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The Road Warrior Mailbag - July 14, 2008

Airport Dropout With MacBook Pro
Logitech VX Revolution Nano Cordless Laser Mouse
Ideas for iCards replacement?

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Airport Dropout With MacBook Pro

From Edward Smith

Hi Charles:

Over the past month or so I have been having 'wi-fi' Airport connectivity problems with my MacBook Pro..... it works fine all morning .... then late afternoon, the connection goes up & down, then vanishes. I am working on the main floor of my house, about 10 or 15 feet below the Airport extreme base station ..... the iMacs (2) we have upstairs - one beside the base station, the other in a separate room, function with no problems at all. Even if I take my MacBook upstairs, two feet from the base station, the signal is weak, though less so than downstairs.

Is this an interference problem, in your best guess? I wonder if a neighbour logs on late in the afternoon which blocks my own signal? I thought maybe it was my own portable phone - but then why only certain times of the day?

Any thoughts?

I have tried the Apple forums online - they have millions of similar problems, but no one has any solutions to this......I tried changing the 'channel' as one suggested (the other options were too complex for me) - but this didn't do anything. Is it a design flaw in the MacBook's wireless connectivity? Then why has the problem surfaced only recently...... oh well, even Macs aren't perfect. I am working away furiously now, knowing that by mid-afternoon I will have no access to the internet on my MacBook....

Ted

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Hi Ted;

That sounds very annoying and frustrating.

There is no inherent issue with MacBook Pros and Airport that I know of, and it would be well-publicized if there were one.

My own hands-on experience with wireless connectivity is sketchy. My main workstation PowerBook has built-in Airport and my other PowerBooks support it through a Buffalo WiFi PCMCIA card, but I don't have an Airport network at home, so my encounters with WiFi are limited to sporadic logons to hotspots, which have always worked fone.

What version of thye Mac OS are you using?

There *have* been known issues with Airport performance and OS 10.5 Leopard, and indeed the OS 10.5.4 update released on Monday reportedly addresses them, I don't know yet how successfully.

If you;re still using OS 10.4 Tiger, you should make sure you're updated to the ultimate 10.4.11 version.

Rather than a defect, a more likely cause is some sort of software corruption. Sometimes just installing a OS version update will restore harmony.

It's also prudent to run a system maintenance utility like OnyX (excellent and free) once in a while to clean out system caches, repair permissions, run maintenance scripts,etc., or even reinstall the OS if all else fails, although I've rarely done that in the OS X era.

OnyX:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Also, since the Airport wor4ks fine sometimes, but craps out after a period of use, ther eis a possibility that it could be a thermal-related hardware fault.

Charles

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Re: Airport Dropout With MacBook Pro

From Edward

Thanks Charles.

I'll run Onyx. I have 10.5.4 installed ...... just last night, so far no problems today with my connection - so may be that did fix it,

Ted

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Logitech VX Revolution Nano Cordless Laser Mouse

From Islandgirl

Have you tested the Logitech VX Revolution Nano Cordless Laser Mouse? It also has a tiny receiver that plugs into a laptop's USB port.

I use the standard VX Revolution with my iMac and think it's the best mouse I've ever used. Logitech's mice seem more sensitive than others.

The Revolution series mice also have the scroll wheel with two different modes: one to easily scroll through long documents and the other for slower scrolling and more control.

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Hi Islandgirl;

I haven't had the opportunity to check that one out, but it sounds pretty cool. I'll see what I can do about getting one for review.

In the meantime, thanks for the report.

Charles

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Ideas for iCards replacement?

From Kevin Shaffer

Hi Charles:

Now the .mac services are rolling or rolled over into the new deal at Apple, is there any decent and affordable or free services out there which worked as well as iCards? You know, with a single item in the recipient's inbox and no attachment or no second link inside the first email?

I found a thread to a discontined services forum (hard to find the actual forum; googled and found some which were dead, from July 9th) and this One appears to still work. Some of the ideas are beyond some user's experience or maybe intimidating compared to the simple elegance the Apple iCards segment of .mac and iTools provided... Some topics are gone, didn't make the transition; these links work for now:

Topic: "Ideas for iCard replacement"
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1552455&tstart=1

This is within "Discontinued .Mac Services" for the present time:
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=244

Is there a sufficient database or maybe just some groups of known alternatives to either a working icard-like ecard system; or perhaps, as alluded to in the ideas link above, a way to construct a self-owned and hosted personal ecard system; where it would not cost a fortune and maybe could use an account such as the free Google Pages, as a host site for some 100GB of images; which could pull from a second same-user Page Creator/Google Pages web site for other content online... maybe?

I get the impression some people did not know what this iCards was; except for those who truly liked a web-based system for sending small messages with good images, and this did not require going to extra sites or additional attachments in the case of travelers or business people with controlled limited web access.

There doesn't appear to be a legitimate replacement from Apple so far, in this matter.

Regards,
Kevin

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Hi Kevin;

There are several iCard services on the Web, but none I can think of that come close to iCards' "simple elegance" as you so well describe it.

In recent years, I've been more inclined to make my own ecards from scratch using Sophie's Cards, EasyCard, or HappyHolidays.

Incidentally, back in the late '90s, a fellow named Simon Jones operated an excellent mac-oriented ecards site called "MacCards" but Apple Legal went after him and shut him down shortly after they launched iCards (the uncharitable might speculate that they stole the idea from Jones).

Charles

*** cmoore@macopinion.com

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