As most Macintosh diehards know, Apple is rumored to be close to releasing Mac OS 10.3, codenamed “Panther” This Panther category will be used for all Panther related articles.

I’m looking for a cordless phone (not a cell phone) that will:

• Not interfere with 802.11b/g
• Support bluetooth headsets (so I can walk around with phone on hip)
• Bluetooth to OS X for caller ID lookup, and maybe syncing (some) #s to phone

Anyone have any ideas?

Julie and I went out shopping for fabric and I came home with $40 of world navigation print in blue on white cloth. Is going to work great for my office!

I also got a second pair of Merrell shoes, and wanted a third but they didn’t have my size. My shoes look like:

Several months ago Comcast took over my cable modem service from ATTBI. Ever since then, I’ve been randomly punted from my Internet connection with either my Linksys lan or wireless router, and also my Netgear routers. The connection could not be re-established until the router was reset.

After months of haggling, I think I have finally discovered the problem. I first read on Broadband Reports that some attbi customers were being assigned the same IP addresses. This bit of info made sense to me, as it explained why I would randomly get the boot and why I could get back on after a router reset. I did not know the solution however.

Then on 9/24 I purchased a Motorola SB5100 cable modem to replace the Toshiba PCX2200 I had bought the week prior as I did not like the Toshiba’s slow 10baseT, half duplex WAN port. I called Comcast to have the MAC address provisioned, and the gentleman told me I could not, but rather I had to use the SAS registration system. After explaining I had my Toshiba MAC provisioned, he did not budge and asked me to log in.

Being on a Mac, he told me to plug the Mac directly into the cable modem and go to Oregon’s SAS server, sas.r1.attibi.com. IE could not find it, so he put me up to level 2 support. While on hold, I found out from a graphic I downloaded off of broaddbandreports.com that I needed https://sas.r1.attibi.com. Dumb IE, But it got me to level 2 support, so I was happy heh. I was now able to get to the login screen, but I did not have my account ID nor registration code.

The level 2 support guy told me that Comcast is indeed getting more picky about how it hands out IP addresses, and none of my equipment was registered with Comcast! Not knowing that I needed to do this, he cleared out the three MAC addresses registered, gave me my account and registration information and let me log in.

I then was registered, we reset the cable modem and I was surfing.

Then he had me plug in the Netgear WGR614 wireless router, plug the Mac back into the router and reload the SAS server page. Sure enough, it said the router was not registered. So I had two options. Replace the MAC address on the registration with that of the router, or use the Netgear’s cool “Use this Computer” option on the Basic Settings router setup page to clone the Mac’s MAC address into the Netgear. I chose to clone the address and once the router reset, loading the SAS server page showed me as registered.

This was on Wednesday, 9/24 at 11:30 am, I wrote this piece at 6pm on Wed (still running and it was posted on 9/26, 50 hours later. I believe this solved my common drops.

Summary:

Comcast is giving out IPs to any device that requests them, such as a router. My theory is that if that device is not registered, then the IP is not reserved and can later be handed out to another customer. This of course changes the route tables at Comcast and you are effectively “off the net.” If you reset your router, you either get a new IP, or pull the same old one, effectively bumping the other customer off the net.

I have no hard data to back this up - But since we got the MAC address of my equipment properly registered, it has worked fine.

Here is the graphic that I got off broadbandreports.com containing the SAS regions and server names. If you are an ex-ATTBI customer and are having connection issues, give this a shot. If you log into your SAS server and it says you are not registered, it could be the source of your woes. Call Comcast and get your equipment registered.

This wired article talks about the new silvery logo Apple is about to unveil

Got an old mac? Thinking about a G5? Someone on Apple’s discussion boards posted this about their dual 2ghz machine:

“Converting my 26 minute movie to a DVD format took 36 hours on my G3 b/w 300Mhz. Takes under an hour on this one, including burning. And this is a stock machine!”

I was just talking to my brother about this last night! This trick solved the problem!

Apple Tip to speed up AppleWorks launches

From the Apple discussion boards:

Greetings,

We are aware of an erroneous fan error that Apple Hardware Test (AHT) may report on Power Mac G5s. If you run AHT and receive either of the following errors:

2Fan/4/x : Fan For BackSide: This error code usually indicates the Drive Bay has failed. The Drive Bay fan is located between the hard drive(s) and SuperDrive.

