I’ve been having some odd performance issues and have been trying to track them down. A Verizon technician came out, checked my jack, my light and it all looks good.
Then he heard I was still on PPoE and said “We should get you moved to DHCP” which I agreed with.
This afternoon he called me saying his supervisor said “no” and that the only way to switch me would be for me to call in, cancel my service and then sign back up! How ridiculous is that?
But there is a method to their madness - I’m still on the early adopter rate and canceling would get them out of that contract.
My car has been creaky lately, really creaky, so along with my milage woes, I’ve started tackling issues.
First I checked the tire pressure and it was low, around 28psi. Increased to 34.
Next, I took the car up to Mike at SHO Parts NW who did wonderfully on the cam sprocket welding. In the process of checking out the squeak, we noticed the positive battery terminal was corroded badly. He spent about 30-40 mins cleaning that poor thing - It even copper coated his tools, but we got the car starting again. That lead to a new battery today at Sears, which I would suggest because they looked up my current battery which I got from them 50 months ago and gave me $38 back. Now the car cranks instantly - Diehard Gold seems like a winner.
Anyway, Mike took off the left wheel and after some tests decided it was the tie rod end. He popped off the tie rod and yep, the aluminum shaft was grinding inside the aluminum bushing, which it should not even be moving. He worked the tie rod end around, loosening it up, and put it all back together. The noise was better, but still there, so we did the right side and it was worse.
Now, the car is quiet again and next weekend we’ll be putting brand new tie rod ends on, as well as changing all four O2 sensors (they are factory original still) and getting an alignment done.
Between the O2 sensors and tire pressure, I should see some improvement in mileage.
Along with this security issue, Font Book ran into corrupted fonts which I removed as noted earlier. I had also tossed my Caches and byHost folder to see if that would help.
As a side effect, Mail.app was drawing its from field on top of the subject field. Safari and OmniWeb had the wrong display font. Even though Times, a system font, showed in User A’s font book, it did not show in mine.
So on a lark I tried selecting all fonts in /System/Library/Fonts/ and did File->Open. Then I quit font book and now Mail, Safari and Omniweb are happy.
For awhile I would get issues about certificate errors, etc. Today, I could not go to my webmail, check mail nor go to say godaddy.com in Safari, Omniweb nor Mail.app.
After 90 mins of mucking around, deleting corrupted Fonts (now my TextMate font is all messed up, later issue) I found this thread on apple discussions
In short, deleting com.apple.security.revocation.plist from ~/Library/Preferences/ and relaunching Omniweb/Mail cured the problem!
USC makes me fill out this interactive PDF for expenses. Preview does not handle these, and the damned PDF has 0s in place, so I can’t really edit it unless I buy PDFPen and put blanks over the 0s.
So I download Acrobat Reader. Excuse me, I download the Acrobat Reader Downloader. Install that. That then downloads Acrobat Reader. Install that.
Open this form. It warns me that I cannot save my changes and I must print to paper and file it. So I make my changes, choose Print and using the PDF menu in the print dialog, choose “Save as PDF”
Now to preface, this works in any, any, any OS X application that supports printing.
Until today.
Adobe patched that nice little button and put up a dialog that said “You can’t save this way -> use File menu save”
Of course they had already told me that won’t work.
So John Warnock’s paperless office is forcing me to print to paper. Yes, thats right. I receive an electronic form, fill it out electronically, which updates the subtotals and totals electronically, then to email back I have to print to paper and scan
How ironic.
How crappy.
I’ll just take a screen shot. Thanks, Adobe.
Update: Barry told me to send this to Adobe, so I filed a bug against Reader:
Out of the box, the router will connect you to the IPv6 Internet using an automatically configured tunnel. This means putting IPv6 packets put inside regular IPv4 packets. Those of you who really want to test IPv6 (you know who you are) are better off manually configuring a tunnel to your ISP or a tunnel broker, this is faster. If you don’t want IPv6 and don’t want to turn it off on all MacOS X and Windows Vista systems connected to the AirPort Extreme, you can select “Link-local only” as the IPv6 mode. If you leave IPv6 turned on, you may want to select “Block incoming IPv6 connections” to turn on the IPv6 firewall or your network is wide open over IPv6, even if it’s firewalled over IPv4.
