Airport Extreme E-Book

I’ve never understood how non-techies make sense of things like private IP addressing, DHCP, Wifi, etc. When they troubleshoot -  where do they start? The only thing more baffling to Murphy is how the technically-disinclined manage to upgrade their Wordpress installs.

But for anyone looking for guidance with an Apple Airport configuration (or any wifi network) there’s help: Glenn Fleishman’s Ebook, Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Network. The 265 pages are packed with information for anyone trying to get the most from their Apple Airport, Time Capsule, or Airport Express.

This ebook is part of an entire series of ebooks managed by publishers Adam and Tonya Engst. The catalog is extensive - and based on Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Network - the quality is excellent. I hadn’t read many electronic books before but one benefit became instantly obvious: searchable text. The book is also well hyperlinked, allowing easy hops from what you’re reading to related content.

So - do you really need this book? If you typically guess your way through networking and have set up wireless networks before you’ll probably get your Airport up and running using the Airport Utility’s guided setup mode. But is up and running good enough for you?  Consider these questions:

• Should your wifi be running on the 2.6 ghz radio or the 5 ghz?
• Can you stop your iPhone from slowing down your Mac’s wifi?
• Could an Airport Extreme be the bottleneck between your lan and an ultra-fast Internet provider?
• Do you know what channel is best for wifi in your home or office?
• Do you want to allow outside traffic into your network?
• Do you want to extend your signal outside or beyond the range of a single Airport?
• What kind of encryption is best for your network?
• Does it take entirely too long to copy video files across your network?
• Do you know how to interpret the information in Airport Utility, like the chart displayed here?

If you’re looking for guidance on any of those questions -or if you think the Airport should have included a detailed manual - you should take a look at Glenn’s book.

Your Airport has many configuration options, not all of them are obvious.  For example, when selecting a radio mode only a few choices are listed in the drop-down list.  Yet option-clicking the list yielded the choice I was looking for along with many others.  How was Murphy supposed to know that?  Read the book.

Advanced configurations can get confusing with two radios.  What are the best options for naming the two networks?  How will your guests access the network?  Are you going to allow access for 802.11a?  Glenn covers these questions in his book.

Yes, the Airport came with a 36 page manual. But the first eight pages explain how to plug it in and the last five cover how big it is and whether or not you can use it at the North Pole. In between you’ll find the same vague information found in many Apple publications. On the other hand, Take Control of Your 802.11n Airport Network is one of the longer Taking Control titles - and it’s packed with useful information.  The material covers a wide swath of networking information with just the right amount of depth.

The book starts out by covering many general networking concepts, quite an undertaking in itself. But it’s not overwhelming and it won’t bog you down. All the content is cleanly presented with plenty of screen captures and diagrams - helping you understand the roles Apple networking products can handle. The presentation is easy on the eyes; the content is well written.

For those already familiar with the ins and outs of Ethernet and IP networking there’s an in-depth discussion about channels used by wifi networking gear. Glenn explains how wifi signals can be constrained by walls as well as devices in your home such as microwave ovens and cordless phones- as well as many other culprits.    The topic is covered even further in a new appendix.

Sure, some people can get their network running themselves.  But maybe you’d like to get a handle on networking yourself - or you’re considering calling the Geek Squad.  With this book you can easily set up a network without outside help.  A generous sample is available on the ebook website.  Don’t forget to check out the other Taking Control titles.

iPhone GPS Abroad

Worried about iPhone international roaming charges while traveling abroad, but you want to use the phone’s GPS? Read on.

I’ve had lots of people ask me about using their iPhone when traveling abroad. Specifically, they want to know if the GPS will work without the SIM card installed (yes) or while in Airplane Mode (no).

MotionX GPS updated their iPhone app a while back with an extremely useful feature: The ability to preload a map cache for selected geographic areas. You can also select a range of zoom levels you wish to cache. The interface is as simple as dragging a circle around the area to be cached. You can also drag an oval shape if your travels are more linear-inclined.

Before the update I preloaded map tiles into MotionX GPS by dragging maps around an area of interest in advance of my travels. That wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to repeat the procedure for every zoom level you might want to view while offline. Omissions were inevitable.

Of course as you select closer and closer zoom levels there will be far more tiles to download. The app lets you know how many megabytes you’re downloading and a progress bar lets you know when the cache has been built. You can also delete a cache when you don’t need it anymore.

Cached maps improve performance while online as well, so maybe you’d download your home town. The maps will load faster when they’re already on your iPhone. Note that MotionX GPS works with Google and Bing map tiles but the preload cache feature only works with MotionX’s own maps. The MotionX maps have been fine for Murphy.

Your phone has a button to turn off data roaming, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t use the iPhone for voice or data. Instead of using Airplane Mode while in Toronto I removed my sim card to ensure I wouldn’t be charged international data rates. Airplane Mode turns off the GPS receiver. My hotel wifi connection gave the GPS enough information to get a fast fix on my location and from then on the GPS worked just fine. Without a cellular or indexed wifi connection it could take a very long time for the iPhone GPS to report its location.
Note: Turning on Airplane Mode turns off wifi too, but you can manually turn wifi back on while in Airplane Mode.

