Archive for the ‘computers’ Category
Thursday, January 10th, 2008 |
Wireless networks have been around for sometime, and I have had it for years as it makes it easier to take my notebook with me around the house.
I have the first generation of the Apple Macbook Pro’s which does not come with a 802.11n card, which have been annoying me for a while, so last saturday I finally got around to get the ‘MacPro 802.11n upgrade kit’ which one can get from any Apple Service Center for around €50. Then the next thing to get was a Wireless Access Point which could do 802.11n, I decided to get an Apple Airport Extreme which have both 3(4) Gigabit ports, and one can attache a USB disk which can be shared on the network.
Well so far so good, only problem was that the only shop in town who had one of these was MediaMarkt (for Americans, MediaMarkt is an European version of BestBuy), and to my surprise it was a restock which they where selling for the full price, but a hardware reset, and a bit of playing around with the Airport Tool it was working…. now it where the fun starts.
First the wireless range both with 2.4GhZ and 5GhZ is nothing to write home about, as a fact it incredible bad, but with a bit of fiddling (2.4GhZ, 130mbit/s..) helped a bit, but still it cannot compete with my homebuild AP which is running Leaf Linux on a PCengines WRAP board.
There are a few not so positive discussions on the Apple Discussion Board, which points out that connections are lost, the AP resets it self, and so on. So I did the following test; start a copy of a 1GB files with finder, and in terminal start another copy of a 600MB file with scp, and bingo lockup, and no matter what I did could bring it back to life. Needless to say I returned the Airport, and got my money back.
Then I thought, someone must have produced a Wireless AP supporting 802.11n which is working and have a decent wireless range. So after I got my money back, I had a look around and decided to pick up a Netgear WNR834B, got it setup, and did my test, with the wireless range, and yes better than the Apple Airport Express, but still nothing really to write home about (especially not when one reads the marketing material Netgear puts up about the 802.11n range). So next point was to do my copy again, well I never got further than using Finder to copy before I lost my connection.
So my conclusion about 802.11n is that;
- It’s fast – when it works one get around 7.7MB/s which is about 3 times faster than with 802.11g
- It’s not stable, most vendors have based their AP/Routers on 802.11n Draft 2, which means that it’s still not a standard.
- Having a 802.11n wireless card in your notebook, could be a good thing as it could look like the range is better than having 802.11g (only), but that is for other people to look into.
Well I’m back using 802.11g which ‘only’ gives me 2.4MB/s which is actually quite reasonable, but it would be nice to get something which is close to 100Mb/s….
technorati tags: 802.11n, Airport Extreme
Posted in apple, hardware | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 |
Almost a year ago I wrote about MacFuse, which is a great way of incorporating 3rd party filesystems into Apple OSX. One of the things iis to be able to have SpotLight as a filesystem.
But the new thing (relatively) is iTunesFS, which allows you to use finder to look at your iTunes Library. You might say that, that is possible with iTunes, but this also recognizes your iPod(COOL!!!), which means that it’s possible to copy files off your iPod if you by accident delete it on your Mac.
I don’t know about AppleTV, but it’s worth a try.
technorati tags: MacFuse, Apple OSX, SpotLight
Posted in apple, osx, technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 |
Just after Leopard was released I wrote about my findings with PHP5 on Leopard here – which had the conclusion that PHP on Leopard is more or less useless due to the fact that there are so many missing modules.
I used to use Entropy PHP on Tiger but I could not get it to work, well I am quite happy to say that with a bit of reading on the forums at www.entropy.ch I have been able to get Entropy PHP to work on Leopard.
In short which have to happen to get it working:
– snip –
cd /usr/sbin
mv httpd httpd.ub
lipo -info httpd.ub
lipo -thin i386 httpd.ub -output httpd.i386
lipo -info httpd.i386
ln -s httpd.i386 httpd
cd /etc/apache2/other
ln -s /usr/local/php5/entropy-php.conf .
locate libexpat
# in my case I found a libexpat in /opt/local/lib, from macports. Your mileage may vary. I also did a symlink from php ib to apache2 so everything would be in the same place
ln -s /usr/local/php5 /usr/local/apache2
cd /usr/local/apache2/lib
ln -s /opt/local/lib/libexpat.1.5.2.dylib .
ln -s /opt/local/lib/libexpat.0.dylib .