The set has been on for about 5 hours and we can hear the fans now. Am not sure we should be hearing the fans in a 71 degree room after 5 hours of use. Am going to check into it.
Its a low to medium hum and it colors the audio from my center speaker.
Wow. The set arrived on time from Video Only today. The delivery guys were quick, made sure it worked and took off.
I immediately adjusted the basic settings to get rid of the sharpness and overbright out of the box settings and it looks incredible, even without ISF calibration.
I watched some ESPN and noticed the “ticker tape noise” but its not a big deal.
I played Elebits, Rayman and Madden on the Wii. All look great and I did not notice any game lag. I used the Rayman Dance game as a test of that.
I watched some of The Incredibles with my Samnsung upscaling DVD player and it looks fantastic.
I took some photos and a comparison photo with the old set: Look
Well I took the plunge and bought a Mitsubishi 57732 today. Its a 57″ DLP rear projection set which will take up the same space as my current set, but is shorter, which is nice for viewing, but will make playing the Wii more interesting (depending on viewing angle)
I am concerned about RBE (Rainbow Effect) so I got Video Only to give me a 5 day refund policy (30 day in store credit) which was nice of them.
It comes tomorrow and is replacing my TW56X81 which has been a workhorse for 7 years but the power supply is going (has to re-power it on almost every time I turn it off now) and it got reset poorly years ago, so its time.
I wanted to hold out for SED because of RBE and gaming issues, but with the 5 day trial and 1 year no payments/interest, I think its a safe bet.
The floor model looked good - not great, but they split the component signal 800 ways and of course not calibrated.
I’m thinking of skipping ISF and getting myself a Spyder TV so I can tune friend’s sets as well. Comments welcome.
Over at CNET there is an article about malicious javascript taking advantage of the fact that routers from Linksys, D-Link, Netgear who knows who else have known, default passwords.
This hack uses your web browser to log in to your router using the default password and reprogram your router to use the hackers Domain Name Server! This means when you type in say www.citibank.com you are taken to the hacker’s server, not your banks!
(Mom, you are fine, we’ve changed your password)
I’ve often commented on the fact that while default passwords are necessary, a router should not function until the password is changed from the known default. Your web browser should take you to, minimally, a screen saying you need to change the password.
On Macs with Airport, Apple could insist this as well and then popping up a nice dialog at any internet access attempt.
Roxio rejected my $20 Toast Titanium rebate for my DOWNLOADED Toast due to “missing upc proof of upgrade” (even tho I had to supply my old serial number).
I got a nice little postcard in the mail, so i called the rebate center and the dude looked up my rebate and immediately oked it. What a joke. They just reject them now and hope you never respond.
Apple’s new Airport Extreme N base station has a neat feature called AirDisk. You can attach drives to the USB 2 port on the base station and share them with users on your network, or over the internet apparently.
Installation is easy. With the Airport Utility, you click Disks and choose how you want to share the drives you might attach. You can simply use the same password as the base station, assign a password to access the disks, or create disk accounts with privileges.
I chose to assign a single disk password. I pressed Update to save my changes and the base station rebooted. I found this fairly poor, as if I want to do basic disk administration, I have to knock off other users who might be using Skype, etc. You should not have to reboot the base station to change anything other than WAN settings.
I attach my drive and my laptop says “hey, I see new drives!” because I had installed the Airport software. I told it to mount the drives and gave it the password. Instantly they showed up.
Disk performance is poor. Over gigabit ethernet to the base station (which only has 100/10) I got roughly 700K/s to the drive. I don’t know how this compares if the drive is attached directly to the computer, but I will test later and update.
I do however think this will be nice for Time Machine in Leopard. What one could do is have one time machine drive per computer in the house. Attach it directly via firewire and let time machine do its full backup. Then attach it to a hub in the base station and let the nightly backups happen, slower of course, but they should be much less data.
This way, the drives won’t need to always be on the machine, which in the case of a laptop, is nice.
I got an IM today and was told my new Aiport Extreme N basestation was in at the Mac Store! So I headed on over and picked it up.
After I finished work, I plugged it into the laptop via ethernet to configure it. The Airport Assistant was easy to use and it even told me the ethernet to WAN was not plugged in when I was setting it up, so I would not get internet access!
After setup, I connected over wifi and all worked fine. I then reconfigured the Express to connect to the Extreme, again that went fine.
