Sysadmin Field Notes - General Technology and Gadgets Archives

May 2, 2008

In case it helps, here's the steps I used to setup my Airport Extreme in bridge mode behind the ATT Uverse RG 2wire gateway thing. I previously had the DSL modem with ethernet out, into the Airport, letting it act as the router. I like and would prefer that configuration I think, but the RG doesn't have bridge mode. So if you leave things set like this, you'll have two levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) going on. Which works fine for some things and terribly for others. That includes anything that needs to allow ports back in, like iChat or other A/V things, bit-torrent, etc. It's not that it can't be made to work in some cases with careful port forwarding, but it's a hassle.

So the way we want to configure things is such that the RG is the router; it will do all the DHCP stuff; get its IP from ATT, and then act as an internal DHCP server so things on your home network get IP addresses. Luckily, this is the immutable default configuration. :-) We'll probably also want to disable it's wireless network, just to avoid interference with your existing network, or your neighbors, etc. since we we prefer the Airport's wireless network.

For the Airport, we'll need to configure it in bridge mode. This disables its DHCP server, router and firewall. Now it's essentially just a dumb switch; it's just passing traffic between it's ethernet ports and the wireless network. So when a computer connects to the airport network, it will ask for an IP via DCHP. The airport will no longer answer that request from it's own pool, but instead pass it onto it's ethernet, where it will get to the ATT provided gateway. Then the gateway will give the wireless computer it's IP address and route traffic to it. We'll also want to set the Airport to get its IP via DHCP from the ATT gateway as well, so it can have an IP for printing or disk use, etc..

A word of caution before we begin, you will likely lose connectivity briefly during this procedure, so be prepared. Don't be 99% way through a 20GB download when you do this.

So let's get started. First the airport. Run "/Applications/Airport/Airport Utility". You should a screen showing all airports (I have an express and extreme). Select your desired Airport, and you should see this:

Click on manual setup at the bottom (circled in the above shot, then click "Internet" up at the top. You should see this:

On "configure IPv4", set it to "Using DHCP". This will give your airport an IP you can connect to. Then under connection sharing (highlighted), choose "Off (Bridge Mode)". Now click update. If I remember, I think it reboots, or does something that takes a few seconds. You'll probably lose your connection to it initially.

So now you might be a bit stuck, you may/may not be a bit stuck, since your computer probably has an IP that your airport gave you, but now you're talking straight to the RG for routing. No worries, you can either reboot your computer, or follow Apple's procedure for getting a new IP. Skip to the "Solution->Mac OS X instructions -> 1. Force reconfiguration of IP Settings" section. Or just reboot. Any other network hardware that got it's IP from the airport will need to be rebooted as well.

Now, any computers plugged into the Airport extreme ethernet ports or wireless networks should be getting their IP from the RG and using it properly. Before you started, if you looked at your RG configuration screen in the Home Network section, you would have just seen the airport extreme. Now you should see all your devices showing up.

You can get to this screen by trying this configuration URL (which is pointing at your router), or manually visiting http://192.168.1.254/ in your browser.

Now the final step if you don't want to use the RG's wireless networking at all, is to disable it. From the screen above, click Home Network and you should go here:

Notice the circled button on the right; "Disable" next to the wireless network. Click that. You'll get prompted for confirmation, and the device password. Once done, the button changes to "Enable", which you can click to re-enable the wireless should you ever choose to.

That's it; with the Apple acting in bridge mode, the RG is in charge. Seems to work fine for me so far, no complaints. Note you can still have the Airport participate in a WDS network even in bridge mode; I'm using it with my Airport Express that way.

Update 4:00PM PST Fixed broken image

March 26, 2008

Wow. So the other day, my LaCie d2 Triple-interface drive that I use for backup died. Bad noises (although not the terrible head chunk noise, just a weird clicking), wouldn't mount; the usual story. I figured I'd be sending it back. I opened a case on their website, and they first said they were shipping a replacement power supply (external) just in case. They also included an RMA number in case that didn't work, I could ship 'em the drive.

