The Most Incredible Knife

No, really, this is a pretty amazing Swiss Army Knife.

Built more for collectors, rather than someone who actually intends to put it in their pocket, this "pocket" knife features no less than 85 different features. I did read somewhere else that it is a real unit and it sells for around USD$1200...

Grrr! Powertools!

Browsing through the local Bunnings on the weekend and what should I see but an electric jackhammer for $100. There was another one for $70, but this one had a bit more power (1100W vs 900W) and a higher impact level.

Having a couple of things around the house that needed some gentle persuasion to fix, I thought that this would be ideal, and cheaper than hiring one for two days.

Sure, it's not quite up to this level, or even this, but for the amount of use I'm going to put it to, it should be more than enough. It comes with a three-year replacement warranty and once I've demolished enough stuff with it, I can sell it on eBay and recoup most of my original investment =)

Only problem with it is that I now have no excuse to not tear up the broken pavers on the front porch, or demolish the brick wall out the front, and all the associated labour involved in then replacing them with something new!

Wireless/Wired Bridge with AirPort Express

How to use an AirPort Express as a wireless bridge when connecting it to an existing AirPort network via WDS

This one had me going for a while, but I eventually got it sorted out, and when I got it, the answer was really quite straightforward and easy. I guess my problem was looking for the hard way to do it - and this just didn't work.



Here's a bit of history to set the scene:

I started my AirPort network out with just an AirPort Extreme Base Station, using this to connect to my cable modem and share the internet between a PC via wired Ethernet and my Mac via AirPort. This was all good, and easy to configure.


Then, Apple released the AirPort Express. AirTunes was the deciding factor in purchasing this unit, and I quickly added it to the AirPort network. Now, this was a couple of years ago now, and I can't remember exactly what I had to do to configure it, but I eventually got it all working so that the wireless network was extended by the AirPort Express, I could play music through the AirPort Express and I could plug something else (a friends laptop, for instance) into the wired Ethernet port on the AirPort Express and it could use the internet etc. At the time I set it all up, the firmware was in it's early stages, and getting WDS to happen wasn't as easy as it should have been. From memory, I put the same settings in about four or five times and it magically worked. All was good.

Until, at least, the AirPort Express died. Yep, dead.

I got a brand-new AirPort Express and went to set it all up as it was before. This time, with the new firmware I could use WPA with WDS (whereas the old one had to use WEP) but try as I might, I couldn't get it to use the ethernet port.

This became a problem recently when I wanted to use a friend's Xbox 360 on Xbox Live, and he didn't have a wireless adapter.
Every time you go into the AirPort Admin utility and tell the AirPort Express to join an existing wireless network, it disables the Ethernet port completely.


Eventually I reset everything to factory defaults and started all over again. I then configured the main base station (the Extreme) and then went to configure the remote base station (the Express) and still couldn't set it to join an existing wireless network (on the AirPort tab) and have Ethernet enabled.

Taking a step back, I approached the problem from a different angle, and here's the steps that need to be done in order to get it to all work:

Configure the main base station, however you want. I set it up to share the internet connection on the WAN port to both the LAN port and the AirPort. I set it to be a DHCP server and hand out a range of IP addresses automatically. I set it to have a different network name, and set the name of the base station appropriately. I then enabled WPA2 encryption on the AirPort and all was good with it.

Next, I reset the AirPort Express to factory defaults and plugged it into my Mac via wired ethernet. This is one of the key steps - at this stage I'm connected via AirPort to the network I have just set up, and I've got an unconfigured base station connected via wired Ethernet.

In the AirPort Admin utility, I went into the configuration for the MAIN base station and enabled the base station as a main base station. I also ticked the box to allow wireless clients on this base station. Lastly, I hit the + next to the list of wireless networks and base stations to allow for WDS. Once I'd done this, I could select my unconfigured base station to join it to the network.

The AirPort Admin utility automatically configured the AirPort Express base station with the appropriate settings, and set up WDS on the AirPort Extreme base station all in one go.

Lastly, in order to keep everything neat and tidy, I manually configured other settings in the AirPort Express, such as the base station name, and turning on AirTunes, just to round it all out.



The end result is a working wireless network, using WPA, and an Ethernet port on the remote base station in my loungeroom that is bridged to the main network, so it can automatically receive an IP address, surf the internet, see other devices on the LAN and generally just work.

Easy when you know how!

Microsoft gets it right!

I've just been playing with an Xbox 360, and it seems that Microsoft is pretty well on the money here.

The console works nicely, I plugged it into my broadband and Xbox Live came up - had a couple of problems signing in initially, but once that was sorted out (and I've got no idea what I did to get it to work) then it was seamless.

The downloads are nice, especially the arcade games, as are the game demos and movie trailers.

Downloads seemed a little slow, they probably aren't using anything like Akami to host stuff close to where it's needed.

The Media Centre Extender bit is pretty cool, downloaded the trial version of Nullriver's Mac OS X Prefpane, Connect360, which allows my Mac to share out the iPhoto library, and the iTunes library to the Xbox, where it can play it all in glorious high-def on my LCD TV.                             

I love the wireless controllers, they're a great idea, and makes it easy for people to take their controllers round to a friend's house, where you hit the big round Xbox button and the console recognises it.

