I have a plantronics m2 (I think, the white apple one) which has worked fine with a PowerBook and rev A macbook pro, but the santa rosa, no go on the mic. The headphones work ok.

I had migrated from the old macbook pro to the new one using migration assistant. Apparently some audio preferences got borked and the only way to fix them is via the MIDI setup utility!

Thanks to MacOSXHints and my brother’s recent bout with MIDI setup:

• I went to the /Applications/Utilities/Audio Midi Setup.app.
• Under Properties For: and chose Plantronics Headet
• Then on the Channel “M” (for master) I UNCHECKED MUTE.

Now my headset works fine!

My new MacBook Pro 15″ arrived today. It has the Santa Rosa chipset and LED backlight screen. Its late so I will make a quick bullet point list:

• Screen is great. Compared to my 14 month old MacBook Pro, its brighter at the max setting and dimmer at the low setting
• World of Warcraft runs at similar speeds to the x1600, except when it comes to smoke/particle effects. There are no more slowdowns. The overall performance may be a driver tuning issue.
• The machine runs much cooler playing World of Warcraft
• I have not noticed must difference in 802.11n speeds but then again, I have 4 other 802.11g clients on the same router.
• The hard drive feels plenty fast
• Total transition time was 6 hours, including the 2.5 hours of firewire Migration Assistant, then reinstalling things like LIttleSnitch, mySql, Sunversion, etc.
• The migration assistant copied the contents of my boot camp volume onto the main volume, which is ok i guess, but it would have been cooler if it had made a partition and just moved my boot camp over
• I have not tried parallels yet
• I now have 10gb more free space after copying all of my music and photos to the 160gb drive.
• The 4gb RAM from Crucial.com appears to be working flawlessly and was easy to install. Two minutes tops.
• The space bar squeaks when pressed in the center.
• The wifi has been solid all day.
• Moving windows feels snappier, not sure why.

Update: SOLD

I finally listed my PowerMac G5 on ebay! Here is a copy of the description:

PowerMac G5 Auction

Buy It Now and receive free FedEx Ground Shipping!* (See note at bottom)

Apple Macintosh PowerMac G5 Tower model M9032LL/A!

A great personal computer taken care of and loved by the original owner! This PowerMac G5 is great for making those professional looking home movies with iMovie or Final Cut Pro, recording and editing your podcast with GarageBand or video conferencing with iChat. (Software and video hardware not included)

This Macintosh has two unused PCI slots for external SATA cards or extra networking cards. With its super fast gigabit ethernet networking port and fast SATA hard disks, this Macintosh would be a great server for your photo or music collection.

Store data on not one but two hard disks, weighing in at 300gb and 160gb respectively. Both drives are freshly erased and ready for your use, with the 300gb drive having OS X Tiger 10.4.9 installed for you.

Also included is the Radeon 9800 Pro video card which supports both Apple displays with ADC connectors or displays with DVI connectors. An included adaptor allows you to connect your older SVGA monitors!

Includes:

• Dual 2 GHZ G5 processors
• 2GB RAM (Arranged with 1GB in each bank)
• SuperDrive
• One 300GB SATA hard drive
• One 160GB SATA hard drive
• Radeon 9800 Pro video card with 256MB RAM with ADC and DVI connections
• Original Power Mac G5 CD with hardware test (OS X 10.2.7)
• Gigabit ethernet port
• OS X Tiger Upgrade CD
• OS X Tiger 10.4.9 installed
• Bluetooth module + antenna
• Wifi Antenna (NO wifi module)
• One button wired Apple Mouse
• G5 power cord
• Original manuals (10.2.7)
• ADC to DVI adaptor
• DVI to VGA adaptor
• Original packaging
• NO Keyboard
• NO modem (Although the phone cord is included)
• NO AppleCare / Warranty

Shipping Weight: ~50lbs. Shipping to USA only. Paypal only Shipping quote of $60 includes insurance of $1600.

*For free shipping, I will change the invoice to match the Buy It Now Price.

Update: SOLD

I’ve just listed a DirecTV HD DVR HR10-250 for sale on ebay. Take a look if you are interested!

TiVo Auction

Buy It Now and receive free FedEx Ground Shipping!* (See note at bottom)

DirecTV HD DVR HR10-250

If you have DirecTV, love TiVo and have been wanting a DVR to go with your HDTV, this is the unit for you!

Purchased in December, 2005, this TiVo saw one month’s work before I was required to move to a location that did not have any satellite coverage. I was forced to switch to cable and the TiVo has sat unused since January, 2006.

I have fired it up, checked that the menus work, the sound works on composite video and analog audio. When I last used this in my home theater, it was connected via component cables and digital optical audio.

