It doesn’t matter what kind of wireless network you are running at your home,  be it an Apple Airport base station, or one of many other brands like D-Link, Asus, Billion, Netgear, or even a branded one like a Bigpond home wirless network,  they all suffer the problem of network congestion.  By network congestion I mean there are so many other people in your street or block of units with wireless equipment and they all interfere with each other – a bit like lots of people talking together in a crowded room. This  can manifest itself as reduced range on your WiFi network, a drop in speed, your wireless signal dropping out,  or your wireless  signal strength going up and down  randomly. Here’s  how to change your wireless channel so that you won’t clash with the other people around you.

In Australia there are 11 wireless channels in the USA there are 13. When you go and buy a wireless router and bring it home and plug it in it will default  to one of those channels, most likely the middle one – Channel 6.  If your next door neighbours have done the same thing,  chances are all your wireless networks are on channel 6 and  therefore  they are interfering with each other. This  does not reduce the power that your wireless base station puts out, but it does make it harder to your computer to pick up  the signal because it will be picking up next door’s network as well – it’s a bit like trying to listen to a conversation in a noisy room. The best thing to do is change the channel of your wireless device.   There is a slight complication though,  because although there are 11 channels, they all overlap!  Have a look  at this picture:

wireless channels - click to enlarge

All the 11 channels overlap and so the way to use channels that don’t overlap is to use either channel 1, 6 or 11. It used to be the case  that if you are having trouble on say channel 6 you could just switch to channel 1 or 11 and  find some free space.  But as more and more people go wireless these channels are filling up.  For  an example, look at all the wireless networks where I live. (I have used a ubiqity AirOS on a Picostation to get this information, but you can use an iphone app such as WiFiFoFum or a great app for mac OSX called wifi scanner from here.)

A list of the local wireless networks interfering with my home network!

These are all the signals I get sitting in my lounge room at home! And this is in a rural area  with quite spread out houses!  I’d hate to see what was like living in the city. Notice  that although there are 7 networks, most of them are on channel 1, 6 or 11. So I would be better choosing a channel between these, like  3 or 9. This will overlap with the other channels but it will be better than trying to compete directly with them! All wireless routers come with information on how to choose a different channel –  might be time to dig out the user manual!

A Telstra big pond wireless router

Finding the BEST frequency for your location.

I find the best way to work out  the optimum frequency for your wireless network is by trial and error,  and using a little iPhone utility called WiFiFoFum.

Firstly go into your wireless router – you will need the password for this, and change the Channel to 1.

On the airport base station it  this looks like this under Settings, Airport, Wireless:

Selecting a wireless channel

When you have done this, restart your wireless modem, then measure the signal strength (RSSI) using WiFiFoFum, eg -89.

Change the Channel to 2, then do it again.

You will end up with some results like this:

Channel 1 88-89

Channel 2 92-94

Channel 3 84-87

Channel 4 84-87

Channel 5 82-84

Channel 6 83-85 and so on.

Pick the channel that has the best signal – note that a lower number is better as it is measured in -dB so higher means a weaker signal. For me it was channel 5.

You may want to repeat the test another time and another day  because people can turn their wireless modems on and off at different times in the day.

How do I find my wireless  base station settings?

For most wireless routers  you need to surf to their web page from your browser –  Safari or Firefox. To  do this you need the IP  address of your router. To find it  go into your Apple Menu (top left of your screen) , then  system preferences, then network, then click on Airport, then Advanced, then TCP/IP, then have a look at what it says next to Router:

It will be a number like 10.0.0.138, or 168.0.0.1, or 192.168.1.1 or something similar.

Type that number into Safari as if it were a webpage!

Accessing your wireless router to change the channel

This will take you to your wireless Router page (you will need a password that came with the router – check your documentation)  where you can change the channel settings.

You will need to restart the  wireless router each time you change a setting.

If you  have an Apple AirPort base Station you don’t need to go through Safari, you can just use the ‘ airport admin’  utility in your utilities folder.

This is not really something to set and forget –  because other people might change their settings too!

I used to write BASIC code on my good old Commodore 64, but the Macintosh has been a bit impenetrable in terms of where to get started with programming.

I was recommended this book and am using it to work through with my son. It teaches Python, a simple language, using your mac. It’s a beauty.

You can buy it here from Amazon .

If you have a friend with a PC chances are they are sending you documents that use fonts such as Calibri, Corbel and so on. Some of them are quite nice. Here is how to install them on your Macintosh for free – Cambria, Calibri, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel and Candara.

First go to this page where you can download the Open XML Converter for Macintosh. This program allows you to open Office 2008 programs in older versions of Microsoft office. It also includes all the fonts for Office 2008.