Now, I would have never guessed that a power supply would have been the problem; I almost just shipped 'em the drive anyway. But the supply arrived today, and on a whim I swapped it out and boom, no ugly noise, the drive mounts fine. I had to A/B test with the new and old power supplies three times to convince myself.

Competent tech support, who knew. Makes me wish I had picked up another LaCie instead of the WD 500GB that I got at Costco in the interim (it was cheap, and I've been wanting redundant backups anyway).

So now I have a time machine drive on the WD, and I'll continue to use the LaCie with Super-Duper to give me a bootable, identical clone (that I'll probably move back and forth between my parent's house and home). Sound paranoid? Never forget that the universe tends towards maximum irony.

March 7, 2008

I was given hope by the docs that said that "not all functionality will work on PPC' macs.

Installing on a Mac gets you XCode 3.1 beta, but no iPhone SDK at all (docs, sample code, projects, etc.). You do get a bit of the cool iPhone Dashcode features for building iPhone web apps, but that's it.

Guess I'll be writing iPhone software on Cyndie's MacBook.

Update: It can be made to work. When/if I get my cert will I have the stones to try and upload to my phone from a non-supported environment? That seems...unlikely, but at the basics can be done via simulator.

December 14, 2007

Hey cool, I was running into this exact issue. Mac OS X 10.5: Finder may restart when trying to change file permissions

Cool that there's a reason and a workaround.

November 16, 2007

Cool I found this today: iPhone: Understanding the symbols for Internet connectivity

Ever since the 1.1.2 update, I've noticed that the EDGE icon sometimes becomes a solid block (a few areas on my train ride, which has some spotty coverage). I had never seen that before, so had no idea what it was. I guessed that maybe it meant GRPS instead of EDGE, or was just a bug. Looks like it is a GPRS indicator. Cool.

November 1, 2007

I posted a lonely little message on the Apple discussions because Leopard file sharing wasn't working for me properly. Shares that I added now that you can share arbitrary files weren't showing up. It was a permissions on the parent directory issue; no execute.

That seems like a rough edge on the UI not to warn the user, but I'm sure it will be filed down eventually.

October 29, 2007

Could there be a bigger disaster in the Mac enthusiast world than Quicksilver being unavailable? Seems that blacktree.com has been down for a few days. However, since the forums are hosted at cocoaforge.com, they load, if you can wait for the stylesheets to timeout (presumably). I found this explanation:

Site is down due to a plugin downloading bug (and a subsequent server overuse)

Latest version is available at
http://blacktree.meadgroup.com/quicksilver/application/QS.3814.dmg

But plugins won't be online for another day or so

And that was posted 10/29 3:27pm Pacific time, so hopeully all should be fine soon. Although I have B51 (build 3800) and it seems to fine, except for it's icon showing in the dock.

October 27, 2007

Upgrade install onto Cyndie's MacBook (first gen) went fine, no hitches at all.

Upgrade install onto my Dual G5 Power Mac, pretty good, two oddities.

For one, my "services" menu is cleaned out. All the custom stuff is gone, and I only have about 4 paltry choices. Weird, and I don't have idea how to get the things back (and yes, I used to use a few of them).

Weird thing #2, no transparent menu bar. I know it's hated/reviled, but I do wonder why mine isn't. Power PC thing? It's not a GPU thing as far as I can tell, I'm Core-image fully supported and hardware accelerated. Dock on the side thing? No idea, I guess I should be happy. :-)

July 30, 2007

Apple is getting sued for the non-user-replaceable battery in the iPhone. This is stupid, getting sued for a design choice.

Maybe next someone will sue because it's only available in one color?

Oh, and the lawsuit is actually about disclosing this fact? Funny, my iPhone, right on the box says:

"Battery has limited recharge cycles and may eventually need to be replaced by Apple service provider, see www.apple.com/batteries which has links to the pricing, replacement instructions, and life-details.

Just goes to show that trying to please everybody is a waste of time.