MotionX GPS isn’t primarily designed for tourists or finding restaurants. But to find your way around the streets in an unfamiliar city it’s more than adequate. The application is built for biking, hiking, running, etc. But the cache and other features make it useful in many situations. For $2.99 MotionX GPS is easily one of the best paid apps Murphy has purchased.

MotionX GPS ($2.99) has frequently been updated with useful new functionality since I purchased it. They also make a turn-by-turn direction product called Drive that Murphy hasn’t tried yet.

More on MotionX GPS:
Loading Google Directions into MotionX GPS
Intro to MotionX GPS

Random Filenames for Digital Photo Frame Images

Many of the digital photo frames on the market still don’t have the ability to shuffle images and display them in random order.   A couple people I know have frames and want to mix up the photo stream a little. The first time I ran into this issue I used a Windows utility called renamer to assign random names to the image files. But what about a pure Mac solution?

There is one, and you don’t need anything other than OS X to get it done.  Skip to the screencast if you prefer - otherwise here’s what you do:

Place the files to be renamed in one folder. It’s best to have them all in one folder without subfolders. If you have images scattered inside subdirectories you’ll have to make some adjustments to these instructions.  USE A COPY OF YOUR ORIGINAL IMAGE FILES,  there’s no reason not to.

Open the Terminal from your Utilities folder in Applications. Type cd followed by a space. Then drag the folder containing the files from Finder to the Terminal window. Hit return. The Terminal prompt should update to indicate you’re now in the directory containing the images.  This folder should NOT BE THE SAME AS THE ONE YOUR ORIGINALS RESIDE IN.  Sorry for that, but it’s important.

Finally, type the following command in the Terminal:

for i in *.jpg; do mv $i $RANDOM.jpg; done

The command is case-sensitive.  If your images have names ending .JPG you’ll need to adjust the *.jpg part of the command above to use a capital JPG.

Hit return and your image files are renamed using random numbers.  Copy them to the digital photo frame and your images should cycle randomly.  Thanks to this thread at Mac Rumors Forums.

I’ve included a screencast for those not familiar with Terminal.  Be careful in the Terminal.  You can delete files accidentally and they won’t be in your Trash !  See this warning for more information.

Google Maps to GPX or MotionX GPS

While looking for a way to dump a Google Maps route from my Mac into MotionX GPS I stumbled into a web site called GPS Visualizer. They provided a form for processing a Google Map url, such as a directions page. The output was a GPX file that MotionX GPS could import.

From the beginning: First I went to Google Maps on my Mac and got directions from Point A (apple store 5th ave) to Point B (apple store broadway). Then I clicked on the Link link and copied the text in the link field. In other words, after clicking “Link” at the top right of the map I copied the text from the top field in the pop-up. (image below)
Optionally, you might want to save the map to your own personal Google Maps before grabbing the link. In my brief experimentation fewer waypoints were dropped into my iPhone if I added that step. When I was done with the route on the iPhone I had to delete the waypoints one by one, so fewer waypoints means less cleanup later.

Here’s a look at the form I filled out on the GPS Visualizer site. I only needed to paste in the link and select GPX as the output format, as indicated.

(Instead of using directions you can use the link from a place on the map, in which case MotionX GPS will import a waypoint)

Once you click Convert on the form above you’ll be given a link to download the GPX file. Check your Downloads folder and make sure the file name ends with .gpx - and fix it if it doesn’t. From there it’s all downhill.

The GPX file is added to your iPhone by email. Send your downloaded file to gpsimport@motionx.com and they’ll reply with a specially created link. Open their email response on your iPhone and tap the link. That’s it, the GPX information is imported into MotionX GPS. You’ll see a new entry on the log page in MotionX GPS and when you open it up you’ll see something like the map included here.

There may be FAR easier ways to accomplish this — if you know one please let me know. But for now thanks to GPS Visualizer for offering a useful service. It looks like their site offers many other forms of conversion and map creation as well.

MotionX GPS is one of my favorite iPhone apps. It’s had many significant updates since I purchased it, highly recommended.

Restore the Master Library Container in iTunes

Remember when iTunes used to have a Library container that you could select as the basis for a search of ALL your content? That was nice. Now if you want to search for a TV show in the library you need to click on the TV Shows node before initiating a search.

If there were a keyboard shortcut to select each container I’d use it, but I don’t see any such shortcuts. Thanks to the king of AppleScripts for iTunes I’ve pulled together some pieces that give me a solution.

If you really miss the all-inclusive Library container you can add it back into iTunes using an AppleScript application provided by Doug Adams called Change Hidden iTunes Preferences. From there you can script selection of that container or you can go a step further: I’m using TextExpander to kick off a script that facilitates iTunes searching. The script can select the Library container or go on to select a container like TV Shows, Movies, or Podcasts. The extra step is only required if you prefer to have search results limited by media type.

The commands to select the Library container were provided by Doug. When hooks for selecting other containers weren’t readily apparent (maybe they’re there and I didn’t see them) I moved on to another strategy: Selecting the Library and then scripting arrow key presses to move down the tree. So far that works ok. Last step: Place the cursor in the search box. Doug’s page on automating keystrokes helps there too.

The simple script, shown in the screenshot, can be kicked off with a keyboard shortcut. For me it means not using the mouse, and that’s worth the effort. Still, the script isn’t working 100% of the time. For example, if the Library node is already selected it fails. Needs a little work…