– snip –
And as far as I understand it will not work on 64bit Macs, which means that if you have a G5 or a Core 2 Duo then you will have to forget about until Johan from Entropy builds a PHP5 which will work on 64bit. Right now I’m happy that I actually did not have the money to go out and get a new Mac with a Core 2 Duo….
technorati tags: Leopard, PHP, Entropy PHP
Posted in apple, osx | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
I just wrote and entry about how to get nice scrollbars in Finder.
Well there is a way to do the same in other Applications which does not get the resources from OSX. In for example Firefox, copy the Extras2.rsrc to /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Resources, restart Firefox and the scrollbar looks like it does in iTunes.
Only thing is that I now need to find a Theme which makes it look nice, as, as it is not it does look a bit odd….
technorati tags: Apple OSX, Firefox
Posted in apple, howto, osx | No Comments »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
Even though Applehave said that they have made the Leopard GUI unified, there are still a few things which are lacking. For example the scrollbars in Finder are not as nice as in iTunes.
I stumbled over this Italian blog which describes how to change the look of the scrollbars in Finder.
It’s in Italian which I do not understand but the Extras.zip which is for download on the website, have a readme.rtf which also have the instructions in English.
But the easy way of doing it is;
1) download file
2) extract the file
3) copy Extras.rsrc (PowerPC) or Extras2.rsrc (MacIntel) to /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources
4) make sure that root:wheels is the owner of the file (#sudo chown root:wheel Extras2.rsrc)
5) restart Finder (#sudo killall Finder)
And then the Finder windows will have a nice scrollbar.
Now, next step is to figure out how to do that for all Applications….
technorati tags: Apple, Finder, iTunes
Posted in apple, howto, osx | 1 Comment »
Sunday, November 11th, 2007 |
So we finally got a build in backup tool in OSX – that is in Leopard. Well get your hands down again (well there have been a lot of talk about this since Leopard was released). The tool is Time Machine, and it kind of does not really do much…. except for having a nice interface for restoring files.
My annoyances with Time Machine are:
a) It is really really slow, using ‘rsync’ is faster…..
b) When it does a backup iTunes stutters once in a while which is annoying, especially as Time Machine runs every hour (in automatic mode).
c) If one runs Time Machine from the command line, it will go into restore mode (crap!)
d) You have to have Time Machine in the Dock if you want to run it in manual mode (crap!)
e) Per default it does not work with network drives (there is a hack for that).
f) It not possible to limit the amount of disk space it uses, you will have to create a partition for Time Machine only (crap!)
g) …
For e) there is a solution here and here, problem is that if it does not work when you actually need that backup you cannot call Apple for help:-(
Time Machine is great for what it is, but it is a very simple tool, and a power user will just get annoyed with it. Go get something else if you need something which you can customize…..
Thank you Apple for giving us something which almost works…..
Update – 2007.11.12
Looks like there is a way. According to MacOSXHints, in this hint , it is mentions that right clicking on the TimeMachine disk allows one to do a manual backup.
technorati tags: backup tool, Time Machine, Apple OSX
Posted in apple, osx | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 |
There have been some writing the last couple of days after a data recovery company have said that all 2.5″ Seagate harddrives made in China used in Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro’s can crash due to a hardware failure.
The thing is that a manufacture can be unlucky and release a batch of “faulty” drives into the wild, and people using them can (will) loose data. The good thing is that if this happens Apple will replace the harddrive (that is why we have warrenty), and probably with one which does not have any faults. In the mean time, remember to backup you data.
Now the funny thing is this (not the loosing data part) is that at work I’ve had 4 computers from Dell which all of them came with 2 Maxtor harddrives. And of these 8 harddrives I’ve had 6 of them replaced due the a crash, and the amount of data lost on this is more than I want to think about. But Dell knew about this issues, and everyone who got a computer from Dell would have a catastrophic failure and data loss at some point. But there was no recall or no big writing on the wall for that reason.
technorati tags: Seagate, Apple Macbook, Apple Macbook Pro
Posted in apple, computers, hardware | 1 Comment »