Sidewaysgravity Blog

It has been exactly one year since I got my Apple Airport Extreme base station and it has been that same amount of time since I was able to connect my Nintendo DS Lite up to the wifi…. until today.

The symptoms, there really was only one, when going to connect to the router, my Nintendo DS would show my wireless network with a gray lock. No lock is an unsecured network, a red lock is a secured network, and a gray lock is also a secured network, but one that has settings that the DS does not support.

Today I found the solution to my problem, the gray lock, through lots of searching and two very useful posts.

http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Edco/airport-extreme-and-nintendo-ds-wifi-78447.phtml

and

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/33/41958-connecting-ds-airport-extreme-802-11n-solution.html

Both posts basically say the same thing. Just in case these links don’t work at a future date I will sum up what they say. Your Nintendo DS only supports certain encryption settings (WEP). Wireless (N) which is what the new airport extreme’s use does not support the type of (WEP) that is needed. When you open up the Airport Utility found in the Applications/Utilities folder you will click on the manual setup. The Airport icon should be selected by default and you will need to select the Wireless tab.

Radio Mode while holding the option key

In the drop down labeled “Radio Mode” by default there are no non-N network settings…. but they are their… sort of. When you click to select the Radio Mode, hold down the option key and like magic you will see several options that were not available before. From this list you can choose 802.11b/g compatible for your Radio Mode. Now you can select for the drop down labeled “Wireless Security” Web 128 bit. This is assuming you want wireless security on your router. With that selected you will need to create a thirteen character passcode that you will use to connect all wireless devices. Once done, click on update and try your connection again.

One side note about security that was brought up in the reply posts of the second link was that WEP security is not very strong. This is true and it is something to take into consideration if changing your settings to WEP from a more secure method (WPA). Because I do not use my DS online very often, and since I now can easily set it up, I keep my network at WPA2 security and only change it to WEP when playing the DS online. Although its not the best solution, it works for now.

It seems like all that I write about is Playstation! I should probably spend a little more time reading books and working on my programming and less time playing the ps3 during my free time. With christmas break around the corner, thats not likely to happen.

Although I have been playing more than I should, this past week I have been hitting the books for finals and so I am just getting around to updating to 2.53 on the playstation. That being said I think it was just release yesterday, but I am not sure. A quick seach on google will tell you that the main update for this patch will be to bring full screen flash to the playstation. While this has received mixed reaction, I am looking forward to seeing what all I will have access to that I did not before. Sites like youtube may not have the highest quality video, so unless your watching TV on a 21″, your videos might not look so good on a 50″ with youtube. Nothing says HD quite like a pixelated video. What I am excited for is sites such as NBC, CBS, and others which provide a selection of there shows and some with HD quality. I will look foward to see how those sites will perform with this new update. All we need now is either a netflix player for the ps3, or for netflix to switch to flash instead of silverlight, or for ps3 to get silverlight support.

Although I didnt dig to deep, it looks like that is the main point to the 2.53 update. If you know something more about it feel free to share.

UPDATE: When trying to play a video from nbc.com I got the “You need to have flash 9 to play this, click here to download.” After spending some time trying to navigate around cbs.com I was finally able to get the the full episodes of Numb3rs, a show my wife and I like to watch. While I do not get any flash errors, the page just seems to load forever on first try. I refreshed the page and then it loaded properly. One click and we had a perfectly fit full screen video on our TV, so yes for cbs and a big no for nbc

Over one month has past since the initial (delayed) launch of littlebigplanet. I decided to take some time to look back and see how things are going.

The initial launch, including the delay in the game was a fairly bumpy ride. After running the software update that was available the first time I played the game was plagued with dropped connections and server timeouts which caused the whole game to lock up. The first couple days I looked forward to when they turned the servers off just so I could play without the game freezing on me. After a week or so it seemed that the servers became more stable an since then have been running well. All the while we haven’t heard much from media molecule.

Since the server connection issues have been mostly taken care of after the game launch it doesn’t seem like to much has changed. The problem is that there are still parts of the game that don’t function correctly and it’s over a month after launch. The one obvious problem, although it does not affect get play, is the fact that it always shows 0 0 0 for your play, create, an share stats. I have heard that these stats were part of the reason the servers had such a hard time in the first place so they turned them off. The other issue that I am aware of is the shared levels themselves. I’m am not sure if anyone else has this problem or not but depending on the day, I can only access a certain number of online levels, and it varies from day to day. Some days there will be 30+ pages of levels and other days only 7. There is a great news system built directly into the game so mediamolecule can easily give updates to all users but so far hasn’t produced much.

Overall given all the difficulties that this game has suffered since launch, it is still a fun game that I enjoy playing. It appears that they have it stable enough to enjoy and have fun, but they still have some smaller bugs to work out.