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.

One thing that has bothered me with the iPod touch since I got it was how to pause the music while I was working within an app. It wasn’t until this morning that I discovered by accident how to access your volume, play, pause and skip to next and previous songs.

By double tapping the home button from any program or even the home screen you can get a small mini navigation tool for your music. If you haven’t found this yet I hope of helps to enjoy your iPod, and if you already knew about it I’m sure your wondering why it took me so long to finnaly figure it out.

If you know about any other helpful tips or tricks for the iPod, please me me know.

I’ve had my iPod touch for a couple of days now and found another reason to like my Airport Extreme.

While in the parking lot heading home I realized I had a close to full strength signal on my iPod from my base station which was a couple hundred feet away, five stories up, and in the corner of an old brick building.

I just got my iPod touch today and I am trying out the wordpress app and the ability to post from the touch. So far it has been pretty easy to use and to get used to. Typing can take a while to get used to but after using it for about a day I have already increased my typing speed. It has a fairly good spell correction built in that can help when you are only one or two letters off so that you don’t have to delete and retype things.

iPod Touch

Apple is at it again. Only a month ago the iPod Touch was sitting at a pretty price of $299 for an 8gb. You could get a great deal for the refurbished 8gb for only $199, a hundred dollar price difference. The price gap was the same for the $399 16 gb and $499 32 gb. With the announcement of the second generation iPod Touch along with fourth generation Nanos and appropriate price cuts came the inevitable price drops for refurbished iPods. The iPod Touch went from $199 for an 8gb refurbished ($100 savings) to $179 ($120) savings, not bad but not good. The real difference came with the 16gb.

Because the next generation 16gb iPod Touch dropped to $299 new, they had to drop the price of the refurbished, otherwise you could get a brand new iPod Touch for the same price as an old generation Touch. So they dropped it from $299 to $229 or $239. This is the part I cannot confirm, but it only stayed there for about a week. Today the 16gb Touch shows up for a great price of $219 ($180 savings) from the “Original Price” but really only an ($80) savings from the current 16gb price. Not Bad.

So the question comes to this, what will the price point for the new generation iPod Touch (refurbished) be, and how long until it shows up on the apple store? This will help to determine how good of a deal the old generation Touch really is and only time will tell.

Its official, I have converted to the light side. Yes, after many years of denying the Mac, I have decided to give myself a little apple in my life. And I mean that very literally. I now have a small but stylish 13 inch MacBook. It is a very powerful laptop, and has a lot of features that help me at school, work, and home.

The kicker was Macs change to intel processors, because they run intel now, I can also run windows xp, not just a program that allows xp like features, but I can run xp itself with a dual boot setup. Although the more I get used to the Mac, the less I use xp. I rarely use it now since I have found comparable programs for the Mac. I also have a G5 at work, thats what started the conversion, and then I couldnt help myself. Although a little pricy, it really isnt much more than a nice pc laptop.

For anyone that is considering a new computer, I wouldnt leave out the Macs, especially the newer ones, the user friendly OS X is great for the novice to the experienced, and with a lot of power combined with great simplicity, it makes the perfect computer. The only exception is if your a hard core gamer,.. you better stick to your pc, altough the Macs are pushing forward on this front also. In every other way I’ll take my Mac, hands down.