Not to Knock J.K. Rowling but…

Via Daring Fireball (via John.C.Welch)

New Home, Old Router

So I’ve moved house. Last weekend was the big day and we got a whole house moved in one day, that included picking up keys and going to Ikea.

Now the biggest problem is connectivity. And it explains why I’m in Starbucks doing this. We got out BT line connected last tuesday. Then I called Virgin to get Broadband ordered. And then it stopped, cos they didn’t have our new number on they’re system. So I called back the next day, and tried again, with no luck. So I tried a third time on Friday and had success. So our broadband will be active next thursday. THURSDAY! Thats a year away when there is an Apple Event between (New ipods, lots of them, and a cheaper iPhone YAY!).

But the real problem is the router. I had to switch back off my Linksys WRT54G using DD-WRT to my old Netgear DG834G as its phoneline broadband, not cable/dsl. And the problem is my Macbook Pro seems to struggle staying on or even finding the wireless network. And I don’t know why. Its plain as day there. Only one other Wifi box nearby, which is on channel 11 and I’m on 1 or 2. But I can’t get it to connect.

I can’t figure out why. It doesn’t matter too much now since there is no interweb connection but when that bad boy starts, I will wanna use it.
So if anyone else has an idea, or a similar problem with their DG834G, let me know. Where is my SSID!!!!

 Update: Turns out the problem seems to be with the channel my DG834G was broadcasting on. I had it running on 1, which didn’t work well. After some browsing the Console and trying it out again, I noticed the problem. I’ve switched up to 6 and it works perfectly now.

Safari Booster

So I’ve recently been trying to use Safari more effectively, as it is a lovely browser and much quicker than Firefox IMHO. To do this, I’ve installed various plugins. And here’s what. Credit to Merlin Mann for some of these.

Firstly, you need to install SIMBL which is a plugin manager. Go to here and follow the instructions.

For all these, you need to download the plugin, and copy the *.bundle file to ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

SafariSource – Adds colour marking to the View Source windows to make reading the source much easier.
SafariStand – Adds massive support for a preview sidebar of tabs open, quick search key commands, flash/plugin blocking, Bookmark Shelf so you can bookmark a whole workspace of websites and launch easily later
TabStop – Asks you if you want to close all tabs when more than one is open (nice save for those keyboard happy people)

In addition to those, i have also:

Sogudi – adds abbreviation use for specific website search, so ‘gg chris pirillo’ searches Google, ‘am long winters’ searches Amazon.co.uk, ‘wk lost’ searches Wikipedia for Lost. Completely customizable, add your own websites, just remember the short codes.
Inquisitor – Fantastic plugin for the search bar. Adds spotlight style functionality, giving you search results as you type, and search suggestions. Also will tell you the sites you visited directly from the search box (nice if you forget which one you looked at)
SafariBlock – Allows you to block website content (ads for instance). Worth checking out this page for a good starting list of sites to block, or add your own.
PithHelmet – Useful program for blocking plugins for ads on websites

Well thats it. I haven’t really tried the Safari Beta yet cos I’m happy with my setup. My only one complaint of Safari is that some of the Google apps don’t work properly (alignment in Calendar, no Docs support, no chat from gmail.)

Tags: safari, sogudi, safaristand, inquisitor, safariblock, simbl, safarisource

BBC iDon’t-Player-very-well

There’s been some talk recently of the BBC iPlayer service, which allows you to watch BBC TV programming on demand.
There has also been a lot of outcry as using this service seems to be difficult indeed.
The current requirements are as follows:

Windows XP operating system *
Minimum 500Mb (RAM) memory
Internet Explorer 6 browser (or later)
Windows Media Player 10 (or later)
A video and sound card capable of playing high quality streamed or downloaded programmes
JavaScript, ActiveX and Cookies are all enabled
A high speed broadband internet connection

The first problems. XP – What about all those new PC owners with Vista? How exactly can’t it Vista support it when it should be backwards compatible?
IE6 – Firefox is a much better browser, and a large amount of people are using it nowadays.

Then there’s the Mac and Linux users. No supported way of running it. Why? The main reason is probably because it runs on Peer-to-peer networking (much like Limewire or Kazaa). So that means a desktop client, which means background services, which would need to be written from the ground up. There are a number of problems with this. Firstly, the lack of cross platform support. Surely if I’m a License payer I should be able to access these services without having to spend money on either a) a new windows PC (or should I say old as I need XP), or b) some sort of vitualisation method like Parallels, VMWare, or Virtual PC for non-intel Macs. Thats awful.