You are responsible for contacting DirecTV and making sure you can get DirecTV service as well as signing up this HD10-250 for service. Please contact DirecTV before bidding if you are unsure about any aspect of this unit or their service.

Includes:

• HR10-250 DirecTV HD DVR
• Record up to 30 hours of High Definition programming or 200 hours of Standard Definition programming!
• Record two shows at once!
• Up to 1080i picture output!
• Original Remote (with brand new batteries!)
• Power cord
• Phone line splitter
• Phone cord
• Component video cable
• HDMI video cable
• HDMI to DVI video cable
• Composite + stereo audio cable
• S-Video cable
• Start here manual
• DirecTV HD DVR User’s Guide
• Original packaging
• NO access card
• NO Warranty

System Information:

Manufacturer Brand: 400 IRD Model: HR10-250 Software Version: 3.1.5f

Shipping Weight: ~14lbs. Shipping to USA only. Paypal only Shipping quote of $17 includes insurance of $400.

*For free shipping, I will change the invoice to match the Buy It Now Price.

Update 3 Apple said to track the status but the battery is not covered even under AppleCare, unless it has a major failure. I hope that doesn’t mean “it burned your house down.”

Update 2 Now that I’ve been on battery for an hour, the full capacity reads 5054! I am taking it in to the Apple Store to get their opinion.

Update! I let the machine run down again, charged overnight, and now my full capacity is down to 4318! 2h15m again. But last night it ran for over 3 hours! Annoying.

Apple today released the Apple Battery Update 1.2 for MacBook / MacBook Pro via software update. Before applying the update, I checked my battery via System Profiler. My 1 year old Mac Book Pro 15″ Core Duo was reporting 4098mAh full capacity

After the update, I removed the battery, plugged it back in, and now I am showing a full capacity of 5082!

Unplugging the power showed nearly 3 hours of life, while playing iTunes, where I had dropped to about 2h15 mins.

Nice!

They have had this price for a couple weeks now. 5 year warranty, 7200rpm, 16mb cache.

The box says $179.99, the sign on the pile (the shelf was empty, but there was a pile around the corner) said $169.99, I spoke to a guy at the hardware desk and he printed me out a sheet for the $119.99.

Perfect for that G5 or Mac Pro!

Steve

My Harmony 890 Universal Remote arrived today!

The included paper documentation is useless. I already had the software installed, so I ran it and told it to change the remote. It found the 890 and had me update the firmware. Then it had me plug in the remote extender to update that.

That worked fine, and I plugged the remote extender into an outlet and then plugged two IR extenders into it. Each extension cable has two IR emitters, which I glued to my DVD player, my stereo, my video switch box and my Comcast DVR.

Everything functioned well, even the DVR player, but the DVD player did not at all. I was sure I had the emitter in the right place, but no luck.

So I used the software’s knowledge base and discovered that I had to enable the emitters. The remote was controlling my devices not the RF extender!

So I told it to use the RF extender for everything but the TV. It then had to reprogram the extender, which I had to dig out from the A/V rack and reprogrammed the remote.

All works fine now.

So then I decide to put an emitter on my new Mitsubishi 57732 TV. I can’t find the IR sensor anywhere so I look in the manual and guess what? My TV uses the entire screen as the IR sensor! The sensors are inside and it uses the mirror to reflect down to them. LOL. So I’m kinda hosed in controlling the TV from under the blankets for the moment, as I am sure where I can put the sensor and have it:

a. functional
b. not look awful

Amazon has some very affordable ($9.95 at time of this writing) Kingston 1gb keychain drives

They also have 2gb and USB versions linked from the same page.

Look

hahah roomba just fell down the stairs, bin came out, and it said “oh oh” in beeps

Guess the stair detector isn’t so hot. hmm

Here is a great hint from the Maccast: Read

Because the blog uses a horrible UI and makes finding links next to impossible, I’ve included the link to Apple: Apple Repair Program

Hopefully this evidence will get the Apple store to replace the fan. I know they have the parts now I took it there originally because I had to leave the next day for my trip. They heard it, but said it was “in spec” yet ordered the fans anyway.

Who thinks this is “in spec?”

Watch

Update:

I called the store and they said that since my machine was in last week, they’ve had two others come in with bad fans. So I took it in, had lunch and when I got back, the machine was repaired.

Awesome!

Thanks to Dave for this link of a MagSafe connector attracting sand.

Here are two recent stories of laptop batteries catching fire. I think I’ll be turning my laptop off when I am not around, although I am not sure if that will actually prevent a battery from exploding.

