Tag: General Hardware

Serves Them Right

You know what’s my favorite feature of my new Evo 4G? It’s the fact I can hold it in my left hand and still have a signal! If you’ve been watching any technology news lately you know Apple is having some problems with the newest version of their Jesus Phone. See if you hold the phone in a certain way which many people do when just normally talking on the device the Jesus Phone 4 loses signal and the call is dropped. Steve Job’s solution was to tell one upset customer to stop holding it that way. Yup it’s your fault for wanting to hold the phone in your left hand you stupid peasant.

The Jesus Phone 4 is also having problems with the proximity sensor which prevents random shit from being pressed when the phone’s screen is connected to your phone. This problem isn’t as big since in order to experience it you must be talking on the phone and that doesn’t seem to be a feature of the newest model.

Well Apple is now holding a special Jesus Phone 4 press conference tomorrow. There are two possibilities here; they are going to address the recent troubles with their new phone, or they’re going to unviel the new white version of their new phone. Hopefully it’s the latter.

As much as I like Apple’s computers I don’t really like anything else they produce (especially their fucking wireless access point, it can go die in a fire). In the case of the iPad I just don’t like Apple’s draconian control over it but in the case of their new phone I don’t like the idea of a phone that doesn’t work in my left hand. Either way all this karma serves them right.

The Apple Airport Extreme Sucks

How often do you read rants about wireless access points? Probably not too dreadfully often as they are usually pretty straight forward. It’s a pretty mature technology and everybody usually has a decent setup. Sure there are problems with various models but most of those are at least hardware related.

Well here is my official rant dealing with the Airport Extreme Base Station. The thing seriously sucks all kinds of monkey balls.

First of all the problems I experienced with the Airport Extreme are not hardware related. I’ve had this access point for a couple of years now and it’s always worked well enough on the hardware side of things. This problem is a software related issue. Namely Apple made some really boneheaded mistakes.

The main problem here is there are so many stupid fuck ups with this product I’m not sure where to begin. I guess I’ll start with the access point’s complete inability to route any traffic to an external network that doesn’t have an IP address that falls into the access point’s DHCP range. Let’s say you setup the Airport Extreme to dole out DHCP addressed between the ranges of 10.0.1.2 and 10.0.1.200, the default settings when using a 10.x.x.x address scheme for your network. Now let’s say you give a server the IP address of 10.1.0.1. You have effectively cut that server off from the Internet because the Airport Extreme won’t route any traffic to an external network unless said traffic originates from an IP address between 10.0.1.2 and 10.0.1.200. Yup it just flat out refuses to do it. This effectively means you must layout your network’s address scheme to fit what the access point wants instead of what you want. Brilliant! This little undocumented (as far as I could find) issue cost me a couple of hours when I was trying to get my VPN server running.

Did I mention you can’t change the second quad in the DHCP address range? Yup if you want a 10.x.x.x address it has to be 10.0.x.x and only 10.0.x.x. I wanted all computers that received a DHCP address to be in the range of 10.253.0.0. Well you can’t do that if you’re using an Airport Extreme to dole out DHCP addresses.

Well a simple enough solution would be to simple disable the DHCP functionality on the access point and setup a DHCP server on a computer, perhaps one that’s acting as a VPN server already. Good luck doing that if you still want to have NAT capabilities. Yes I actually want to use NAT for my network even though I despise NAT. Why? Because it allows me to forward different traffic to different computers without needing more static IP addresses (which I pay extra for). See the Airport Extreme has three operating modes; one that has DHCP enabled with NAT, one with only DHCP mode, and bridged mode which disabled DHCP. There is no way that I found to have DHCP disabled with NAT running. It’s a pretty simple concept and Apple doesn’t seem to be able to grasp it.

Seriously what the fuck? A cheap Linksys can do that! The rule of thumb should be if a cheap Linksys access point can do something your more expensive product should be able to do the exact same fucking thing and more.

If you’re looking for a nice wireless access point steer clear of the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. The only positive thing I have to say about it is… well my Wii, which is finicky as all Hell, actually connects to the Airport Extreme. But that’s really it.

Technical Specifications on the New Kindle’s Screen

Yesterday I posted about the new Amazon Kindle DX. One of the new features being boasted about is the 50% higher contrast ratio screen. Well E Ink, the company behind the displays, has released some technical specifications on the new screen.

It appears that the new screen not only brings better contrast ratio to the table but also less power consumption to boot. From the specs page it appears the resolution of the new Kindle DX is 1200 x 825 which is pretty respectable considering some netbooks with 10″ or larger screens barely exceed that.

New Kindle Released

Yes I’m a Kindle fan boy and no I don’t care if you’re sick of hearing about them. Amazon annouced a new version of their gigantic uber-Kindle, the Kindle DX. The new Kindle DX sports a new color (graphite), a screen that is advertised to have a 50% higher contrast ratio, and a new lower price coming in at $379 (which is high in my opinion).

I have to say going by the pictures I like the new graphite color. It’s muted enough to not be a distraction when reading (as shiny black would be) but also different from the previous white. I would very much like to check out the screen and see how much of a difference the higher contrast ratio makes.

Anyways it ships on July 7.

HP to Start Printing Ads On Your Printer

Oh this should go over like a lead ballon. HP has released a new line of Internet connected printers. One of the features of these new printers is they each have a unique e-mail address so you can e-mail documents directly to the printer and they’ll print them. But that’s not all they’re going to print. They are also going to print advertisements and you’ll be footing the bill on the ink for them. Yes that’s right not only do you get to pay for the printer and the ink but now you also get the privilege to pay for a little extra ink so HP can print advertisements onto your documents. Oh and this is just great:

“What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement],” Nigro said. “Part of it I think our belief is you’re used to it. You’re used to seeing things with ads.”

Really? You must have an odd test group because if I pay for something I don’t expect to have to deal with advertisements. If the product were free then I can see the justification in doing this to pay for the hardware but the customer is purchasing the printers. And yes I know HP sells their printers at a loss but they make up for it with the overly expensive ink. Now they’re double-dipping but overcharging for ink and advertising. But to make it really bad they are printing those advertisements with the overly expensive ink.

Fuck I hate what HP has become. I still remember when they were a good company that made reliable products.

Evo 4G Fully Rooted

Good news for anybody who owns an Evo 4G phone, it’s been fully rooted. Previously we’ve had rooting abilities but you either couldn’t write to the /system directory or could but had to reboot the phone in recovery mode to do so.

This should lead the way to custom ROMs being produced (a working copy of Froyo on my Evo would be awesome).