Category: Tech

On Airport

“Unplugged all Airport satellites — wifi now works from the Airport Extreme. I guess I will try replugging in the others one at a time.”


Ok, here’s the root idea, with details below: you do have to start with one base station as the hub, the master. Test basic connectivity and range. 

Then plug in and reset ONE Express. When you get that one green-lighted, stop. Then use your network for a few days and see how it feels. 

Test network range, speed, and ease of connection with all devices, e.g. taking a computer or phone away from the house, using a different wifi network, then bringin’ ’em home and seeing if they hook back up without you having to kick ’em in the pants. Also, test any peripheral services such as AirTunes — playing audio wirelessly from iTunes and other applications; you gotta know about Airfoil (http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/)! — and printing to a printer plugged into the Express’ USB port.        

Then call me to discuss. 

Now, some details, sort of psychological:

Networking is a real arcane process. You gotta either know what’s up, or do what the software tells you. 

Airport devices are actually easier than other manufacturers, but they are still the least Apple-simple items in the consumer lineup. You have to be ready to reset all of them to factory defaults and start from scratch one airport at a time. It’s also important to know that Apple doesn’t sanction using more than three airport devices on a given network. Multiple base stations (comprising both Extremes and Expresses) should be connected as an atom looks: a nucleus with satellites, as opposed to in a chain or series, which configuration I have found unreliable.

The most crucial recommendation I can make about configuring a wifi network is to have patience, about 3 or 4 hours worth on your first try with multiple base stations. You’ll get it, you just have to turn the puzzle pieces around a couple of times.     

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Links to the free iPhone/iPad apps I download for everyone

Google Mobile App – Now with Google Goggles!
AppBox Lite – Gotta have a level app, perfect for hanging pictures
LED Light for iPhone 4 Free – Best pocket flashlight I’ve ever owned
Amazon Mobile – Try the Amazon Remembers feature.
Dragon Dictation – It’s so great to have voice dictation on every iPhone 4S now, but owners of older phones will be glad to have Dragon.
Flipboard (iPad only) – Fantastic display of news articles as well as your Facebook and Twitter feeds
Google Translate – Translate via text… and voice dictation.
Google Shopper – one-touch product scanning is pretty cool.
Apple Remote – To control iTunes and your Apple TV
SoundHound and Shazam – These magical apps recognize songs just by listening to them, and their new feature is to display the lyrics as the song progresses, karaoke-style. Fantastic!

 

A couple that more people might wanna get into:
Simplenote… hey, where did Simplenote go? Oh, here it is, revved up just a touch with tags and stuff.

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Note: I put Siri Assistant on this list back in 2009 – So good, Apple bought ’em and the rest is iOS history.

Picking an internet service provider in San Antonio

For the record, my order of preference for ISPs in South Texas is:

1) Time-Warner – very fast, decent customer service, not AT&T

2) Grande Communications – often very fast, offer Fiber-to-the-Home in some places, good pricing, sometimes excellent (but sometimes bozo) customer service, and at least they’re not AT&T

a distant last) AT&T …
… Let me tell you, these jokers are probably the worst company we have to deal with. If they have even the smallest opportunity to screw something up, they will. I’m serious:

Call to change your billing address, they cancel your internet service. We ask them to install internet, and they put it dangling smack dab in the middle of the office and charge our client a mysterious $300 for moronic work, and then we have to come back and arrange things logically and have to charge for another couple of hours. We ask AT&T to troubleshoot a modem, and they log onto my client’s #$^%@! server, and change the IP address — a huge no-no — which shuts down file access, and forces me to make a bloody emergency call to set right.

Plus their internet is like 1/3 the speed of everybody else’s. At one of my clients’ office, it feels like a dial-up connection, and they say they can’t make it faster.

For the love of all that’s good and right in the world, do yourselves, your employees and loved ones, and your IT contractor a favor, and don’t make us use AT&T’s crappy internet.

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Taiwanese TV explains Antennagate

Awesome cartoon with Jobs as heir of Vader.

Taiwanese TV explains Antennagate

NMA News, the Taiwan TV station that recreates news events as ‘fly on the wall’ 3D animations, has applied its gift to Antennagate. It starts slow, but really gets going when the lightsabers come out. Bonus: Gizmodo is mistakenly referred to as “Gizmondo.” Hat Tip: Thanks, Michael Logan!

J2 Consulting ~ j2mac.com/calendar ~ 210.367.3420 

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BBOD, the feared “beach ball of death”

> I am having BBOD “beach ball of death” issues.
I’m going to phrase generally, for the sake of a blog post:

Please check Activity Monitor (in /Applications/Utilities/). Look in the System Memory tab first (low memory is the usual cause of beach ball). If the green slice of free memory is small, reboot.

