JIWIRE: Wi-Fi Hotspot Finder, Product Reviews, and Industry News

Wi-Fi Hotspot Finder, Product Reviews, and Industry News

I came because of their neat jiwire widget, but then remembered my iBook still runs Panther (though with the new 40GB drive it could run Tiger ...). Very interesting directory service though!

Where are the wireless speakers?

I want to send music (including AAC and AAC/FairPlay music) from iTunes to a speaker set in the kitchen and a speaker set in the dining room. At first I thought I'd install a shallow receiver in the dining room bookcase, attach an AirPort Express, and drive the speakers from their (there are wires in place from that spot to the kitchen). I'm having trouble, though, finding a shallow enough receiver ...

Where are the wireless speakers? | News.blog | CNET News.com

July 26, 2005 3:42 PM PDT
Where are the wireless speakers?

If the technology industry is so wonderful, how come it can't resolve one of the prime headaches of home entertainment: speaker wires? It's a question that has bedeviled many interior designers.

It turns out it's a basic problem of electrical engineering, according to a representative from Samsung's home theater department. Speakers need an amplifier, and amplifiers need a wire for power. Sending electricity through the air isn't realistic, and batteries die. Some have made speakers that receive audio tracks via radio signals from the amp, but the quality is iffy and the speaker needs to be plugged into the wall anyway.

Looks like I may need to run wires to the basement stereo ...

Update 10/10/05: After 2 months of research, phone calls, consultation, collaboration and unanswered queries I think I've found the big piece of the puzzle.

Epson scanner workarounds for Tiger: Disable Epson Scanner Monitor

Macintouch: OS X 10.4.2 (Part 29)

James S

Someone on August 10 mentioned that they were having problems with the Epson Scanner software on their G5. I had this issue as well; however, I removed the Epson Scanner Monitor startup item from my login profile.

This is used to allow the user to press the hotkey buttons on the Epson scanner; however, it's not necessary to use the scanner. Anytime I want to do a scan, I either open up the Epson scan software (which should be possible through Photoshop as well) manually then do my scanning. No more monitoring software eating up CPU cycles.

Update 2/22/2008: The same bug is still around!

Place your name and address on your laptop's login background screen

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

It's easy to change your Mac's login background image, but more importantly you can add your name and address to it. A great hint!

TeXShop: LaTeX client for OS X (and that's a lot of X)

TeXShop

GPL. I'll try it. I wish someone would recreate something like WordPerfect 5.1 as an OS X Cocoa app around the LaTeX layout engine. It wouldn't be a "port", more using WP 5.1 as a functional spec. It would not support all of WP 5.1's features of course. It might, however, be the savior for those of us who loathe Microsoft Word. (Since WordPerfect used internal markup, the functionality may be more compatible than one might expect. Remember "reveal codes"?)

PS. Thanks Alexandre A. for pointing me to the great wikipedia article on LaTeX.

Pogue loves the SanDisk Ultra II Plus CF card

A Brilliant Memory Card - New York Times

My slightly older cameras take CF cards. Sandisk has figured out how to create a CF card that will interface to a USB port; an astounding feat that couldn't be done on a smaller scale memory card. Pogue thinks it's fabulous.

SanDisk says that the suggested price for its folding, Ultra II Plus card is $80 (for the 512-meg version), only $5 more than the non-folding Ultra II. Weirdly, I could find only one store online carrying the Plus card--Circuit City--and it was exactly the same price as the non-folding version ($84). (Note that these are high-speed cards. Regular 512-meg SD cards cost much less, in the $50 range.)

Apple support and especially Airport support

A Macintouch article led me to Apple's support page. Oddly enough I've never visited through this route, the hardware specific support sites are really good, particularly the AirPort site. As noted on Macintouch, on the right side is a link to the top secret AirPort management tools:

David Colville

A couple of tips about configuring AirPort with WDS bridging as you discussed.

- Internet Connect (in /Applications) will tell you the Base Station AirPort ID of the base station you are connected to - very useful for determining which base station you are connected to...

- AirPort Management Tools are a heaven send and I'm surprised Apple doesn't promote them better for these kinds of uses. You can get them at AirPort Support, there is a link in the right hand column to the "AirPort Management Tools" which will let you download them straight away. Included in this package are the Management Utility, and the Client Monitor.

The AirPort Management Utility will not only allow you to see the configurations of multiple base stations (and change them easily, en masse), it'll also query each base station for the clients that are attached to it and give service and noise graphs for those clients. Very useful for making sure your base stations are actually "seeing" each other. It will also allow you to query the base station for it's logging.

The AirPort Client Monitor can be run on a connected computer to give an idea of how good the service it is receiving is (similar to what you see in the Management Utility, but from a client perspective).