June 13, 2007

So opinions are all over the map. The "experts" all have their opinions (generally considered failure), as do the fanboys and stock analysts (wild success). Here are my predictions, which are somewhere inbetween.

• Scoble said on some video "If you took the Apple logo off and put a Nokia logo on, the story would be that it's the 'crappiest phone of all time.'" I'd say it would be crappy, because it's likely the interface would be the same warmed-over inconsistent, confusing pain that has cell phone companies have been beating customers up with since the beginning. The beauty of the iPhone is in it's software, and ease of use (assuming Apple has really gotten in right, which we won't fully know until launch day).
• Camera. Seriously, people are actually arguing specs on a cell phone camera? No one has seen a decent picture, but it's a lot more than megapixels that determines camera quality. I've never seen a cell phone camera that didn't terribly suck because of terrible optics, a way way too tiny sensor, and terrible image processing. My secret hope is that Apple had a hand in the design and the thing actually takes decent pictures. If not, who cares, I only use my phone camera for very limited things, and frankly if I'm going to take terrible documentary-only photos, I'd rather they take up less space on my hard drive. Jury is out on the camera, but I don't suspect it will be terribly worse than other cameras.
• Battery life. First, we don't know what battery like is like, so it's amusing to pan the thing for that. The stated 5 hours of talk/video/web or 16 hours of audio seems reasonable. Remember, it's only got 8gb, so you're going to want to sync the thing anyway...contacts, videos, songs, etc. I think people will find that as long as it can 100% reliably get you a full, active day of use, it's not going to be so onerous to toss it on the charger (and since it's a dock connector, there are already millions of car, wall, and computer charging cords out there). If it meets the quoted times, I'm happy.
• Hype: Way overhyped at this point, so there will be a natural backlash. And there will be a natural dip in sales after an initial rush. Pundits will call it a failure when that dip comes. But it's not like Apple will be sitting still, and they'll still be moving units. They have invested in this game, and the iPod cash cow will give them time to get it right. So you won't be able to write the success or failure story right away.
• Flexibility. This is one area that will hurt adoption with the geeks. It's going to be very frustrating for a lot of people to have this totally kick ass Mac OSX platform, with wi-fi and EDGE internet, and be so limited in how you can use it. The "Web 2.0 apps as apps" idea is a good one, but not nearly as satisfying as actually using it as a more general purpose computer. The big question is does it evolve more like the iPod, where it's expensive and closed to get anything onto it, or more open like a smartphone. I'm hoping open, but I'm suspecting iPod-style closed-ness, and that's always going to be frustrating. Geeks are going to want to -play- with their phone and explore it. There's not much to explore here I suspect. It's more utilitarian than fun, it will be a cell phone that actually works like you expect. It sucks that you have a pay such a premium for a device that works like it should, but I think it's true.
• Finally, price point. This is going to obscure the success story even more. It's really expensive, spin aside. Subsidized smart phones (that can run your own apps) + an iPod are very much cheaper. This more then anything is going to cause that "iPhone hangover" I suspect. Most purchasers and potential purchasers will like it, but they'll either be reluctant to spend or regret spending the premium money on it. Again, it will impact the mid-term story, but the long term is that there are going to be many more iPhones, and the price will gradually come down. Given the investment that this thing must have taken, again, Apple is in it for the long haul.

I'm buying one on June 29th because my old phone is falling apart, and I've never met a phone I didn't passionately hate (except for my old Nokia 2160 and 6160; those things rocked). I'm probably going to say something like "it's cool, but not quite $600 cool" after a few weeks of use. Eventually, Apple will get to the price point it needs to be at to move a lot of these things.

June 13, 2007

I hopped on #webkit for today on IRC a bit, and was able to describe (and open a bug on) the weird proxy behavior I mentioned earlier. Specifically that proxies requiring authentication wreak some havoc. Win32 Safari gets really angry when you try (for example) to go to https sites that have lots of redirects or multiple SSL connections, continually re-prompting for authentication and eventually crashing (my example was just https://mail.google.com). I was able to pull a memory dump and include it, bug id #5265192, and a few of the #webkit folk can replicate now.