Then look at CPU. If you have more green or red or blue than black, reboot. Finally, storage: again, if hard drive available space is small (below 10% of capacity), then we need to clear some space, possibly downloading Disk Inventory X from http://www.derlien.com/.

If, after check CPU & RAM, you’re still seeing the BBOD, we have several possibilities:

1) We could reinstall Leopard, but the G5 in question just recently got that upgrade, so I think it unlikely that that would fix it.
2) We can cast a baleful eye on your hardware, particularly your hard drive. It’s fairly likely that, on this older machine, the system disk is bad, and that makes for a lot of real bad BBOD. Changing a drive out is easy and cheap on a Power Mac or Mac Pro, and might be a worthy idea anyway. Here’s a link: http://amzn.to/SeagateBarracuda500GBonAmazon

3) I’m gonna say to any G5 user that it’s time to upgrade. This may not be in the budget at the moment, but it should definitely be a priority. Snow Leopard is an important update for productivity, stability, and future compatibility. Call me to discuss!

P.S. It is worth noting that, whenever I pick up my laptops — on which I’m always running 10 apps and 17 web pages, along with countless other 3rd-party utilities — I’m almost guaranteed to encounter the BBOD. And both laptops are current-generation units with 4GB RAM and plenty of disk space. But my iPad… Always smooth, cos I can only keep one thing open on it at any given time. And it keeps me focused on the task at hand. I know the tablet doesn’t work in a production environment, but I find the change in paradigm interesting.

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iPhone 4 antenna hasn’t bugged ne

It’s actually totally fine. Every phone has an antenna weakness somewhere. In the iPhone 4’s case, it’s a little more easy to trigger, but it hasn’t affected my experience at all (and I’m left-handed, and haven’t been concentrating on holding it a certain way). Also, while Apple’s response — “buy a case” — came out pretty douche-y, but as an independent, I can second that suggestion as something you need anyway. FWIW, the 4’s reception on GSM, 3G, and GPS has been markedly better than my previous units (and I’ve had ’em all). On Jul 12, 2010, Steve wrote:

> Ouch! Perhaps a chink in the armor….
> > From The New York Times:
> > Consumer Reports Says iPhone 4 Has Design Flaw
> > Consumer Reports said signal problems with the iPhone 4 were a result of a flaw in the phone’s antenna design, and that it could not recommend purchasing the phone. > > http://nyti.ms/d7xZrx

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Can’t email this one dude

I’m having trouble sending andreceiving e-mail to a client. Sometimes e-mail comes through; sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it goes through; sometimes it doesn’t.

The most likely cause of the response kicked back by the server — “format of the recipient’s e-mail address isn’t valid” — is that one of the email addresses in the to, from, cc, or bcc fields is in fact screwed up. “But they look good to me,” you reply. And they might to the eye, but perhaps not to the computers, because some funny and invisible character(s) have snuck into the address.

The fix takes just a little time: Go through your address book(s), as well as the lists of previous recipients that your mail software keeps (Apple Mail > Window > Previous Recipients), and delete any instance of one of the possible addresses. Then manually retype into an email, making sure it doesn’t autofill — as that would indicate you missed a spot — and try to send.

Start with your main correspondent’s address, and test. Then repeat the process for other messagees. You may have to include your own address in the hunt. (There’s an off-chance this entails the extra step of going into Mail > Preferences > Accounts and reëntering your email address, although that’s typically only necessary when you can’t send email to ANYBODY.)

The only other cause I can guess is that somebody’s email software is screwed up, but that should only yield one-way problems, and you said the issue is bi-directional? If you can send to anybody else in that same organization, then the issue is not that their server thinks your domain or your IP is smelly.

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FYI for your customers re: iOS 4 on a 3G

On Jul 4, 2010, Scott wrote:

iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G sucks! It’s ruined our phones. Several times a day we can’t even answer the phone when calls come in. There are incredible intermittent lags everywhere that can sometimes last as much as 45 seconds. All of this after a restore and hard reset. 

I saw this yesterday:

and those suggestions helped! I don’t use a browser much at all anymore and had 8 pages open in it that I forgot about. Nonetheless it’s hard to convey how frustrating iOS 4 is on the 3G. Battery life is suddenly horrible. They shouldn’t have released it for the 3G, IMO. I’d strongly recommend that your clients with 3G phones stick with the 3.1.x OS!
Yeah, I totally agree it shouldn’t have even showed up as an option for the 3G. It slowed another friend’s old phone down a lot, and I gotta tell you, I’ve long thought the iPhone 2G and 3G were unbearably slow ANYway. I am just cynical enough to think this was an apple ploy to get people to upgrade. 

So I’m real glad you’re getting the 4. You’re gonna love it!!

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