News for Saturday, 17 December 2005

Another do-it-yourself antenna where there is no "scientific" explanation, but it seems to work.

Happy to have recently received a dual core PowerMac G5 (2.3 to be exact), I am one of those who think that a computer (or an XBox 360) is supposed to function correctly no matter where the machine (or the power supply) is located.
So it was my misfortune to notice that once installed under my desk, the Airport reception of the PM was very poor.
There, where my PowerBook, even though it's not the same kind, gave me between 2 and 3 "bars," the PM went back and forth between 0 and 1, with the inopportune disconnections which obviously resulted from that.
In all honesty, with my little knowledge of physics, I seriously wondered how a small strip of plastic integrated in a large mass of aluminum could be effective, especially without any shape to improve the reception.
In desperation, I was about to order an external access point for a machine which I paid more than 3,000 bills for (the AirPort was extra, if you recall), I remembered a item published on your site where one of your readers had placed a AirPort Express in a metal sieve.
So I went in my kitchen and got a some sort of metal strainer (Sorry, I don't know the exact term).

I then placed it behind the PowerMac, and then, the joy: instantly 3 bars!
Since then, I have had no more disconnections... Yes, I know it's completely idiotic.
Now, I am divided between the immense joy of being able to surf normally and the the strong desire to stick a pair of dunce caps on the Californian engineers who did not take the trouble to test their AirPort antennas.

Note that it will be ncessary to seriously test the quality of the reception and his signal-to noice report/ratio to know the real benefit. But for that price, it is a very amusing antenna.

Thanks to Pickwick for his testimony. He was also victim of the Shuffle forgeries and did not take long to react.

Some info on the fake iPod shuffles. I was a victim and after the seller refused to give me a refund, I took my complaint to the police and the object was confiscated in order for the police station of Nice to pursue the case.
I informed the seller of the step I took, and in the evening at 11pm, his "mom" called me asking me to withdraw my complaint.
After thinking about it and hearing from other tricked people (who had purchased and payed for it), I asked this lady to completely refund my money (85 Euros) and I brought up two other people as an incentive for the mom to make the same deal with them... oh what a Merry Christmas...
I'm waiting for the confirmation of all this before I withdraw my complaint, but I extremely doubt that the business is limited to the Nice region where there are legions of counterfeiters...

All those who have tried to watch the trailers in h.264 have probably noticed that it requires a lot of processing power. It is especially true for 1080p video, which is only playable on the most powerful of Macs.
Things could very well change with the arrival of hardware acceleration via the video card.
On December 22nd, ATi will release drivers which will be able to decode video on the X1000 series of video cards. Only the X1800 will be able to decode 1080p material, while the other will support up to 720p.
NVidea should also be releasing support for this kind of acceleration for it's latest video cards in January. As usual, all we can do it hope (and request?) that the optimized divers will eventually find their way to the Mac.
[Update] Présence PC has an article [in French] on the AVIVO technology from ATI. It has been discovered that contrary to what was thought, the transcoder is a pure hardware solution, without any acceleration from the graphics card.