My wireless signal won’t go through my walls.

Now this wouldn’t be a problem in a new house with an open floor plan. I’ve lived in houses where I get signal out on the street sitting in my car and that was running of a 802.11 G router 5 years ago, so I understand my situation is unique.

Here is my current setup.

1. Airport Extreme 802.11N – Main Router
2. Airport Express 802.11N – Extender
3. Airport Express 802.11G – Extender w/ USB Printer

My current wireless clients are as follows

1. Macbook Pro 802.11G (2007)
2. Macbook Pro 802.11G (2006)
3. iphone 3G
4. iphone 3Gs
5. PC Server 802.11N

So I toiled and strained for days trying to get the mixture right. And because I’ve got different classes working with each other it was truly a matter of getting the right device to initialize in the correct sequence. So know this Paduan. If you too are trying to setup a new wireless network, using your Airport Expresses as Wireless Extenders, do the following.

Reset everything and unplug everything. Start in sequence.

1. Plug in your Modem (Cable/DSL)
2. Attach your main wireless router (Airport Extreme 802.11N) to your modem via ethernet.
3. Register to the Airport Extreme 802.11N’s network on your main client laptop.
4. Open Airport Utility on your laptop.
5. Run through the assisted setup.
6. Make sure to check the box that reads Allow this network to be extended
7. Once this is completed and the router has reset to a solid green state, plug in the wireless device (in my case, an Airport Express 802.11N)
8. Using the same laptop, you should now see the second device show up in the Airport Utility window.
9. Select the device and run through it’s setup. (it will ask you to “switch” networks)
10. You are setting up the Airport Express to join the existing network and “extend” it’s range. Any other setup will screw everything up so make sure to check the box when you’re asked.
11. Once you’ve got the green status light a glowing on the second Airport Express, you can check on your overall network health under the Advanced > Statistics Tab in the Airport Utility application.
12. At the bottom of the window you’ll see a Logs and Statistics button. Select that to bring up a real time graph of all the wireless traffic on your network.

The most important thing to remember is to reset EVERYTHING FIRST and work in sequence to make it perfect. If you skip a step or get a little lazy, I swear to you you’ll end up spending days trying to get the mixture right.

I hate opening attachments.
I hate downloading attachments.
I hate how people use attachments and most of the time don’t know how to resize or compress anything so you end up getting a ginormous 12 mb email stuffed full of crap that you didn’t want or need to see anyway.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if that stuff didn’t bulk up your inbox?
Wouldn’t it be great if an entire project could be housed at one location so anyone who needs to can find anything related to that project anytime can do so with no special software, just the browser?

Google Wave
Well it looks like Google is in the hunt for just such a product with their brand spanking new Google Wave product, however we plebs out here won’t get to see inside that crystal palace till the end of the year so instead, we still gotta make do with what’s out there now.

UPDATE : 10/21/2009

I just scored a beta invite to Google Wave. Very excited to try it out.

UPDATE: 10/28/2009

Google Wave is incredibly powerful. Stacks of how to’s out there and I’m honestly just too busy to sit and sing it’s praises for 20 pages when so many greats have already gone before. I will say this, there is one major downfall with Google Wave that can only be corrected by time.

It’s a completely closed system, you can only use Google Wave with other Google Wave members and there ain’t nobody in there with you. I knew 2 people who were beta members and though it was fun to play around with a collaborative story time experiment. It really won’t flex it’s muscles till it is touting the user base of a gmail or facebook. More to come.

UPDATE: 12/01/2009

Google just announced they have opened the beta of Google Wave to 1 million members. Plus I just got a couple of invites in my Google Wave box to play around with. Hmmm who shall I invite?

Now we are really going to begin to see the dawn of online collaborative tools. Google Wave is massively extensible so really, the sky is the limit. Only thing stopping us now is that pesky learning curve.

Bad Request Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Well don’t fret, coz it’s an easy fix…

Step 1. Log in to your wordpress dashboard.

Step 2. Go to Settings > Permalinks >

Step 3. Set Permalinks to something non custom like the date and title structure.

Step 4. Save Changes

Step 5. Refresh your blog.

All fixed. Now get out there and start having fun again…

But how do you find out what your credit score is?
There are three major services that collect and provide this information based on your total financial profile. Generally mapped through your Social Security Number. They are Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.
But to retrieve your score from any of their websites costs money. So what do you do if you want it for free?

Go to freecreditreport.com. You know the commercial. The long haired loser friends singing stories of how their credit got screwed up so they went to freecreditreport.com to find out what their score was?

So I signed up today, and within 10 minutes had a beautifully layed out presentation of all my credit history, accounts, lease holdings and investments. Pretty scary but there I was, ink on paper.

Yes you have to give them your credit card, but here’s the trick. You call them immediately (within 7-9 days) and tell the CS Rep you want to cancel your membership. Yes you want to cancel. No you don’t want the extra service or discounted rate, you just want to cancel. They put you on hold for 2 minutes and then come back with those lovely words, “you are all set Mr. Schweinhowzer. Your membership has been cancelled. You are free to go.”

Nice.

Bookgoo is an interactive web-based tool for highlighting, annotating and sharing documents . The idea is pretty much the same as Google Docs. Although unlike Google Docs, you don’t create your documents on the Bookgoo site, but upload them instead from your PC. And unlike Google doc which limits you to textual editing of documents shared between different collaborators, Bookgoo stretch online document editing even more by letting you highlight some parts, write annotations explaining why you highlighted that part of the document, and share them with friends or to whoever you may want to share it. Your friends can edit your documents as well, should you give them access to your documents in Bookgoo.

asically, by allowing document collaboration, Bookgoo is promoting social networking among online users, but this time over a common purpose of developing ideas about the documents uploaded in Bookgoo.