Maybe I'll try to install the beta on my Mac again, and use WebKit from source. Maybe would be a good chance to start picking up Cocoa/Objective-C again, something I really enjoyed when I was dabbling in it a bit when I first switched to Mac.

June 11, 2007

In the new side and back views of the iPhone, it sure looks like that black part down at the bottom might be a way to open it up. Swappable SIM cards and batteries under that little door?

Time will tell.

June 11, 2007

You know, the -one- time I dont' follow the daringfireball upgrade method, I'd get burned. Really stupid to not follow it for a beta safari. I figured it would do something sensible like install in parallel.

I don't know if it was related to not rebooting pre-patch like I usually do, but the installer hung, and left me without key bits of Safari Installed.

dyld: Library not loaded: /System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/A/JavaScriptCore
  Referenced from: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/JavaScriptGlue.framework/Versions/A/JavaScriptGlue
  Reason: image not found

So I can't run Safari...or Quicksilver...or (worst of all) Installer.app. Seems like many people with similar problems.

I have backups...so I'm hoping I can piece enough of Safari back onto the system to get Installer.app to run, then run the beta-3 uninstall and be done with Safari 3 forever (or at least until it comes out for real).

Interestingly, Safari 3 installed successfully on the PC, but the proxy support is badly broken/half-hearted.

Here's to hoping I can get things on the Mac back in order.

Update:

So I pulled:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/JavaScriptGlue.framework
and
/System/Library/Frameworks/WebKit.framework

Which were missing after the aborted beta-3 install and restored them from backups. That let me run Installer.app, and I was able to run the beta-3 uninstaller successfully, and after the reboot I'm back up and running. Quicksilver runs, I'm posting this in Safari (never thought I'd be so happy to see "Version 2.0.4 (419.3)" in the Safari about box)...seems like I'm back up.

Probably not willing to chance another run at beta-3...we'll see, I might try it with the right procedure, or wait to see if Apple updates the installer.

Update 2:
BrendonG has a good idea about where to get the files if you don't have backups, they are in the combo-updater for 10.4.9. Kind of a large download, but then you can get them out of the package and restore them enough to run the uninstaller.

Update 3:
Probably final update, "boxhead" has the easiest fix, finding where the installer backs up the files, /Library/Application Support/Apple/.SafariBetaArchive.tar.gz

Good digging.

June 7, 2007

Today my 60GB iPod died.

Logic bomb placed by Apple so that I'd have to buy an iPhone? Hardly seems fair since I was going to get one anyway. It's been behaving strangely ever since I flung it off the elliptical at the gym...I guess that's hardly a logic bomb. :-)

I guess for $249 I can get it "serviced" which actually just consists of replacing it...or get a $149.95 used replacement drive with a whopping 6 month warranty.

Neither seem worth it. Guess I'll just put the money into the iPhone savings account.

Update: Wow, I'm like the fonz or something. After reading this ArsTechnica post on dead iPod drives I followed the advice and dropped it flat on my desk from a height of about 8 inches.

Now it boots, syncs, and the click/whirr/grind is gone.

Talk about counter-intuitive. That's downright freaky. Certainly I imagine I'll still have trouble with it, but it was kind of fun. Apparently it's commonplace even. Maybe the cable was actually the problem. Probably shouldn't have dropped it in that case. Oh well, we'll see how it goes.

Don't worry Apple, I'm still buying an iPhone.

May 8, 2007

I'm thinking of making a few changes around here. For one, when I upgraded moveable type, I never bothered to update all my templates, so that's pretty much a mess. Plus many of them (for some reason) still have the spaces for comments, which then blow up since I disabled them. I should fix that.

I'm also considering a name change for the blog. I haven't really been a system administrator for almost three years now, and am unlikely to ever be one again (at least a "pure" systems administrator). I'd like to find something that captures where I'm headed, and not just where I am. Stay tuned.

I'll try to make the changes as painless as possible for subscribers.