Finally I moved it, plugged it into my Verizon FIOS ethernet port and powered it up. Instant internet access!
I ran some speed tests and whereas under the linksys I would get 1.8mbps up, 8mbps down over 802.11g, I was now getting 1.8/14.65! In other words, my 802.11g performance is now equivalent to the lan speeds when connecting out to the internet!
Both of Elizabeth’s Windows XP laptops are only getting 3.x mbps down and i have not determined what that issue is yet.
I plugged in my Canon ip4200 printer, which wasn’t seen by the Mac Book Pro. I then realized that I didn’t have the drivers on this machine and they are not part of Tiger. When the printer was connected to the G5, it had the drivers and thus no other machines needed them. Now, the basestation acts more like a direct connection to the printer and thus all machines that want to print will need the drivers installed.
I have not tried AirDisk yet.
The first major issue came up trying to use a corporate VPN client from Windows. No go. After some research, its a widespread problem. One solution is to set up a reserved IP address for the computer needing VPN access and then set the “default host” (dmz) to that machine’s IP. This lame workaround works, but exposes the machine to non-firewalled internet access. Hopefully a fix is shortcoming.
However, while the dmz was set up routing all ports to the PC, Erick video chatted me and it worked fine! Instant connection too.
Pros
Fast 802.11g performance with Mac Book Pro Core Duo (full 15mbps down)
Easy setup
AirDisk fast reads
Stronger signal than Linksys WRT54gs
Cons
Need default host work around to make Windows SonicWall VPN client work
Windows 802.11g performance very slow (3 vs 15mbps) - Wired speed is fine - Same performance on WRT54GS!
Need to reboot after making any changes, such as to add a new user to AirDisk
Updating/Rebooting does not reset FIOS PPOE connection -Base station thinks it has a connection, but it doesn’t. Have to pull the power plug.
I, like every other microwave oven owner, has had to deal with the buildup of smells in their oven. I clean mine, and will even more now that I’ve gone back to scrubbing sponges thanks to new data showing that nuking a sponge for 2 minutes kills all bacteria in them!
However, thats still not enough to cure that popcorn odor, or last three frozen dinners odor. Enter baking soda.
I use Arm & Hammer refrigerator baking soda (which is just baking soda in a box with open sides to allow more surface area to contact air) in my refrigerator and freezer. It works incredibly well and I replace mine every 3 months or so.
Thus I decided to try a box in the microwave oven as well. I take it out while cooking of course and each time I put it back, I turn it upside down to shake up the baking soda some.
Don’t buy any music from the big four labels. None of it. No iTunes music, no CDs, and best of all, don’t pirate it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t tell your friends about it.
If the RIAA wants Apple to license DRM so they can cram it down our throats even deeper, I say a big “Screw You!” to the RIAA.
Now, is there a site where you can enter a song and find out who will be paid if you buy that song?
In the end, we the consumers control the music business. The sad reality is, we’re all dolts and go along with the crap they feed us just so we can listen to some artist they have deemed worth of their promotion.
Buy only open and free non-big four music. See how they like them Apples.
Over at the get a mac page is a wonderful new “Security” ad discussing Vista’s over zealous firewall.
On the same page is this text:
No upgrade nightmares. Before you can even think about Vista, you’ll likely need a new PC. Or upgrades for memory, hard disk, and graphics card. Why go through all that hassle, when you can just get a Mac?
Well, I for one have experienced upgrade nightmares on OS X. Such as:
Installation does not upgrade every component, leaving broken apps
Upgrading from Panther to Tiger left cache crud in my user library folder causing all sorts of grief
Failure to reboot after a system update upgrade
I have personally found that in order to have a good upgrade experience, I must:
Run Alsoft’s $100 DiskWarrior 4 prior to installation
Download a “combo” updater if available
Quit all applications manually, including background applications
Run the combo updater
Reboot immediately after installation
Because OS X does not force you to quit your applications, or check the disk first, I feel it leaves a lot of room for improvement in this regard.
Sure, OS X upgrades probably go much smoother than Windows upgrades, but to claim “No upgrade nightmares” is simply false.
Tonight was a good night in the World of Warcraft. I got two new chest pieces and this really nice dagger for killing a uber boss in Shadowmoon. Thanks to Nobunaga and Stormfist for letting me tag along. They were on the same stage as I was so we five manned the boss.
