All Tied Up
Published 21 years, 3 months past
Fresh from a Taiwanese factory and several FedEx planes, I now have in my claws a brand-spankin’ new 1GHz 15.2″ TiBook. Ahhhhh…. except for it running OS X, which I still don’t really quite understand. Thanks to Mac OS X Hacks, I quickly located the terminal window and added it to the Dock for handy access. <mood type="bliss"/> I even got the built-in AirPort option even though I don’t have WiFi in the house. So, of course, I’m in the market for a wireless access point. Anyone have suggestions for a good one? Bear in mind the access point will be situated inside a lath-and-plaster house, which may mean a whole lot of metal wire mesh in the walls. Then again, the house was built in 1920, so I don’t know for sure that they were using much metal in walls back then.
Also bear in mind that I didn’t buy an Airport base station because I didn’t want to spend that much on a wireless extension to my existing wired network. I’ve been looking at the LinkSys WAP11, as I have a LinkSys router already and the price is right, but I’ve been reading online that its range is limited and I want to cover three floors of the house, plus the front and back yards. As long as I can good signal at a fifty-foot range from the station, and moderate signal up to one hundred feet, I’ll be more than fine. I found a how-to on hacking the WAP11 to boost its transmission power, but I don’t know if the current firmware still allows the hack. What does sort of bother me is that the WAP11 won’t pass through AppleTalk packets. It’s not that I do tons of AppleTalk, but that it bothers me buying an access point that absolutely slams that door shut. I will want to communicate between my Classic OS desktop and the TiBook, obviously.
Anyway—have need for wireless access point, need to cover multistory house, will want Mac-to-Mac communication, looking for recommendations. The more plug-and-play, the better. Meantime, I have to figure out how to best go about repartioning the hard drive into my usual triad of boot volume, data volume, and scratch-space volume. And then I have to come up with a catchy name for this beast. Oh, the crosses I bear.
Somehow I missed the fact that Opera Journal published a short interview with me on Tuesday and Wednesday. You should probably start with part one, and then follow it to part two. I think it got broken up because I spent some time answering the first question, but it really is short—five questions, if I counted correctly. But not a Friday Five.