• http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32550
• http://wcco.com/consumer/local_story_148150249.html

More tests to http://nitro.ucsc.edu, running Talisman 1.2 RC1 on a Linksys WRT54GS 1.1:

10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 1.93Mb/s running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 14.97Mb/s

Yeah!

ok I really want this to work. I bought a refurb base station at The Mac Store. I did this crazy thing because of my iChat woes and also to test the hardware and latest firmware. Nothing like an overzealous geek.

I brought it home and plugged it into my G5. Upon opening the Airport Admin Utility, the software said “Hey, there is new software for your base station, 5.6!” Sweet, so I click upload and off it goes. Within a few mins I had the base station configured for WPA2 and off I went upstairs.

I connected via the Mac Book Pro and opened the Airport Admin Utility and upon connecting to the base station, the software said “Hey, there is new software for your base station, 5.7!” Weird. Ok, so my G5 was out of date somehow. I am not sure why, I always update stuff, even airport on my G5 Anywho, I update.

All is well and having just run some speed tests with my WRT54G2 running Talisman 1.2 RC2, I knew a 1.92mbps up and 2-8mbps down was ok from the living room. I got the same speeds on the AE! Sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

Then Elizabeth on her PC laptop tried to connect. No joy. So after a good while of researching I found out she had older broadcom drivers. Joy. I set up the WRT again and after some fun with that, I had her back on the net so she could work.

Yesterday I got permission to update her machine. So I installed new drivers from HP, but it still didn’t connect. Then I installed a new utility, but still no connection. Then I ran all of the latest MS updates, one of which was for her card (remembering I had just installed the latest from HP not an hour before) and after all of that, it would finally connect.

yay! So I ran some tests with myself, all is good. Until she sat near me on the couch.

With her radio near my radio, the Airport Extreme tests dropped to a horrible 175kbps up and 300-800kbps down. I ran the tests over and over. Nothing helped. I could move into the kitchen and it was a little better, but not much.

I unplugged the airport and reconnected the WRT. With both of us sitting in the exact same spot, I got 1.93mbps up and 8.2mbps down. Over and over.

I had both base stations set to the same channel, same WPA password and in the spot when they were active.

So alas, it looks like it might be going back, unless anyone has some ideas?

Update: I returned it. I picked up Call of Duty 2 instead.

LAN and Wifi speeds comparable to WRT54GS.

Elizabeth’s PC no connecty to Apple. Probably her older drivers. Have not updated yet. Went back to WRT.

Of course Talisman 1.2 RC2 broke wifi, and some firewall issues kept some of it from working at all (no google, etc) so downgraded to RC1.

Fun eh? All to fricken’ ichat.

As you can tell from my mystic posts, I’ve been trying to solve this can’t iChat AV in Tiger issue even though I’m talking to people with PhDs and what not. Or not talking to them should I say.

I had Vonage switch to SIP port 5061, but then eliminated the Vonage router altogether and still had issues.

I then upgraded my Linksys WRT54GS v1.1 to Talisman/Basic 1.2.RC2 and wow, with just uPNP I could talk to John, or Tim, or Patrick, but not more than one of them at once. Grrr.

Oh anf then, my wireless in WPA mode is dead. Known issue, rc3 coming soon.

So I got the offer to buy a refurbed Apple Airport Extreme Basestation for like $20 off list. I’m going to try it but my gut tells me I won’t be happy. I already lose a port, which means some other piece of hardware is needed (I was using 1 2 ports on my linksys in conjunction with a Netgear 4 port gigabit switch). I’ll test the wifi speeds, the lan to wan speeds and see if it actually works for iChat and Vonage. Report later tonight.

Apple, if anyone is listening. Come on, please. At least make a cool wizard that says “Hey, we noticed you actually connected to two people, mind if we snag your router info, ISP so we can let people know what works?” Anything would help other than this religious voodoo we’re going through.

In these days of “Get a Mac” ads, its sad my ichat experiences are reminiscent of why we’d giggle at Windows users.

Over 802.11g via my Linksys WRT54GS 1.1 running Talisman/Basic 1.2.devsnap.RC1

http://http://nitro.ucsc.edu/ is the test suite.

TCP/Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.3.3d click START to begin Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 1.92Mb/s running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 8.11Mb/s The slowest link in the end-to-end path is a 10 Mbps Ethernet subnet

click START to re-test

The WiebeTech TrayDock looks like a really, really neat external firewire solution. Has anyone used one of these?

The initial entry fee is $170, but then it is a mere $50 per drive after that. You can reuse that 80GB drive laying around for $50. Let it store those FCP projects you were deleting for space. Etc, etc.