More Random Tech Junk

Posted on January 21, 2006

An Apple Update | If you remember I’ve been trying to get a new battery for my laptop. I placed the order on 12/23, received the (wrong) package on the 28th, placed a request for a return, didn’t get a shipping label until 1/4, and Apple received the package on the 9th. At that point, it takes four to five days for them to process the return. It’s now the 19th and I haven’t gotten a refund credited to my account yet. I called them today to see what’s up, and they told me to wait a week and call again if I still haven’t got it. Which is what they told me last week. And what they told me when it took a week and a half to get the mailing label to send it back. If all goes well, I should get my new battery about a month and a half after I ordered it. I’ll keep you updated.

iLife ‘06 | The new application suite from Apple is out now, and I’ve got it. The improvements to iPhoto are pretty great, including the expansion of the library size (iLife ‘05 could only handle 25,000 photos, the new version can support up to 250,000) and the way the photos are arranged in Finder. And it’s zippier. iMovie I haven’t tried out yet, because I don’t work with video too much, but I’m going to give it a spin soon. (I’ve got a little project stewing.) iWeb, in a word, sucks. It’s supposed to be an easy webpage creation app. And it is easy, but if you want a blog, you’re better off with Blogger or Wordpress.com, if you want to share photos, go with Flickr. The pages do look slick, but don’t really look like webpages; they look more like print pages. Very graphics intensive. And to my knowledge, automatic syncing only works with .Mac; otherwise you have to ftp your pages to a server manually. iTunes is updated to 6.0.2, mostly a minimal dot release. So far the big changes are the Mini-store, which has had its own little brouhaha which turned out to be pretty pointless, and the fact that you can now share video over a network. Which lends new credence to the rumour that you’ll soon be able to plug Airport Express into a tv, (again, not as exciting as people make it out to be, as your tv is 640×480, most internet video is not that big and video bought through the iTMS is a fourth of that at 320×240). The biggest change is the new Garage Band, which has added a podcast recording studio, which is actually pretty sweet. Included tools are bumper music, sound effects, and radio effects, and iChat integration to record voice chat (hopefully someone will make a 3rd-party plugin to integrate Skype, which is a little more common, and cross-platform, than iChat.) Also new is a studio to score video, a baby version of Apple’s Soundtrack Pro which is now only available as a part of Final Cut Studio. I don’t have a dvd burner, so I’ve never used (nor installed) iDVD.

Wifi at Work | I’ve finally been given the go-ahead to set up a wireless network at the country club I work at. This is pretty sweet for me, because with all the stuff I’ll be doing, I prefer (and in some cases have to) do on my iBook, and I’ll need an internet connection. I picked up a Linksys router for fifty bucks at Wal-Mart, and needless to say, hooking it up has been a pain in the ass. We’ve got a big ass router that the whole club is hooked into via Cat-5 cable (actually three routers) as well as a dodgy Windows server that feeds the workstations. I can create a network with the wireless router that my iBook can connect to, however I can’t get the wireless router to connect to the big router, and therefore the internets. I can connect my iBook to the internets by plugging directly into the big router via the same cable that I was plugging the wireless router into. But the wireless router just won’t connect. DB is going to provide a little over-the-phone tech support so hopefully it’ll all work out. Another issue that is plaguing me is range; I can only get 1/3rd the coverage that I need, so hopefully I’ll be able to convince the boss to spring for another wireless router at a later date.

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