2Fan/4/x: Fan For Slot: This error code usually indicates the PCI Slot fan has failed. The PCI Slot fan is located in front of the PCI slots near the front of the computer and just under the SuperDrive.

Do the following:

1. Remove the outer door and verify the Drive Bay fan and the PCI slot fan are spinning (If the fan is spinning, there is nothing wrong) 2. If either fan is not spinning, take the computer to an Apple Authorized Service Provider for service

Note: AHT v. 2.1 has been updated to v. 2.1.1 and contains a revised fan test. The new version of AHT will be available soon.

Mark Apple Support

Thanks to my gracious boss a Dual 2ghz G5, 1GB RAM, 160gb HD, Radeon 9800 Pro, SuperDrive with Bluetooth is on order! Could be a month or more before I see it, or a week, Apple is all screwed up on their shipping it seems.

Yay!

On the Apple KBASE updates from last night is:

iCal 1.5 for Mac OS X: Information and Download This article contains information about the iCal 1.0.2 for Mac OS X and a link to the software download.

The document only lists 1.0.2, but the title says it all.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.2.8 today and along with it a new version of Safari, 1.0v85.5 (which shipped in 10.2.7) This new version now renders Toms Hardware much better than it did just a scant 8 hours ago (I had to use Mozilla)

The java based applets I use (Digichat and the speed tools at broadbandreports.com) still don’t work - let’s hope those get fixed shortly! (Both involve applets opening windows with other applets in them, in the latter’s case, the results of the test)

Good job Apple, keep the fixes coming!

I keep a album of photos at http://www.geeksrus.com/albums/ and I have been using Transmit to sync my local photo folder, which is generated by Simeon Leifer’s wonderful BetterHTMLExport. I’d noticed that transmit was not doing a proper job, and was slow!

So having recent learned how to use rsync over ssh, and learning how to use public/private keys with SSH on my web server (which also runs Unix, the same as Mac OS X) I was able to make a simple script to keep my web album folder in sync with the one on my hard disk. not only does it work, it is lightning fast!

Here is the script:

#! /bin/sh

cd ~/path/to/you/albums/

rsync -azv -e ssh –progress * yourlogin@your_ssh_server:path/to/remote/albums/

If you have set up a ssh key on your Mac, and put the public key on your server, then you can just run this script and wham, you’re synced! You can learn how to set up your ssh passwords by issuing the following command in the terminal, pressing space to get all of the text, then search for “password”

man ssh

here is the text that is important:

ssh implements the RSA authentication protocol automatically. The user creates his/her RSA key pair by running ssh-keygen(1). This stores the private key in $HOME/.ssh/identity and the public key in $HOME/.ssh/identity.pub in the user’s home directory. The user should then copy the identity.pub to $HOME/.ssh/authorizedkeys in his/her home directory on the remote machine (the authorizedkeys file corresponds to the conventional $HOME/.rhosts file, and has one key per line, though the lines can be very long). After this, the user can log in without giving the password. RSA authentication is much more secure than rhosts authen- tication.

So today started off with some errands. First off to Staples to see what kind of chair mats they had. I have a vinyl one for hardwood floors and it is fine, except for that the chair makles dimples in the mat, so rolling around becomes a problem. This may be because I have it on a carpet and maybe the carpet mats are thicker, but I’d rather find something hard. Matt suggested plexiglass, so I looked at home depot but they only had this ugly, easily scratched blue stuff. So the search continues. Have ideas? Please leave a comment.

Next door was Comp USA. My I have spent a ton there. A 6 foot USB extension for the scanner and one mouse pad later, I was done. Also spoke with the Apple rep there. I want to see if I can get a deal on my G5. Comp USA had these cool, thin, leather like pads, but they caused too much drag. They only had one of the 3M Precision Mousepads (the best and thinnest on the planet) so I picked it up, even though it is of fish.

Next down the street was Home Depot. No mats there, either.

Across the street I went to Meier and Frank, having learned they are the place that sells my cologne. The store I got it at is half way cross town and they didn’t have any of the deodorant, so I checked my local one and wow, they had a lot of Armani. And I got to watch the Blazer girls dance five feet from me. Not sure what they were doing on the second floor of Meier and Franks, but i sure was not complaining. Amazing how 7 super petite women can make the floor of a dept. store undulate. I was glad to get out of there. The clerks looked nervous too - the pens on the counters were actually rolling back and forth.