May 1, 2007

Here's a funny thought.

Do we as developers think that web based applications are good enough "end users", but not for serious work...like the work of building web applications?

With more and more applications going to the web (mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet, scheduling, project management, time tracking, more), it seems like the time spent in local rich apps is going down quite a bit.

But all the applications used to -build- those others applications (text editors, development tools), are pure-play local apps. I'm sure it's just a different problem domain, and one where the local app has many advantages, but I wonder what a web based IDE could bring to the table. Some things would get a lot easier.

March 26, 2007

Just ran into something "exciting" while using gmail via Safari to send an attachment. I exported Cyndie's resume to word and PDF to send at work. It sent fine. But sending the native pages file caused gmail to just basically hang. With Firefox or Safari.

At first I thought it was because the filename had spaces, so I renamed it to the same name as the exported files and it still hung.

So doing a bit of digging, iWork Pages files are actually bundles...For the unfamiliar, bundles are a cool concept in Mac OSX that (generally) seamlessly make a directory look like a file. Generally.

This is an exception. Gmail is probably expecting a single file, not a directory full of files. Bundles are nearly transparent and make life grand for the most part, but here's a pain point with them I hadn't noticed before.

So the fix is to zip it up first, then send it. That'll turn it into a single file so it will get emailed properly. I didn't expect "Pages Publications" to be a bundle, so it was a bit surprising, but I guess that's how good the abstraction normally is.

November 1, 2006

I went to go see if there was an office I had missed in iTunes today (since our Tivo is being a little weird and didn't record one this week), and there were no TV shows in my iTunes. Okay, that's kind of weird...where'd they go? A quick google search shows that TV shows aren't available outside of the US...but I'm in the US...and oh, Robbie Williams Rudebox is the #1 album on the top sellers chart. So somehow I tunes thinks I'm in the UK now? I click on account info and it helpfully informs me that I'm only allowed to view the US store and will be taken there now.

Uh, ok. Thanks. Kind of a back-handed way to fix my problem, but I'll take it. Clearly this has something to do with my computer losing it's authorization after installing iTunes 7 and needing it restored? Except that was a few weeks ago and I've downloaded a TV show since then. I hate it when computers misbehave for seemingly no reason (and no, I haven't picked up the 7.0.2 release yet).

Good news, I didn't miss an office, and even better, Season 1 of the state is available on iTunes now. Sweet.

October 25, 2006

So the other day I'm looking through my Safari history for something and I notice this "snapback" menu item. What the heck is that?

Well, it's like a quickie-temporary per-window bookmark that you can easily jump back to. It's easy to set on a "root" page that you're browsing from, and it automatically sets itself in some cases.

Pretty cool, I've wanted something like this for a while. Tabs do a lot of this job for me, but in a week of use this has helped me lose less stuff. Cool.

September 17, 2006

So now I needed to get my wife's MacBook printing to our printers, which I was dreading given my past terrible experiences This I thought should be the easiest of all right? No more weird Windows bonjour drivers to get going, and since I'm already setup for sure to share via bonjour on my computer, should be cake right?

Sigh.

The laserjet 5p setup went fine (install foomatic hpijs drivers from linuxprinting.org and ghostscript, setup as IP printer). Same as on my system.

So for the office jet 6110, bonjour found the printer just fine. yay! Except the driver said "Unknown". That doesn't bode well. I picked the same shared definition I used before, the weird local queue I had to setup pointing at the usb port instead of /dev/null, otherwise with Windows bonjour I just got blank pages.

So "unknown" seemed unlikely to work, and indeed it did not. No weird errors in any logs that I could see, just "Error while printing" appearing when trying to print from little old text edit. After about 10 minutes of vainly trying to figure out how the change the driver for this printer definition manually (which for some reason, everywhere I tried to change it, the drop down was greyed out and disabled), I decided to try the "regular," local printer definition on my box.

