I did find the awesomely named post, “The ATT U-verse 2Wire 3800 HGV-B. I am not a fan…” detailing other problems with it. Needless to say, I am not a fan of it either. I got this resolved (by simply locking those machines to the “incorrect” IP reported by DNS — my will to live was figuratively destroyed by this point), but the next time I run into a problem with it, I’m just going to shove another TomatoUSB-powered router behind it (to replace it as a wireless access point, basically), stick it in DMZPlus mode (more info here), and be done with it.

Of those two platforms, I would say that their influences were quite different on me. The incredible breadth and depth of games available on the Apple II platform really fanned the flames of my interest in gaming, which I would later go into as a professional career. The Mac, apart from the obvious innovations in user interfaces, introduced me to concepts like hard drives, laser printing (via PostScript), local area networking, WYSIWYG, and desktop publishing (an innovation that has become so ubiquitous that the term isn’t even used any more).

As a game developer, and someone who did some development on pre-OS X Macs, I wound up bearing a bit of a grudge against Apple. Their development environment, lacking protected memory, was incredibly unforgiving in many ways, and killed productivity. And Apple’s haphazard, ramshackle attempts at courting game developers were for the most part insulting, incomplete, and lacked support. I generally stayed away from purchasing Apple products and MacOS for a long time, ending only recently in the iPhone (which is a pretty decent phone).

So, in total, Apple is a company whose products have been incredibly influential not only in the world at large, but to me personally. And when one of its founders kicks the can, I feel obligated to eulogize just a little bit. In parting, I’ll relate an Apple II gaming anecdote that I haven’t written about before:

When we were kids, my brother and I used to love playing a game called Micro League Baseball, on our Apple IIe. It was a baseball simulation game, with somewhat rudimentary graphics, but a wide roster of teams, and the ability to play head-to-head. The multi-player mode was hot-seat — for each pitch, the player whose team was batting would select an option, and then the player whose team was in the field would select an option. Since the options could include baseball trickery like stealing a base, or pitching out, the person who was not entering their option would look away from the screen and keyboard and cover their eyes. This was to prevent the gaming equivalent of stealing signs.

Our rivalry was quite intense, and it was quite a big deal to us to triumph in these games. (We didn’t really consider the relative strengths of teams we were using, apart from the ’27 Yankees being mega-powerful.) So I wound up doing something that was both smart and dumb. The smart part: I realized that the hollow case and keyboard design of the Apple IIe was such that key presses had distinct timbres to them — ones that could be distinguished quite easily, with a little practice. I quickly learned that I could steal signs and know exactly what my brother was doing, even though my hands were covering my eyes in adherence to the “rules.” If he pressed ’3′ to steal a base, or ’4′ to hit-and-run, I would know about it in advance. The key noises were so distinct that there was basically zero chance of making a mistake.

The dumb part: I took too frequent advantage of this, and he got suspicious after about the sixth time that I called for a pitchout and happened to catch him stealing bases. I had to ‘fess up to my little trick.

I can’t remember if covering our ears, too, became part of playing the game, or if the other person had to leave the room, to ensure fairness and a level playing field.

• There are many more neighbors here who are also using wireless networks. They’re also closer to us than in our old place.
• The construction of the building itself may be contributing to the reception problem.
• The signal from our main access point is passing through a few walls. In our old place, it just had to go through a ceiling to get to our PCs.

The end result of all of this is that, in our home office, the wi-fi reception has been a bit dicey ever since we moved in. It would work, but the signal would occasionally drop out, or the response time would not be as good as I would like. With Battlefield 3‘s beta starting soon, I didn’t want to take any chances with a problematic network connection. I finally had a chance to do some tinkering and try and find a good solution to this problem, using components and parts that I already had laying around.

The first thing I tried was to set up a WDS (Wireless Distribution System), with a wireless router (my old Buffalo WBR2-G54) connecting wirelessly to my Asus RT-N16, which was situated in a hallway. The RT-N16 had better, unobstructed line of sight to the computers in the home office. The WBR2-G54 was running Tomato, and the RT-N16 was running Tomato USB. The conventional wisdom is basically that for WDS to work reliably/at all, the same hardware (or same wireless chipsets) must be used on all nodes. I can now report that the conventional wisdom seems to be true — I was able to connect using WDS, but not reliably. One minute, the network would be working very well, with strong reception between my office PC and the access point in the hallway, and good transfer rates. The next, it would be completely kaput, with a reboot of the router seemingly necessary to get it to respond at all.

