A lot of folks these days have at least part of their home network on wireless ethernet, or WiFi. I have two wireless access points in my house, for example, and plan on adding a third. Wireless networking has security considerations: unless your WiFi network is encrypted, someone outside your home can use your bandwidth or, potentially worse, intercept your data. Wireless security was improved significantly a few years ago with the introduction of WPA (WiFi Protected Access) after the previous security method, WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) was “cracked”. Since then, wireless networking has been pretty much secure against any intrusion. Until now…
I like coffee. I’m not a connoisseur: I prefer something like a basic arabica blend- more or less what Tim Hortons or McDonald’s serves. I may not define good coffee as something pooped out of a civet’s butt, but a good cup of coffee (based on my definition of “good”) is a crucial part of every day. I drink perhaps three or four 12+ ounce cups per day in total: more than I should, but less than some.
Irene can’t drink coffee any more, so brewing an entire pot each morning is not efficient. And a regular brewer isn’t very effective at producing a couple of cups- the magic that takes place when the hot water passes through the ground beans loses effectiveness. And instant coffee is barely a substitute: yes, I drink it, and it serves the minimal purpose of something calling itself “coffee” I.E.: jumpstarts my brain, but I can’t really say I enjoy it very much.
As a result of these factors, I’ve been exploring various single cup brewing systems. The “to go cup” brewers you can buy for $15 suffer from more or less the same problem as trying to run two cups through a brewer designed for a pot: the water and the coffee don’t intermingle quite the way they are supposed to. That leaves fancy gizmos like the Tassimo and Keurig single cup brewers.
I was visiting a news site with my OSX Leopard based MacBook Pro two days ago and was prompted to install RealPlayer in order to watch a video. I’ve never had any particular problems with RealPlayer in the past, so I said “yes”, and didn’t really think much more of it.
Yesterday I noticed that my Airport (wireless) network connections were dropping every few minutes. I’d have a great connection, then suddenly it would freeze. I’d turn Airport off and then on, and my connection would be back to normal. None of the other machines in my house were experiencing any difficulties when this happened. The disconnects were very irritating: I tried rebooting my Timecapsule, connecting to my secondary wireless network, restarting my Macbook, and still the problem persisted. What could be causing the problem? I hadn’t changed anything recently that I could recall.
Then I remembered RealPlayer. First I made sure the actual player wasn’t running. Then I opened a terminal session and checked running processes (ps -ax | grep Real) There were two Real player related processes active: the name of one which I wrote down was RPDAgentHelperD. I killed both processes manually, and my network connection returned to rock solid (I.E.: normal) stability. Of course, each time my Macbook rebooted, it relaunched the processes.
I permanently disabled them via System Preferences (System Preferences=> Accounts=> [ my account ] => Login Items. There on the list was a Real Player helper service, which I deleted. And now my MacBook Pro runs without “help” from Real Player.
Was the problem strictly related to RealPlayer? Did I somehow pick up a “trojan” or “hacked” version of RealPlayer? I’m not sure. However, if you are experiencing Airport connection stability problems with your Macintosh, you might want to check and see if you have any RealPlayer components running.
I love advanced technology, sometimes purely for its own sake. But for me the best thing about technology is when it allows us to do neat or interesting things that were basically inconceivable before. The world wide web, for example. The human genome project. Cellular telephones. Satellite TV. And so on…
But it isn’t very often that technology does something so amazing that it brings tears to my eyes. That is the case with this story I came across on Gizmodo. You can watch this video to see what I mean:
That mouse you use every day will be completely gone in five years. It will be entirely replaced by touch screen displays, facial recognition, and Wii-mote like devices that you wave around in the air. This is according to the predictive genius of some guy who works at Gartner and probably makes ten times as much as I do each year. Oh, and his full time job is making predictions about the future of technology.
For the record, the guy’s name is Steven Prentice- if he comes knocking at your door asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars for his predictive expertise, you might want to have some second thoughts. And maybe some third or fourth thoughts as well. Perhaps his quote was taken out of context: possibly he wasn’t saying mice and keyboards would be displaced on existing devices, but rather that for tiny or specialized devices like phones and PDAs we wouldn’t use mice and keyboards. If that’s what he meant, well, I’m sorry for the misunderstanding- be more clear next time, Mr. Prentice.
But I’ll be perfectly clear and as concise as possible- if he honestly believes that the mouse will be completely gone as an input control device within five years on desktop/workspace computers, and particularly if he thinks it will be replaced by touch screen and motion sensitive devices that we wave around in the air, he is going to be proven both completely wrong and astoundingly ignorant.
Everyone is talking about SSDs replacing hard drives, if not today than Real Soon Now. On the surface, solid state drives have a lot going for them: no moving parts, potentially very dense storage, and the possibility for low power consumption. The main things stopping me, at least, from seriously considering an SSD in my machines until recently were price and capacity. The cheapest SSDs cost something like $600 for 64 gigabytes: a normal hard drive might costs $200 for 500 gigabytes of storage, making SSDs easily ten times the price of mechanical hard drives on a per gigabyte basis.
But solid state drives obviously have an advantage in terms of reliability and power consumption, right? So all I have to do is wait for the inevitable drop in price/increase in capacity that Moore’s law suggests and I’ll be set. Maybe… or maybe not.
Microsoft has been working on something they call “Surface” technology. Basically, it is a touch sensitive user interface, and it is usually demonstrated using a large, flat horizontal LCD panel… a table. I’ve had my doubts about the usefulness of this technology outside of a niche environment- but I’m ready to be proven wrong. That said, I find the following video pretty effectively expresses my doubts…
I’m sitting here in front of my second computer, more commonly known as “Irene’s game computer.” It is going through the process of installing Windows Vista at the moment, for the third time in less than a week due to various hardware and driver issues.
I’m typing this on my Macbook Pro while Vista’s install process chug, chug, chugs away. My Macbook never seems to have off days- it always just boots up and works. On the other hand, Windows is far superior for games…
For the curious, the various failures of my wife’s game computer really had little to do with Windows or Vista. The hard drive failed, which was precipitated (I soon discovered) by a failing fan. A couple of days later, as I was installing the replacement fan, I decided it was time to install my hand-me-down video card into Irene’s computer. Unfortunately, her motherboard didn’t have a PCI-E slot, so I also had to install a hand-me-down motherboard. I didn’t have a copy of Windows XP at hand, so in went Windows Vista. Shortly thereafter, I realized that this was the infamous Asus M2R32 motherboard that can’t go into standby with Windows Vista: this of course frustrated me since I am trying to use standby mode rather than leaving computers on all the time as a compromise between my need for immediate responsiveness and a desire to minimize my energy waste. Thus I have replaced the motherboard and CPU, which has led to another OS install, which brings you up to date.
On the upside, when all this is over the secondary game machine here will have more or less tripled in gaming performance. Win!
Still, it is comforting to have something to blame for the situation, and Vista is a handy target
… for me “upward mobility” would be...