I don't like how you require a WindowsXP Media Centre PC (or Vista) to stream content to the Xbox normally, but I do like it that I can stream the content from my Mac =)

RFC 1925 (rfc1925) - The Twelve Networking Truths

Here are the 12 networking truths.

They apply to a whole heap more than just networking, most of them are good advice for pretty much any situation you could possibly get yourself into.

Just remember:

"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead."

VMware Announces New Product for Apple Mac OS X Users

New Intel-based Macs will be able to Simultaneously Run Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris

SAN FRANCISCO and PALO ALTO, Calif., August 7, 2006 — VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced a new product that will enable Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. VMware will demo the product today during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2006 in San Francisco.

Read the press-release for more info...

Apple WWDC Announcements

Here's a quick roundup of the announcements from WWDC.

First, and foremost, is the unimaginatively named Mac Pro.

The Mac Pro is the professional workstation, featuring dual dual-core Intel Xeon (Woodcrest) CPUs in every model. That's four cores, even in the base.

The specs are:

2 x 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz or 3.0GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series CPUs

1 GB DDR2 667MHz Fully-buffered ECC RAM (8 DIMM slots)

4 x 3Gb/s SATA Drive Bays

2 x Optical drive bays

2 x Gigabit Ethernet

2 x FireWire 400, 2 x FireWire 800, 5 x USB 2.0

Digital Optical Audio in/out

Prices starting at $3499

Next up is the Xserve.

2 x 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz or 3.0GHz Intel Xeon 5100 Series CPUs

1 GB DDR2 667MHz Fully-buffered ECC RAM (32GB Max)

3 x 3Gb/s SATA or SAS Drive Bays

1 x Optical drive

Dual redundant power supplies

Onboard Video (no, really!)

On the Operating System front, there's Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Time Machine - an integrated backup with visual navigation for past states. My guess is that it uses filesystem snapshots (wishful thinking?)

Improvements to Mail.

Vast improvements to iChat - you can send in an iChat session a keynote presentation, iPhoto slideshows, remote desktop sharing etc...

A really nice virtual desktop manager, called Spaces. Takes the virtual desktop metaphor that one step further and makes it look really intuitive to use.

Dashboard can now easily make a widget from any web page. Plus the official announcement for dashcode - the Dasbhoard graphical IDE.

Spotlight has received some well-needed attention with more powerful syntax, such as boolean searches, being supported.

iCal now integrates with Mail, for things like the To-do list. Plus, there seems to be much better capabilities for sharing calendars via CalDAV.

The easy-access features in Accessibility have been updated with a new speech synthesised voice that's quite easy to understand. Still sounds unnatural, but it's getting better.

There is full 64-bit support throughout the OS, absolutely required to support the new Intel Xeon CPUs.

Lastly, there's some nice eye-candy in Core Animation.

Leopard Server has some nice additions that will be great for many users...

There's an easy setup process (which may, or may not, be a good thing)

There's an iCal Server! and as Apple say, "It's about time" iCal, Mozilla Sunbird and Microsoft Outlook can all talk to the iCal Server. iCal server also natively supports Xsan, so multiple servers can read and write to the same volume, enabling clustering to increase reliability.

For sharing information, there's a Wiki Server. This enables a collaborative website to easily be set up where users can modify the information contained in it. Easily set up a knowledge base for your company.

Server brings Spotlight searches to the server. Now you can use Spotlight to not only search for information on your local machine, but on Leopard servers as well.

There's an easy to use Podcast Producer where you can stream video and audio from something like a Mac mini, via FTP, to an Xserve, and then out via RSS to clients.

Plus, there's a stack more, such as a new version of Open Directory, a new QuickTIme Streaming Server, better Xgrid, mail, and file services.

Go check it all out.

Apple Displays have dropped in price, some by up to $800, which is a great change...

Picasa Web

Google and Picasa now have a web photo album service online. Check out my photo album.

It's got a nice clean interface, it works well with Picasa on the PC, and now there's an iPhoto plugin so that I can export photos to my web albums, directly from iPhoto.

This is a lot easier than what I've been doing which is a PHP-based photo album that I upload photos to via an FTP client...

You only get 250MB to start with, however for USD $25 per year, you can upgrade it to 6GB, which is quite a decent amount of storage space for anyone's photo albums.

Like other Google projects, it's still in beta, but so far it's looking good and it seems to have everything I need out of a web photo album.

If you don't have a google account, and need an invite, let me know as I've got heaps that I'm not using =)

Different Uses for Google Earth

Google Earth and Google Maps have been updated with not only high-resolution satellite images for Melbourne's Eastern Suburbs (where I live) but there are also street maps as well...

Recently I've been able to put the imagery to good use, in a slightly unusual way =)

The TV reception at my place has been sketchy lately, and with using digital TV, it's all or nothing. As luck would have it, it was the ABC and SBS that were most affected, and with Big Brother on recently, there's been nothing to watch on telly.

Searching on Google Earth, I was able to visually locate the TV transmission towers on Mount Dandenong, and locating my house as well, I was able to draw a line between the two and work out the exact direction for the antenna to be pointed in - as luck would have it, it was pretty much exactly aligned along the direction my house is facing =)