The next thing I tried was to flash both of my routers with DD-WRT, and then try out its repeater bridge mode. This would purportedly allow me to have two separate access points, with the one in the hallway set to use the other one as its gateway, and with all machines on both sides of the network on the same subnet. This sounds nice in theory — however, I wasn’t able to get it to work, and the tools and documentation available for troubleshooting in DD-WRT are somewhat minimal. I double-checked all of the setup instructions on the DD-WRT Wiki, but didn’t have much success — I could connect to each access point separately, but the bridging didn’t seem like it was working reliably.

At this point, I was seriously considering just running some cable from the main access point in the living room to the hallway, and hooking the RT-N16 up there. It might be a bit ugly, but it would definitely work, and the interference problems would go away since the line of sight from PC to the access point would be much more direct and unobstructed. Some new Cat-6 and some cable covers, and everything would be golden…

Finally, I decided to try the basic repeater mode in DD-WRT. I also shelved the idea of using both the Buffalo and Asus wireless routers in this — I just set up the RT-N16 to repeat the signal of the main access point in my place. I also moved the Asus from the hallway to inside the office, in a place that may have clearer line of sight and less interference to the main access point in the living room. (The Asus is sitting near a window, which is across from a single exterior wall, behind which lies the main access point.) Once I straightened out all the little differences in setup (ensuring that the Asus was set to mixed B/G mode instead of B/G/N, due to the limitations of the main access point, ensuring that the wireless security settings matched, etc.), it all just started working. Devices in my living room can talk with those in my office, and the connection seems reliable and steady.

I could probably go back to using Tomato USB instead of DD-WRT, but at this point, now that it’s working well enough, I don’t want to mess with it for awhile. Maybe later down the line I will add another wireless-N router near my main (802.11g) access point, and see if repeating that signal will improve performance, but for right now I’m just happy to have nice reliable wireless networking going for my main PCs once again.

Finally, after a bit more Googling, I saw that some people mentioned that they tried plugging the Kindle into a different USB port on their machine. That didn’t work for me, but changing out my cable for the official Kindle cable made it magically work. Very strange!

So for anyone who’s having problems syncing their Kindle via USB, make sure you’re using the official cable (or a high-quality cable, at least). I initially thought it might be a 64-bit Windows 7/Vista problem, because I saw some other reports of problems with it, but at least in my case it turns out that it was the USB cable I was using.

• uninstall Windows Mobile Device Center
• uninstall the unidentified devices in the Device Manager
• reboot
• install my motherboard’s “proper” USB driver (NEC)
• reinstall Windows Mobile Device Center
• Try connecting via USB again – it still failed, as before.
• Slap in my Bluetooth adapter and connect via Bluetooth. When I did this, it seemed to install the mobile device.
• I also had to delete my two existing PC partnerships before setting up the new one. Now it all syncs correctly.

Annoyingly, I still cannot sync via USB, but at least the Bluetooth works. I could have probably skipped to that, but I’m so used to syncing via USB that I wanted to get that working. I guess I could probably start sifting through the RNDIS driver error logs and see if I can find anything there, but considering that this whole epic saga started because I needed to sync someone’s address to my phone so I could mail them a package, I don’t want to get sidetracked too much more…

• We’ve both recently been the target of hacking attempts originating from China. Of course, the attack they suffered was much more serious and alarming than mine, which appeared to be a bot trying to log into my wireless router (running Tomato) and was mindlessly trying every entry in a password dictionary. I turned off remote access in the admin panel, and that was that.
• I own a Garmin nuvi 200, and got accustomed to using the Communicator plugin with Google Maps to easily input addresses into it without having to use the touchscreen interface. Tonight, though, I tried to use it and discovered that Google Maps no longer shows the Send link off of which the browser integration hangs. Not sure why it’s no longer there, and an update to the plugin didn’t change anything, so it seems like it’s just broken. Argh.