Web Crash of 2007

I really should watch the news. This passed me by. I think I have some of the internet cached if it helps.

Great Mac Apps – Indepth Part 3

It seems like Part 3 is System Preferences time. Read on….

Growl - Its less of an application and more of a system preference and a hook. Growl allows other applications to display onscreen notices. For example, our previously mentioned app Transmission can show notices when it adds new torrents and when they are done downloading. Adium shows notices when you get an IM, when someone comes online. Other great apps like Cyberduck, Burn, Skype, iStumbler, Twitterific, Superduper and many more. It give you the chance to choose styles of notifications, change transparency of the notices, and many other settings. Give it a go and see how it can change your day?

Flip4Mac – Millions of years ago, a small software company in Seattle created a video codec. That codec was called Windows Media Video (WMV). And given the large use of Windows in the corporate environment, it became quite widely used. But that hinders us wisened Mac users. Luckily Microsoft made a video player, and God said “It’ll do” Lucky for us, someone else wouldn’t settle for it, so made Flip4Mac. Its a quicktime plugin that allows you to view WMV files through Quicktime, rather than the horrid Windows Media Player for Mac (ugh ugh ugh and a few more). It lets you decide if you want to display them in the browser, or load them in Quicktime, which personally I think is better as it gives you the chance to make the window larger. So go and download it, install, then hop into the System Preferences and set it up. Its free, and is now available from Microsoft, who deemed it good enough to remove the one hampster they were employing to keep WMP for Mac up to date.

MenuMeters – You might wonder after a while, how much is my processor being hammered? Or why is my computer going slow. Well install MenuMeters and you can find out at a glance. It allows you to add extra menubar items to your desktop. You can add them for processor speed, RAM usage, network traffic, disk usage. Its recently been updated to a Universal Binary and so it displays the CPU usage for each core on your Core Duo or Quad core Intel chip.

Sidetrack – Remember thosePowerbook, the pre-January 2005 ones before they added the scrolling trackpad? Well I have one, and some others do. Well this lets you scroll! Great! It converts the side of your trackpad to a scrolling section. Great!

MAMP – If you are looking to start your own blog, and have more control over it, you might want to give it a test run before you commit to a domain name and a host, you may want to download MAMP and try things out. It is a self-contained setup with Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Mac. So you can install WordPress, or Typepad, or anything you want to and run it in a test environment. Or even to test updates and changes. Great! I use it to run a local version of WordPress for when I actually bother to get my own domain. It gives you much more functionality than wordpress.com. And remember, its not just for WordPress.

Be sure to check out the original list, Part 1 and Part 2

Hopefully Part 4 will come sooner than this!

HOWTO: Connect to the internet via Three (3G UK) and bluetooth

So I have been struggling recently to get online via my powerbook using my Nokia 6280 handset from Three in the UK. I had signed up for an internet package, and was hoping I could do the same I did with Orange previously, and use my phone as a bluetooth modem.

Alas, it did not work. Three handsets blocked this sort of action to limit the bandwidth on the network, and also charge you for a proper package.

But behold, the solution.

1. Set up your handset as a bluetooth modem using the Bluetooth Setup Wizard. The key here is the handset. I think its the phone itself that blocks the access. So I used an unlocked non-Three handset from eBay, my new(to me) Nokia N70

2. Download the Nokia GPRS/3G scripts from http://www.taniwha.org.uk – Use the Nokia 3G Scrripts. Download and copy the scripts to ~/Library/Modem Scripts (this should be the one at the root of the hard drive, not in your user folder.

3. Load up System Preferences, go to Network, Bluetooth, Bluetooth Modem. Check settings are as follows
a) PPP Tab – Telephone number is Three.co.uk
b) Bluetooth Modem tab – Modem is Nokia 3G CID1

4. Go back to the PPP tab, and click Dial Now. This will open Internet Connect. Tick the box to add a Menu bar icon if you want, if not click Connect.

As long as your bluetooth is on your phone, and its paired (which it should be) then it should connect to the 3G network and give you 3G speeds up to 384kbps

NOTE: This is likely to use up all your alloted data in your package (mine is 10Mb) so be careful of additional charges. This also violates the terms of your contract, and your service may be cut off.

Having said that, its good to have an option when you can’t find a Hotspot

technorati tags:3g, three, bluetooth, modem, macosx

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O2 recommends Netscape Browser

I went to O2 today to look at phones and was greeted by this:

Apparently O2 doesn’t like the beta version of Camino, so recommends Netscape? That’s just f**ked up