So you can either run the installer and it will install itself, or if you are a bit uneasy about installing Microsoft products on your computer, right click on the installer and select show package contents. Open the folder called ‘Contents’ then ‘Packages’ then select ‘show package contents’ of the file that is called OpenXML_all_fonts.
Open the folder called ‘Contents’ then double-click on ‘Archive.pax.gz’

This will create a directory of all the Microsoft fonts and you can install the ones you want simply by double clicking on them.

It will give you a graph like this of the various DNS speeds.

I found out that my DNS (internode) is much faster than google and OpenDNS, so I’ll stick with them.

1. Sign up with justin.tv at http://justin.tv. Your login name will be the web address of your webcast as in justin.tv/loginname

2. Download wirecast from here. You can unlock it for $449 (yes $449) or use it as a demo which has an advertisement for wirecast every minute or so.

3. Plug your digital camera into the mac firewire port and turn it on. Launch wirecast and you will see your camera in the video panel. Drag the image from your video camera from the bottom thumbnail into the main broadcast window to tell Wirecast that that is what you want to broadcast.

4. Go to the Broadcast menu and select ‘Broadcast settings’
Under Encoder Preset, Select ‘flash Low Bandwidth
(this will do a 320 x 240 stream that should stream OK up a 256K uplink.)
Under Destination, Select justin.tv
Enter your justin.tv username and password, press generate RTMP,
Press Save.

Press The broadcast icon in the top left corner, and it should stream, it takes about 30 seconds to get going before you will see it at justin.tv/yourlogin

FREE OPTIONS:
Wirecast costs lots of money.

You can use Quicktime broadcaster as a free alternative to Wirecast, and thanks to justin.tv there’s a page with all the settings for Quicktiem Broadcaster here. I tried Quicktime Broadcaster, and sometimes the stream was just a black page, other times it worked. Also the video quality was slightly less than wirecast. So if you need it to be very reliable I’d go with wirecast. QT Broadcaster seems to be fine once you’ve got it up and running. I found the problem came when I stopped then re-started the broadcast, so once it’s working, keep it going!

There is a setting to use from within the justin.tv webpage to upload video without the help of a third part piece of software like wirecast, but this gave very poor quality video.

I deleted the following 2 files from your Library/LaunchDaemons and it fixed the problem.

com.apple.RemoteDesktop.PrivilegeProxy.plist
com.apple.RFBRegisterMDNS_RemoteManagement.plist

To lodge my e-tax I have to run windows XP on my mac (using Virtual box) but needed to print it via a printer shared from my mac. I assume this will work sharing from any OS X mac to any Windows XP.
Here’s how to do it.

The Overview:

Basically you need to find two settings (Name: and Location:), they are here under printer setup in OSX:

and then you put them in here under windows XP:

It’s not exactly intuitive is it!!!

Here’s the more detailed instructions:

1. In OSX go to APPLE MENU and PREFERENCES and SHARING

2. Click the box that says Printer Sharing to turn on printer sharing.

3. Now go into printer preferences:

4. Click on the printer you want to share and click on ‘Open Print Queue’

5. Click on the little button that says ‘printer setup’

6. Here you find the magic settings – take not of the Name: and the Location:
HINT: you may wish to change them to something short and easy like I have if they are long. You can change them – it doesn’t matter what they are.

Now go into Windows XP.

1. Select Add a printer under Printers:

2. Select add a network printer:

3. The important bit – select ‘connect to this printer’ and type in slash slash location slash inkjet. (Ooh yes don’t you love windows!) like this:

It may ask for your password, but then the printer will appear!
This is windows though, even though the printer appeared, I had to reboot windows for it to actually but it did!

1. First enable the developer menu in safari. To do this QUIT SAFARI, open the terminal and type in the following and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
OR
Download Onyx and under ‘Parameters’ ‘Safari’ select the ‘Enable Debug Menu’ option.

2. Load your page in Safari, and under Develop select ‘Show Web Inspector’

3. This will open a new window down the bottom. Click the Resources Tab, then the Size Tab.

You will now see a graph of all the files on your webpage and how big they are. It will look something like this:

You can see in this example (wpcc.org.au) that the entire webpage is 1.028 MB – reasonably large, most of it images. The best way to reduce it would be to go back and find the original images on your computer and compress them to make them smaller. Lots of these images are quite small and yet are 70KB – they could be reduced to 10 or 20KB probably without muck loss of image quality.

