPhone. I think the main impediment is it’s quite slippery. I used a rubbery case for a while but it just scuffed up the chrome rim and got stretched out. Now I use no case and I use iPod “docks” for the first time ever. That’s a good thing.
Would you choose to type on an iPhone rather than write? or talk? or qwerty-it-up? (that’s the verb for that)
I did use my iPhone later to find Ikea was selling a certain bookshelf in other stores that they weren’t selling in ours. When we went to ask the clerk about it, he started looking at the same site I had loaded on my phone. That’s Ok, I said.
Regarding iPhone | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007
If your iPhone update goes awry, just be careful not to be crazy.
Sure we all feel crazy every now and again, but usually some soothing music or beverage can cure that.
Regarding iPhone | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007
I like how several of the security fixes in the new iPhone software update have to do with spoofing phone numbers being called. There’s some novelty to it.
Regarding iPhone | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007
Right now my Airport Express network name is “The Little Network That Could”.
Once I get an Airport Extreme with the transmission power cranked up, I think I’ll need a new name. What should I call it?
The neighbors have been getting testy with their network names, so I’ll definitely have an audience.
I was thinking “Free Porno”.
Regarding A Series of Tubes | 1 Comment »
September 27th, 2007
My iPhone update to 1.1.1 went fine even though I had a zillion 3rd party apps installed. Of course they’re no longer there. In fact the original “update” did fail and I had to do the “Restore” process. (a process that involves clicking the other button)
Not everyone can have such good luck. My dad’s iPhone, which took 3 days to activate back in June, is apparently dead. I hope he didn’t get accused of hacking it. It sounds like he’ll be able to get it replaced or fixed for free.
One thing to remember with iPhone updates — import all your pictures before you start! I’m glad I did this time.
As many 3rd party apps as I had, I don’t know if I’ll miss any of them. At least not right away. They were mostly for show and for fun. The voicenotes app might have been useful but I never actually used it. I thought the most potentially useful app was “iLight”, which turns the screen to white so you can use it as a bad flashlight (I could have used that in the NYC subway 4 years ago) but then I realized you can accomplish the same thing with a blank Safari screen.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the new system to be cracked. Can it be made un-crackable?
The other existential question is should one just wait? Stick it out with software 1.02? Keep using your old apps?
I opted not to. Why live in the past? There are many improvements and security updates with the new software and at least at this point I would rather some new Apple iPhone software than all the hacker software in the world. The home button double tap is worth it alone.
Regarding Apple Computers, iPhone | No Comments »
September 24th, 2007
I thought maybe comment spam was yesterday’s scourge — a blight on my old blogs.
Well it turns out the amount of time it takes for comment spam to catch up with a new blog is from whenever I started this until now. Good thing WordPress can deal with spam (a little) better.
Sigh.
In other news, I’ve been struggling all evening with an awful internet connection. I’ve at various times been ready to throw out or call up the manufacturer of every item in the communications chain and threaten their families or pets.
By the time I was down to plugging my MacBook Pro directly into the DSL modem and sharing that connection across the six feet between the coffee table and the desk to the iMac — and it still craps out — I was at my wit’s end. (if thousands of dollars of computer equipment can’t sustain a working network, what chance do free modems and routers have?)
No, it must be something else.
To stress test the connection (after I gave up on WoW which I today played again due to the Brewfest holiday), I began downloading four BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes simultaneously in Safari. They usually clock around 40-50KB/sec for each one.
They started that fast and slowly trudged down to the pitiful levels of 7 to 10KB/sec. About as good as a 56k modem, I believe.
What the fuck?
Could it be … the air?
Ordinarily I probably would have experimented with a real ethernet cable, but all the long cables are in a box on a shelf in a closet by the bedroom and Holland and the dog are tired out after a long day of playing in muddy pools.
But if it were the air. Or, as it were, the radiation flying through it, what if I were to do this-wise and turn on the mysterious Airport option for “Interference Robustness” ?
Choose Steve Jobs or Emeril to say “Boom” or “Bam” because immediately after I clicked Interference Robustness, the download rates began climbing. 30, 40, 50KB/sec. Eventually they stabilized around 100KB/sec for each of the four, much higher than I have seen before.
When the four finished and the fifth one kicked in (only 4 allowed at once), I saw this lovely sight.
Interference Robustness is magic! Robusto!
My extremely vague understanding is that this option causes smaller packets to be transmitted more frequently, so that recovery is easier when small chunks of data are lost due to radio noise.
The real question is which of my neighbors decided to rig their Microwave oven to operate with the door open this afternoon.
Of course in a new Apartment Complex where everyone works for Apple, IBM, or National Instruments, there are more wireless networks than parked cars. The view above only shows what my decrepit old iMac can see within our four walls. An iPhone stroll around running Kismet is a fascinating display.
Reminds me of H2K2 where at the keynote everyone created their own wireless network to get their message up on the bigscreen — which was scanning all the networks.
Anyway, I know what the solution is now: Run down to the Apple Store for a new 802.11n Airport Extreme, crank the radio up to maximum, and the rest sorts itself out.
I’m sorry I was angry with you, little Airport Express. You can plug into the HiFi.
Regarding Apple Computers | No Comments »
September 21st, 2007
I have several mice (trackballs), still cameras and audio interfaces that I plug into my keyboard. When I switch among them I feel like an old time telephone operator. I’ll just connect you, Mister Johnson.
Also the desk is wooden and really old and kind of worn.
Regarding Uncategorized | No Comments »