That worked right out of the gate. Why do windows and Mac OS bonjour drivers behave differently? Don't care I guess since it's working now. Maybe the actual printing protocol implementation on Mac is smart enough to get it to the right place, whereas something goes strange in the windows implementation. It's all very dark, creepy, and undocumented.

By far the most terrible place within Mac OS X is setting up printers. Of course, maybe it would be better using non-HP printers, since the laser jet is too old to be easy anymore, and the officeJet was produced after HP turned to complete crap.

April 7, 2006

I upgraded to 10.4.6 today. I use profont as my terminal font. Before today, it looked okay bold. I think at least. After the 10.4.6 upgrade, it looks like this:

Which is to say, not good. Any suggestions? It may not have been bold before, but it was never that ugly. So either bold either got suddenly ugly, or now terminal supports bolding. I don't know, but I'd like the old nice looking font back. thanks.

March 3, 2006

I've been wondering for a while now, and finally found out how to open a finder window from bash, in the current directory. On windows in cygwin, I use cmd /c start .

For Mac OS X, the magic incantation is: open -a finder .

Whew.

Update:

open .

Works just as well.

January 22, 2006

So because I finally wanted to switch to WPA, and get some more bandwidth for VNC, I upgraded to a new netgear router. My old one though I still needed for its parallel port print server.

Sadly, even after upgrading to the latest firewall firmware, there was still no option to turn off the radio. I needed to disable the wireless radio... Enter a roll of metal flashing tape. I removed the antenna and
taped up the socket.

My notebook about 5 feet away from the thing had no signal. If I had one of those fancy wireless detectors I'd see what maybe some metal screening, or grounding the shield would do, but this seemed good enough.

Then I enabled the only security it's got (WEP) with a totally random key, enabled only allow particularly MAC's and didn't put any in, and just for grins disabled SSID broadcast (I know that doesn't make a huge deal).

Seems safe enough.

January 15, 2006

So it's sort of amusing that printing on Linux was partially what broke the camel's back and prompted my switch to Mac OS X. So it's fun to get here and realize the printing subsystem, CUPS, is the same.

What's worse is that unlike just about every other area of Mac OS, where they've done a fine job of wrapping the Unix underpinnings, CUPS leaks through all over the place. Things seem to work fine if you are setting up a local printer, but pain and heartache await those trying to setup remote printers.

Previously I fought with my wife's OfficeJet 6110xi attached to her windows computer. Then we finished moving and I fought with my laser jet 5p on the network print server. For both of these, I ended up using the foomatic hpijs drivers, the exact same drivers I used under linux...

Now in the new house, the OfficeJet is on my computer. Actual, native drivers exist and are included for Tiger, saving me the pain of HP's ridiculously lame 60MB "stack" of software. Locally it was pretty much plug and play. Trying to share it to my wife's computer though was just sad. Here's the process:

1. Attempt to share printer, windows style. I'd rather not enable file sharing, but let's give it a shot. Can't figure out how to make it unauthenticated (rather not have to create a username/password just for her and the printer).
2. Go ahead and do it anyway, doesn't work, forgot to add her password to the Windows sharing password area.
3. Find Bonjour for Windows and install it on her computer. The wizard finds the printer, yay! Wow that was easy, let's print a test page. (insert offstage whaa-whaaa noise here).
4. Printer refuses to print a test page or give any errors. The queue on the mac shows the documents as arriving and printing fine, but printer doesn't so much as twitch.
5. Try a million google searches with variants of "officejet 6110 no errors doesn't print." Find very little. Broaden search to just "windows sharing officejet 6110 mac problems"
6. Stumble upon a few pages indicating visiting the local CUPS web page might help. The printer is set with it's device URI as /dev/null. To me, this explains why I'm not getting anything printed. Works fine locally though, so it must have some extra magic way of communication, that just doesn't work through CUPS?
7. By including "device uri" in my search, finally find a hint on macosxhints.com that has a partial answer. Test page finally prints. The important part of the hint is step #2, create a different definition for the remote queue. Since I was using Bonjour, that's the only step I did. I created a new Raw Queue, just like it asks. Then running Bonjour on the windows box finds the new definition well, and prints fine from that. I used the HP officejet driver (the minimal "corporate" one from HP; finally a driver that doesn't require 10 million background processes) rather than a generic postscript or laserwriter driver that some links recommend. I imagine bad, bad things would happen if I tried to print locally at the same time, but at least it works.
   Posted by rmeyer at 6:41 AM

December 15, 2005

Hey, Apple?