Bookgoo does not work only with MS Word documents, but it also supports MS Excel, URL, PDF, HTML, gif and jpeg file formats. Hopefully, it includes PowerPoint presentation files as well.

via Highlight, Annotate and Share Your Documents at Bookgoo.

So I found the only way to correct the issue was to boot from the Install DVD. Create a new ADMIN user account and get rid of the old one.

Only problem was, when you delete a user account that has created all your folders and files, unless you create a user account with the same shortname, you will be kicked to the curb with nothing on but a pair of socks and your files laughing at you from the upstairs window. This has never happened to me in real life but I imagine it’s tantamount to the same thing… Ahem.

Here’s what you do to fix it. Change file Permissions.

2 ways you can do this. The beaatch way, which would be go to every single Get Info window and change them one by one, deleting the offending _unknown user and installing your own account with read & write permissions or, get a bazooka and do the lot all at once.

I don’t know about you, but I’m going for the bazooka every time. My bazooka? FileXaminer. First time I’ve danced with this lovely lady and we’ll see how many times she steps on my toes.

Well that was breathtaking! What would have taken me probably the rest of the weekend one by one took me about 2 minutes to complete. And that was lagging. If I had to “do it again”, 30 seconds max to change the User & Group Permissions & the Owner, Creation Date, Preview Icon… the lot. Amazing piece of software and as your Bazooka salesman, I highly recommend this fantastic piece of software which you can download from the lovely people over at Gideon Software. Or just click http://www.gideonsoftworks.com/releases/fex-leopard.dmg to download the software right away.

So now my permissions are all fixed. Hope you find this useful.

_theSheik

When you delete an email from your mailing account using Outlook and IMAP, it still displays the message but puts a line through it. These messages live on the server until they are “purged,” taking up space and viewable in other clients (such as webmail).

How to fix?

1. Go to Edit > Purge Deleted Messages.

To make this step easier you can add the Purge Deleted Messages button to your Outlook toolbar.

1. Go to View > Toolbars > Customize…
2. Click the second tab for Commands and click on Edit in the left column.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the commands list and select Purge Deleted Messages
4. Drag the “Purge Deleted Messages” button up to the toolbar at the top of the screen and drop it next to the Delete button

If you just can’t stand the site of the email with a line through it, never fear. It is possible to hide those bastards. To do this do this…

1. Go to View > Arrange By > Current View > Hide Messages Marked For Deletion

But remember, you still need to purge them to remove them permanently.

But it’s setup to run only when you tell it to. Crap right? What’s the point of having an awesome personal robot doing stuff for  me if I have to tell it to do the stuff in the first place.

Here’s the fix. Get iCal to tell it for you. By setting up each Automator task as an iCal Alarm Plug-in… Let’s get to it.

1. Launch Automator, located in the Applications folder, and create a new workflow window.
2. Select the iCal category, located in the Library list in Automator. Select the Get Specified iCal Items action in the Action list and drag it into the workflow area on the right side of the Automator window. Click the + or Add button to specify the calendar or calendars from which you would like to retrieve events.
3. Add whatever cool task you want Automator to run below the iCal task in the daisy chain.
4. Select Save as Plug-in… from the File menu in Automator.
5. Name the plug-in something awesome like “WALL•E Clean Up My Open Applications”
6. Choose iCal Alarm from the Plug-in for popup
7. Click the Save button
8. iCal will be brought to the front, and a new event will be created for the workflow. Set the start time for the new event to whatever time you want. Configure the event to repeat every weekday.
9. Once the event has been configured, the workflow will run every time that calendar event tells it to. How AWESOME IS THAT!!!

_theSheik

Turns out it was an easy fix.

1. Go to Options > Advanced Options > Browser
2. Select Internet Browser as the Default browser configuration. It’s most likely Hotspot Browser if you’re having the same problem. Mine was.
3. Escape out. Save changes.
4. You’re done.
5. If it still gives you problems you can always do a battery pull restart to solidify the changes but I doubt you’ll need to.

And that’s it folks. You are back up and running on the lame ass EDGE network whenever you want. Bring on 3G PLEASE!!!!

_theSheik

Well on a Mac it’s kind of different. The application itself is seperate from the windows, so you can have multiple windows open related to the application, close any one of them, and still have the application running in the background. Before the creation of “spaces” and even the utilization of window minizing, this was a nice way to close windows yet still have the benefit of the app running in the background. Take Mail for instance, You don’t necessarily need it up and in your face all the time, so by closing the window but keeping the app running, you still get to keep your mail coming in, but save the space. There are many more complicated benefits and uses for this technique which I won’t go into here, but you’ll get the hang of it once you tool around.

The best way to quit a Mac application is by using 1 of 2 different techniques.

1st Option – Using the Mouse

1. Go to the Menu Bar at the top of the screen
2. Select the Application Name in Bold ie: Mail or Firefox
3. Scroll down the menu to Quit “Application Name” at the very bottom, ie: Quit Mail
4. Apple does the rest.
5. If you have any open documents, web pages, or emails, Most applications will ask you if you wish to save the document for later use.

2nd Option – Keyboard Shortcut

1. Hit this keyboard combination Apple Key ( ⌘) + Q
2. Apple does the rest.
3. If you have any open documents, web pages, or emails, Most applications will ask you if you wish to save the document for later use.

Now… for those of you wonder why your beautiful Mac is running slow, I have a nifty trick you can add to the toolbox. Maybe it’s because you’ve got all those applications running in the background?

Check out my next article on creating an iCal Alarm to close those pesky brain drainers here.