Windows 7 takes longer to boot than XP on the EEE PC, but performance is comparable once the OS is loaded — I have no complaints about the experience so far. The only other strange thing is that the video driver seems to have issues with coming out of sleep mode — the nice thing is that the Vista driver model allows the OS to completely restart the graphics system, so the machine actually recovers gracefully from this. I’m hoping that there will be future driver updates to solve this issue, but it’s not a big deal at this point.

I intend to split the hard drive such that I can dual-boot Linux and Windows — the hard drive on this thing is definitely big enough to accommodate both. When that’s accomplished, I’ll hopefully have a nice, portable netbook for both travel and (very) light development work.

Another thing that remains to be seen is how well games will run on this thing. I’m not expecting to run graphics-intensive games, but if I can run some decent strategy or turn-based games on this, I’ll be very, very pleased.

As it turns out, Opera released a beta version of Opera Mobile 9.5 a couple of months ago. I didn’t know about it until recently, and I only got around to downloading it and trying it out today. It is surprisingly good, particularly compared to IE Mobile and the earlier version of Opera that I had tried. They are clearly trying to emulate some of the Safari interface, albeit without a multi-touch interface. Double-tapping zooms in/out of pages, and dragging motions pan around the page. It’s unfortunate, however, that the reliance for the stylus for the preferred interface (particularly zooming) makes it less useful when navigating via the scroll wheel. The responsiveness on simple pages is good (which is essentially the only way I can compare performance against IE Mobile), and more complicated pages also perform well once they are loaded and the layout has been computed.

It appears to be based off of the same rendering technology as the Opera desktop browser (which is a change from earlier Opera Mobile versions). As smartphones and PDAs get more capable (with more memory and faster CPUs), this strategy makes sense — and as an end user, I appreciate the fact that I can be browsing the "real" versions of web pages instead of crippled or non-existent mobile versions. The JavaScript support is decent — most simple things I have tried have worked, although I couldn’t use the fancy WYSIWYG JavaScript editor that the latest WordPress ships with. (I would have been shocked if I had been able to use it, to be honest.)

So far, so good — unless I find something terribly wrong with it, I’m ready to use the new Opera Mobile as a replacement for IE Mobile. What’s even stranger is that, once it goes final, this might become the first Web browser for which I have ever paid money…

(If you want to try it out, you should actually be able to run it on the Windows Mobile emulators. I’m not sure about the actual utility of running a mobile browser on a desktop via emulation, but if you want to see how the other [non-iPhone] half lives, go right ahead…)

I didn’t find much helpful information through a quick Google search — a somewhat dubious eHow article that advocates stabbing the media through its retractable cover, an article that mentions shredding and degaussing (two options that are not available to me, given that I don’t want to spend any money on this), and a technology columnist who recommends shredding as well as “a large hammer and a stake.” Granted, I could slap each disk in and overwrite it according to security sanitizing standards, but that could take a very long time.

Instead, I decided to investigate simple physical destruction of the magnetic recording material. I was pleased to discover that you can quickly disassemble a disk, separate the recording surface from the hub of the disk, and then shred the recording surface in any ordinary office shredder. Here’s how:

1. First, lift up the metal shutter on the bottom part of the disk. It may be slightly easier to grab the edge of the shutter if you bend the disk slightly.

   

   Lift up the shutter

2.  Next, you can slide the shutter over slightly, and then rotate the shutter out of its normal track.
   

   Unseat the shutter by sliding it over slightly, then lifting

3. Pulling the shutter off may also release the spring mechanism that normally keeps it in place. If not, you can grasp the edge of the spring and pull it out, or simply wait until the floppy has been split open to remove the spring. Discard the shutter and spring.

   

   The shutter and the spring that holds it in place.

4. You can then pry open the floppy disk using the groove (normally covered by the shutter) indicated by my finger here. You can just use the tip of your finger — you don’t need to use a screwdriver or anything special.

   

   Pry here

   

   What it looks like when you begin prying the disk apart

5. When you have pried the disk open, you will be able to take out the actual media platter. Once you’ve done this, you can throw the rest of the disk into the trash.

   

   The media platter, removed from the split disk

6. Finally, you can remove the media ring from its metal hub by simply peeling it off. The adhesive should break very easily, leaving you with just the magnetic media itself. You can then feed the media into a shredder, or manually cut it into pieces.

   

   Peeling the media platter from its hub