How about if "party-shuffle" by default does not include podcasts. For that matter, shuffle-songs on the iPod either. Heck, how about if unless I specifically ask for it, you just never play a podcast.

Nothing quite like rocking out to shuffle only to have some random blogger suddenly talking about AJAX or unit testing, or whatever.

:-)

December 2, 2005

So on a PC or unix, the web browser choice is easy; firefox. So now I have this Mac, and the choices are overwhelming.

So there's Safari, which I think is a great browser. Works with most sites, blazingly fast, and very "mac like" for lack of a better term (obviously, being produced by Apple). I really like Safari. There are a few sites it doesn't render right though, and it does use the metal look and feel. But the interface I love (so few buttons).

Then there's firefox, which has been my primary on and off for a bit. Until 1.5 it was noticeably slower than Safari, but 1.5 has closed that gap considerably. Loads of plugins like greasemonkey, liveheaders, and the web developer toolbar make it indispensable anyway. But no support for Emacs editing keys in the text fields, or the mac-wide spell checker or dictionary.

Then I discover Camino. which is also fast, renders all sites (based on FF), and is very Mac like. It's big ding is no support for emacs editing keys or the spell checker. It's a more-mac like FF, which is useful at times, but no FF plug-ins.

Finally, there's the Shiira Project which has a slew of cool stuff. Sadly, being WebKit based instead of firefox based it still has the same occasional rendering issue.

So at any given time, I have about 2 web browsers running. Should I bother to choose, or just be a browser whore? What do you use?

November 7, 2005

So we got a DirectTV DVR (Tivo) today. This is our first DVR.

Upon purchase and on the way home, I promptly forgot all about our phone line situation. We have speakasy voice over IP (VOIP), so we just have one jack out of the terminal adaptor. Motorla's manual for the thing says that you can't/aren't allowed to hook it into your home phone.

So first I thought maybe those wireless phone jacks. But those apparently cost $80. Yuck.

I called my good bud Andy who has both Tivo and Vonage voice over IP. And he has tied the jack back into his home phone, but did add the suggestion of disconnecting the loop from the phone company. Sounds good, I'll give it a shot.

So I get home and pop open my phone box. Wow, surprise, it's actually nicely done. With the surprise that it's fairly complicated. We knew the previous owners had a lot of lines, but wow. There are two split boxes, one with 6 lines and one with 2, and it's not at all obvious what feeds what. Luckily they all have little modular jumpers to connect the house loop into the telco end. I love those. So I disconnect 'em one at a time 'til I find our DSL line. Yay, off the grid.

Figuring I can't possibly be lucky and guess what goes where, I start with my toner (dead battery, run to Radio Shack to get a replacement, they are out, find one at Rite-Aid...you know the drill).

So I plug it into the desired jack upstairs. Of course, that signal's not present in the office. So I find it in the box and mark it. Then I pick one of the 3 office jacks and tone it back to the box. Now I build a crappy jumper wire between the two. Finally, take the phone line out of the DSL modem and into the jack that's now jumped to the other jacks. Viola! Dial tone upstairs. And it even works with the DirecTV modem on the first try. All told, about 45 minutes worth of work (not counting trip to store).

I love my little Ideal ABS line tester. Sort of a poor man's buttset, but with an optional toner attachment. For only about $80-90 you get a toner and something that makes it easy to check line polarity and dial tone. Every time I use it I save tons of time. Highly recommended item.

Before and after pictures of the box. I highlighted my jumper wire in green.

Now we're Tivo'ed up. Man the thing is cool. Should have got one sooner, but now I'm lusting after the 3-4 tuner HD monster for downstairs, but that's just extravagent...right?

