Newton’s Lore

Recently I swapped out a 100Mb (annoyingly capitalised) NETGEAR FS108 switch for a 1Gb D-Link DGS-1008D switch. Unfortunately, after having done this the Airport Express that was plugged into the D-Link switch would repeatedly hang, dropping the wireless connection and requiring power cycling the Airport Express.
Unsurprisingly this didn’t take long to get annoying, so I did a quick trip to pick up a 1Gb NETGEAR GS108 switch. After removing the D-Link and putting the NETGEAR in place, the Airport Express hasn’t fallen over yet. Conveniently the NETGEAR “Prosafe” versions (more expensive but in a nice solid metal case rather than plastic) have their status lights above each port on the front of the box, which makes it easier to see which cable is doing what, despite it being a bit uglier with all the cables hanging out the front.
I’d previously heard about the dodginess of D-Link, I guess I was overdue for a reminder.

I recently read an article which included a link to the Wikipedia entry about Apple’s 1984 Superbowl ad. I’m going to have to go and re-watch some Futurama and Fight Club now

If you can’t work out how to use iTunes, Apple has posted some iTunes tutorial videos.

In case you’re wondering which Macs you can put an Airport Extreme card into, Apple has a list of Airport Extreme compatible Macs.

Commsec have updated their iPod index [pdf], Australia is now ranked as the 7th cheapest country to buy an iPod, cheaper than the UK or Germany.

Apple have released a keyboard fix for MacBooks and MacBook Pros to fix the annoying “Forgetting I have an internal keyboard” bug:

This update addresses a responsiveness issue on MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers. Some MacBook and MacBook Pro systems may occasionally experience a temporary suspension of keyboard input which can last a minute or longer. The Mac OS X 10.5.1 update is required before installing the MacBook, MacBook Pro Software Update 1.1.

By “responsiveness issue” they mean you can’t type anything, or the command keys you’re holding down in your App (ie the Finder) go unnoticed when you click/drag.

Following their earlier assessments of Apple and the iPod, Greenpeace has given video game maker Nintendo a 0/10 environmental score. Motorola and Nokia also copped serves.

Send a postcard to a friend and they’ll get a 50% discount off a single Profcast license. ProfCast is a tool for recording presentations and slides for creating enhanced podcasts. Version 2.2 is in public beta.

Just got back from 3 days of Cocoa training in Sydney, thanks to the Apple University Consortium (AUC). The training was run by Daniel Woo from UNSW, the class was packed (so much so that they’re running another session in January), and because the base experience level was so high things went pretty quickly over the three days. Lots of fun, and personally I found it very inspirational to be learning and clustergeeking! Someone had written a rudimentary game by the end of the course. There were also lots of hacked iPhones in evidence.

Thankyou to all involved!

(Apparently Apple US can’t even seem to get some Cocoa training for their staff!)

Apple have a knowledgebase entry that indicates what you can do to fix the problem of the Finder restarting when you attempt to change permissions under Leopard. It involves using dscl from the commandline to create a GroupMembership and a RecordName with a leading underscore ‘_’. This affects accounts that were transitioned from Mac OS X 10.4