Stuff it, Turtleneck-boy.
You had me all stoked to start renting movies on your i-toons thing, and what do I find when I decide to try it out?
standard-def, full-screen mockeries. Apparently that’s all Mac owners deserve.
No, I’m not going to buy an appleTV to get widescreen 720p rentals, especially not with a 30-day-after-DVD-release window.
Please try again.
“Buffalo” is a funny word.
It’s actually kind of nice sometimes to find out something that hasn’t been working and has been annoying you isn’t your fault.
That’s the feeling I got recently when I found out that the issue I have with the wireless connection on our Mac mini cutting out sometimes isn’t my fault, and it’s not my router, it’s just that very early Intel-based minis have problems with their Airport cards.
I bought my Intel-based mini in the first week of their availability, so it’s one of the problem units.
This really started bugging me recently since I’ve had this time on my hands - you see, I didn’t want to drop the hundred bucks on the XBox 360 wireless adapter, so I configured the internet sharing on the Mac mini and was routing the XBox through the Mac mini over its wireless to my router and then out to XBox Live.
This works great! Until the Airport cuts out again. And all my Xbox downloads abort. And I scream in… ok, I kind of say “damnit!” fairly quietly to myself. No screaming in agony here.
So, how do we solve problems? We throw money at them.
At least this one wasn’t too expensive to solve. I moused around a bit, found some recommendations for the Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP “Wireless-G MIMO Performance Ethernet Converter”, looked it up on a couple of retailer web sites, found that Circuit City carries the thing and that the nearby store had one in stock, ran out and dropped 80 bucks on one, with a spiffy rebate coupon that may or may not ever result in 20 bucks back. I’m SO not holding my breath.
Plug it in, hook up the laptop, configure the laptop as 1.1.1.2, open a web browser to 1.1.1.1, and I’m in the configuration software for the thing. It’s so advanced it’s even gone out and automatically hooked in to one of my neighbors’ wireless networks. Handy! But… not very friendly.
So… I tell my wireless router about its MAC address, and give the Buffalo thing my SSID and WPA key, and it’s talking to me. Tell it to get its IP address over DHCP, disconnect the laptop, plug in the Xbox 360 and the Mac mini, and they both just work. Not much more I could ask for in a product.
I’m a little worried that I’m actually starting to be able to type in a fair amount of a 35-character WPA key from memory.
The problem I created, well, now the 360 is on the same network as everything else, so I tried to get its Media Center Extender mojo on with the copy of Windows Media Player 11 running on my main machine, and the two seem to connect but that’s as far as it goes - I can’t see any music in the PC’s library, and while I can see photo filenames I can’t actually display any of the images.
Will I try to solve this? Will I somehow manage to destroy my media library again? Who knows…
But at least I now have a new box with blinking lights on it that solves a problem.
Oh, and Circuit City was restocking since I got there at about 20 minutes to close, and I managed to score a nunchuck attachment for our second wiimote. Yay for late night shopping!
The revenge of Apple, Inc.
Apparently saying something against the Steve is just bad karma.
Let me sum up.
There’s a bug in Front Row. Not a big one, really more of a nuisance. Front Row will occasionally claim that you don’t have a license to play your unprotected mp3s. They work fine in iTunes, but not Front Row. So I go looking for a fix.
Simple fix found in mere moments. It seems all I need to do is select all the music in the iTunes library and tell iTunes that I want everything to have ID3 v2.4 tags. This churns for a while - overnight, actually - but when it’s done I seem to have fixed the problem. All my mp3s play fine in Front Row.
This feeling of satisfaction lasts until the next time I try to play an mp3 from a Windows PC on the network. Then I discover hell.
See, I have a lot of mp3s with kanji song titles, artist information, album information, so on. And the Mac represents kanji internally just a little differently from PCs. Just enough different to completely blow away all the kanji when these tags are viewed on a Windows PC, since MediaPlayer can’t figure out what’s going on and thoughtfully tries to rewrite them out…
After a few attempts to fix the problem automatically I wind up truncating all fields in the mp3 header to 30 characters and losing all album art, to say nothing of extended character sets. Time to give up. Last backup… October 2006. I guess it could have been worse, I’ve only gotten… uh. Quite a few CDs since then. Maybe 40? Mostly Japanese. Those Haruhi character singles do pile up.
Also, while I’m at it, I really ought to re-rip CDs that didn’t come in with proper track names, or had their track names tweaked to work on an old mp3 player that didn’t speak kanji either… and I should try to fill in some of this missing album art… So a simple disaster recovery becomes something more of a project, as occasionally happens.
Life would be a lot easier if I was studying, I don’t know, Spanish or something and had a bizarre obsession with wrestling instead of anime. I would have fewer problems involving kanji support on US hardware and software, for a start.
And, as an aside, I’m never letting the mac touch the network shared music folders again.
Uh oh, I drank the kool-aid
I think that should be hyphenated. Probably needs a tm or something, but I’m a very lazy person.
Anyway. So this particular kool-aid.
I’m typing this from a Windows PC. There’s another two to my right and two behind me. At work I use Windows machines. While I’m not fool enough to claim that Windows is the be-all and end-all of operating systems, I’m pretty familiar with it and I don’t have the bandwidth to get as familiar with any other OSes.
I don’t even own an iPod, I have a hand-me-down Creative Zen player than I’m quite fond of.
We have a Mac mini, which I have no complaints with. It’s a fine piece of hardware but basically its purpose in life is to sit under the TV in the living room, play back downloaded anime and TV purchased from iTunes, and record episodes of Legion of Super-Heroes and travel programs about Alaska and Japan. Also it has many fine emulators installed which I do not take advantage of because, again, the whole collect lots of games never have time to play them thing.
It’s running OS X 10.4.8. I don’t need anything better than that. I’m certainly not upgrading to 10.4.9 because I hear horror stories about non-booting macs after the 10.4.9 upgrade.
So why was I really depressed when all the Apple rumor sites stopped saying “10.5 in late march” and switched to “10.5 by the end of June!” today? Why am I even READING Apple rumor sites?
Apparently the next step is buying a black turtleneck and camping out in front of the Cingular store waiting for the iPhone. Which I won’t be buying because it’s six hundred dollars for a fragile device that fits in my pocket.
You won’t get me, Jobs!
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