October 7, 2005

Finally, my voice over IP is up. Took a while and didn't work when it first arrived, but it's all working fine now. Sound quality seems good, phone rings...neato. I'll keep you posted.

August 21, 2005

Okay, some problems solved. Printer installed after much handwaving. Go grab these drivers and install them. Then reboot. Then you can browse to your hp printer (6110 in my case) on your windows computer and actually have it print.

iMovie = cool! Other than two crashes. Save often.

I think Safari wins. It's just too damn fast. The pop-up blocker sucks though, and disallows all popups. At least it's accessible via an easy to get to menu.

New issue: keyboard types double letters. Appears to be somewhat of a common problem. Drives me batty. Might have to buy new keybboard. Annoying to say the least. I'm sure it's some quirk of my typing style, but so far i've managed to get through life without a single other keyboard givinng me this problem, and the forums seem to indicate others have similar problems. Jeez. (section left uneditted for effect).

August 20, 2005

So my "switch" is so far going pretty well. I don't have any of my data from Eric's computer yet, so that will be another fun thing to get running, but in no particular order, here are some things that I haven't figured out yet. Comment if you want to, or if you know the answers...

• Should I switch the control/command key with the modifer menu? I think I have to because of needing to use windows computers so much. I think not switching will just confuse my fingers...
• What's the "Mac Standard" shortcut for moving to the end or beginning of a line. home/end doesn't seem to work. Emacs keys work in some places but not all...
• In general, what on earth is with the keyboard shortcuts. Emacs works someplace out of the box (cool!), others have different ones...I'm confused and there doesn't seem to be a master cheat sheet. Is there a canoncial geek option that people know about?
• Printer; our only printer right now is a offficejet 6110x all-in-one hooked up to my wife's computer. It was easy to find and setup; easier than attaching a network printer in windows and orders of magnitude easier than in linux. Only problem is when I print, I just get blank pages. It's using a gimp driver for a fall back model. Maybe I should install the hp drivers for mac, but they are like 60 MB, and if they are anything like the windows drivers include a bunch of useless things that seem to actively interfere with the system's proper operation...
• Finally, what's the mouse of choice? I went with my ancient logitech one, but I still don't get the middle button to open in a tab under firefox, and the right click doesn't work everywhere (like in iTunes).
• Safari or Firefox? Safari actually seems pretty good, and is too fast to believe. That's pretty compelling...and has Emacs editing keys, which I can't yet make go with ff. But I lose type as you find...

So there 'ya go. Easy enough to poke around in and get stuff done, but I've not yet got the stuff I need to be totally productive yet.

August 19, 2005

Uhhh, okay, that's a lot of memory for a web browser..."Hello, Apple? Yes, I'm going to need to order another 2GB of RAM, STAT!"

June 16, 2005

Ever had a card intermittently fail to read? My ATM card (that was thankfully just replaced) would read someplaces and not others. Or it would take 2-3 attempts to get it; this went on for about a year. The card had obviously become partially demangetized.

During this time it was subjected to an amazing amount of home grown techniques by store clerks to get it to read. These include:

1. Putting cellophane tape over the strip (without asking)
2. Rubbing hand lotion on the strip
3. Putting the card in a plastic bag and swiping it
4. Trying to remove the cellophane tape
5. Rubbing quickly on jeans

I don't know what my favorite is. I wish everyone would just leave my card alone. Try it 3-4 times at different speeds and directions, and if it doesn't read, please don't abuse it any further. Number 5 seems like the easiest to dream up a half-explanation for; static electricity generating some extra coercivity or something maybe. It's certainly better than the tape or the hand lotion.

I think all of this is observational bias and incorrect reinenforcement. Since broken cards are often intermittent, if you run them 4-5 times you'll probably get one to work. If that happens 2-3 times after applying hand lotion, then hand lotion just became the ATM card cure-all, no matter how many times it fails to work.

Anyone else have strange things done to their magnetic stripe cards?