So with Orange Julius and deodorant in hand, it was off to Home Depot to check out said plexiglass. I also picked up 200 black zip ties and I needed some rock for the bottom of my newly painted pot, and sure enough, I had to buy a river bed. Well not that bad, but I had to get a 3 cubic foot bag to get 4 rocks. Only cost me $2.97, so if you need some pebbles, let me know. I’ll scatter them around the edge of the garden I suppose.

Then it was to Fred Meyer for soda and juice. I didn’t need a second file cabinet as I cut the side out of the clock box and made a top for my wire cabinet to set the scanner on. I’d like to find someone who can custom cut a piece of glass like my desks for the top of it. Julie says I am the “glass king” now, heh. Welcome to my castle, here is the windex - get to work.

I had been noticing that my car beeper was starting to take two presses sometimes and realizing I have not put batteries in it, that made them about 6 years old, so a stop into Radio Shack and $6 later, I have fresh batteries.

Popped across the street to Worst Buy - I dislike them, but hey, they had tons of 3M mouse pads, so I bought two more. $30 of mouse pads, this office is getting expensive heh. But they work so well! I didn’t get the optical pads - nobody had em, but the normal ones work just fine.

I then headed home, put down my mouse pads, installed my USB extension for the scanner, tested it, and now I need to think about food! I still need to solve the mat issue and a couple of others.

Tomorrow is yelling at Netgear, seeing as it looks like their new firmware for the v2 model of the wired router fixes the connection issues. I have v1 of both wired and wireless, and I want a fix, damnit.

And oh so much fun work to do, am excited!

Steve

Check out this cluster of 1,100 Power Macintosh G5s

America is not screwed because of terrorism, we’re not even screwed because we go to war under auspicious means. We screwed because people who presume to have intelligence make decisions like running Windows on ATMs

Good lord, when will people wake up!

Aye, tis truly talk like a pirate day

Loved Pirates of the Caribbean I did, both them ride and now t’movie. To all me mateys who have walked the plank headed straight for Davey Jones’ locker before me, and them that thar surely will after, my mug to you!

Comcast came out today and cut back some of the cabling, put water protectors on the taps and now my new cable modem is sitting in the rack with the rest of the equipment! I am a couple of desks and one curtain away from a new office, whoot!

I had some really weird stuff start happening. First Class (two versions) would take 2 minutes to launch. Excel would lock up when quitting, if I had text on the clipboard. I could not figure it out! I was not sure if they were related, so I deleted all of the FC prefs, reinstalled, nothing helped.

Then I tried a second user with Excel. Same problem. Ok so it wasn’t my user preferences.

Then I tried word. Same problem, but it put up a “Connecting to the printer…” dialog! Whoa!

So I checked and yep, I had a remote printer set up (the only one), that server was off and Mac OS X was very unhappy. In fact, I could not delete it or anything.

So, Print Center Repair 3.01 to the rescue! I used the button on the “Print Center & System Files” tab named “Reset Print Center” and now my Mac launches all applications quickly, Excel quits fine and First class launches quickly.

I also noticed I had printer sharing turned on my laptop (oops) so that is now off too. The two of these issues must have combined to really confuse CUPS, the OS X printer sharing software.

Be sure to keep Print Center Repair on any Mac you use!

Interesting article on why Macs are not used more often.

According to a slashdot article, Verisign has added wildcards to their .com, .net etc DNS records.

This means if you misspell a domain name (like www.appppple.com) and that domain name is not registered with anyone, it will redirect to a verisign server with ads that they will make money on. Great. Not.

So, the wonderful folks who write BIND, the DNS lookup software that every unix box uses (including most ISPs, or you can install on OS X) have decided to block this IP so if you do a lookup and BIND gets back that IP address, instead of returning it, they will return an error.

I love it! Touché! This is why no one organization, such as Microsoft, should control every piece of the software puzzle. Checks and balances.

Update:I have installed BIND BIND 9.2.3rc2 on my Mac and now I am no longer redirected to verisign. As the articles point out, Verisign doing this change to DNS without the approval of standards committees, and this is causing some spam filters to consider the entire internet as spam, potentially passes your passwords onto Verisign and other nasties. I say to the BIND organization, “Bravo!”