As a comparison:
Apple.com uses about 600K, notice it’s reasonably graphic rich and yet only 250Kb of images.
macintoshhowto.com uses 963Kb – a bit big.
google.com uses 177Kb – very slim!

If you click on ‘time’ instead of size you can see a graph of how long the various parts take to load on your computer.

MobileMe doesn’t achieve this. iCal shared calendars via itunes doesn’t achieve this. After much experimenting I found the best way is through Google calendar.

Google calendar allows editing and viewing from iCal on your mac and from your iPhone, plus you can let anyone else edit your calendar if you want them to. So Google calendar becomes the hub. Here’s how it all works:

STEP 1. GET A GOOGLE CALENDAR ACCOUNT.
You can set up a new calendar in Google at http://google.com/calendar

STEP 2. SYNC ICAL WITH GOOGLE.
Google has released a program called calaboration that will automatically put all the settings for your Google calendar into iCal. Download and run calaboration. It looks like this, you just select the calendars you want to add into your iCal account.

STEP 3. SYNC IPHONE WITH GOOGLE

If you have iphone version 3 you can just use the built in CalDAV to access your Google Calendar. Go to Settings then Mail, Contacts, Calendars then Add Account then Other then Add CalDAV Account.
You’ll see a page like this:

Enter the settings for your google account here and that’s it!

NOTE – More than 1 Calendar.
If you have more than one Google Calendar you’d like to sync, you need to copy the URL of the calendar from ical across to your iphone. To do this, AFTER you have used callaboration to put the google settings into ical, go into ical, preferences, Accounts, Server Settings – it looks like this.

You need to type that URL into the ‘Advanced Settings’ – ‘Account URL’ of the Calendar on your iphone. It’s quite a long text so the easiest way is to copy it from ical into mail, mail it to your iphone, copy it out of mail and paste it in.

NOTE 2: Old iphone software.
If you have iphone software version 2 you’ll need to use Nuevasync. You set it up in your iPhone as a Microsoft Exchange server that points to Nuevasync. You can sync directly from google to iphone but all the calendars come across as one calendar. To choose which colors the calendars are on the iphone, you need to enable them one at a time from neuvasync, checking the iphone calendar each time, and they will import into the iphone in order of the following colors: red (first calendar) , orange (2nd) , blue, green then purple. eg the first calendar you enable will be red, and so on.

There is a design problem with some G4 ibooks. It can appear after a year or so in some machines. After being on for a few minutes, they get a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes. This article describes the problem and how to fix it.

What models are affected?

After doing this survey which involved over 300 faulty g4 ibooks it appears all models are susceptible to this problem.

The original 2003 ibook G4′s (800/933/1Ghz) have the fault. The “Early 2004″ (1Ghz) models up until Oct 2004 have the same motherboard.

The 60G (1.2Ghz) “Early 2004″ model and all the “Late 2004″ model ibooks (1.2Ghz/1.33Ghz) and Mid 2005 (1.33 and 1.42Ghz) have built in airport extreme which means a different motherboard but they still have the fault. Even models with the new motherboards are affected.

What is the fault?

The Danish Consumer Complaints Board did some investigations and confirmed the fault. There is a really good report in the form of a pdf document with close up pictures of the fault here:

www.forbrug.dk/fileadmin/Filer/PDF/ENGF959-orig.pdf

Here is a photo from the paper. You can see the thin black line below the lead which is a crack in the solder.

My ibook is indeed just as the article describes it. The little chip gets hot, and if I press my finger on the chip, it works! Take my finger off, it stops working!
I rang Apple Australia and they don’t acknowledge that the problem exists. They have officially ‘never heard of it’.

The repair:

You need to grab a fine tipped soldering iron and heat up the top few pins of the chip one by one to resolder it to the logic board. Press the chip down while you apply a very clean and fine soldering iron tip to each pin.

This is a very complicated ‘how to’ a bit outside the scope of this site but may be interesting to some. Don’t attempt this one unless you have had lots of soldering experience!
Here are some pictures:

The G4 ibook with the bottom case off. The offending chip is circled.

Here is a closeup of where I have soldered the legs of the chip. You can see the base of the top pins are shinier from the new soldering. I soldered the top 3 or 4 pins on each side, but it’s only the top 2 pins that the fault occurs with as they are the main power pins. I applied a little more solder to the joint as well, that’s why it looks a bit lumpy.

As pointed out in the discussions below, you might want to take out $10 worth of insurance by buying this little app. Then you can set the temperature that your fan turns on a little lower to keep the ibook cooler.

Here’s an alternate crude DIY repair method:

http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/

another DIY solution is here:

http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/?p=20

There’s some good discussion on the apple pages here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1369476

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5968305