If you’ve ever (cough cough) just happened to accidentally download a TV show or movie via Bit Torrent or some other mechanism you may have run across some video that Quicktime gave up the ghost on, saying it lacked the proper codec.

DivX is a highly compressed video format also known as MPEG4. For some reason, Quicktime doesn’t include DivX support… I’m sure someone knows why. You can buy a DivX Codec for Quicktime or you can use the free one from DivX Labs…the catch being that it’s only supported Power PC Macintoshes thus far. And unfortunately, Rosetta provides PPC emulation for entire applications, not for pieces of them…so Rosetta can’t make a Power PC application plugin work with an Intel application.

Fortunately, DivX Labs has recently released an updated, Universal Binary, version of their free DivX codec for Quicktime.

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As part of getting some old PC’s ready for eBay, I wanted to run some thorough diagnostics on them. In particular, I wanted to test disks and memory.

Most hard drive manufacturers provide diagnostics specific to their drives on their web sites, but memory is another matter.
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There was some speculation when the MacBook Pro was announced that it might support IEEE 802.11a wireless networking in addition to the traditional 802.11b/g networking. 802.11a provides the same speeds as 802.11g, but in a different chunk of frequency spectrum. This is very helpful when you’re around other devices that may be trying to use the same frequencies as 802.11b/g (which is pretty common).

Since then, I haven’t seen any confirmation or denial of it working… so I tested it with an 802.11a access point I’m selling on eBay, and it does indeed work well. I wonder if Apple will update the Airport Express or Airport Extreme base stations to support 802.11a. I’m guessing not; I don’t really expect an update from them until they decide to support 802.11n. I wonder what they’ll call it… Airport Ultra?

A little thing like a stand for an Airport Express shouldn’t be a big deal, but the AirBase is surprisingly helpful. Not only does it help tame the mess of cables (although to look at most photos of it, you’d think that you didn’t see the cables at all - not true, they still stick out some), but by standing the Airport Express up, it helps increase the useful range of it. Since I’ve started using one of these, one Airport Express covers most of the building I’m in (our “barn”). Before, the Airport Express was laying on its side and coverage wasn’t very good. (more…)

Apple’s Airport Express is indispensable.

It’s a small 802.11b/g wireless base station. It also has an ethernet jack, a USB port for printer sharing or connecting a remote control, and - best of all - an audio port (analog or digital). It’s great for use at home and it’s great for travel, so you don’t have to be tethered to the desk at your hotel.

The Airport Express is roughly comparable to the Airport Extreme in terms of acting as a base station. It only has one ethernet port. It can act as a NAT (Network Address Translator), so you can use it to connect multiple computers to a single Internet connection. If you use NAT, it can act as a DHCP server to allocate IP addresses to the computers as well. If you’re using NAT, you can also map inbound ports to ports on particular computers behind that NAT.

You can also use access control - you can either list the acceptable MAC addresses or have it talk to a Radius server.
The Airport Express broadcasts the availability of a USB printer via “Bonjour” (ZeroConf) and the printer can be accessed via IPP - the Internet Printing Protocol.

The most exciting to thing about it to me, though is the audio out port. (more…)

The AirPlay is an FM Transmitter for iPods which have a remote control jack - that would be most iPods up to but not including the current generation of iPods with video and the iPod nano’s or the iPod shuffle (but does include the iPod photo, U2 iPod, iPod mini and most other iPods).

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I use an iCurve to support my Powerbook when I’m using my Powerbook as my desktop computer. I go back and forth… for a while I used the Powerbook portably and a G5 as my desktop, but the G5 is noisy while the Powerbook is very quiet and I get annoyed sometimes at needing to keep the two in sync (or failing to keep the two in sync). In those parts of my computer-using cycle, I switch to just using the Powerbook, with a larger external display and a bluetooth keyboard.

The iCurve is a sexy stand which helps free up desk space by letting me keep stuff under the Powerbook. It’s stable and sturdy… I can’t find a lot to say about it; it’s a passive piece of plastic, but certainly a sexy notebook computer deserves a sexy stand…

I love this thing. It’s a retractable USB cable with one end having a connector that you can snap on tips for lots of different cell phones, so that you can charge your phone over USB. It’s great when I’m travelling; I often have a USB port more easily available than a power plug, and I don’t need to carry a larger cell phone battery charger. I’ve used it with several different cell phones so far and am very, very pleased with it.