Personal Dork Assistant

Extensions

Hauling the Powerbook to and from work every day is getting heavy, so I'm always looking out for ways to carry less crap with me. I've already forgotten to bring the power brick with me a couple of times, which makes things inconvenient, and it's just dead weight in the bag. So I'm tempted to pick up an extra power adapter. Even uncle suggested that I should go get another one. But that really wasn't enough incentive to pay $110 for a power brick here, a big premium over US prices.

Sam had picked up an Airport Express for me (avoiding the Apple Taiwan premium there, too), and I was waiting for mom bring it with her when she comes to Taiwan next month. But then GF's friend wanted to pick up the book I ordered for him right now, so as long as we were stuffing an Global Priority envelope anyway, we might as well as slip the Airport Express in there, too. The APEx came with a duck-head plug attached directly to the station itself. I kinda wanted the extension cord, but I didn't want to pay $43 for some stupid pieces of wire, even if it's "special" Apple and Monster wire. However, the duck-head plug on the APEx is replaceable, just like the plug on the Power(book)brick, and in fact the power supply actually comes with both a duck-head plug and a compatible extension cord. This works great for me since I can leave one power brick at the office with an extensiion cord, plug the other power supply right into the wall at home with a duck-head plug, and use the extra extension cord with the Airport Express. Awesome! Of course, I didn't actually save any money with this arrangement. In fact, I'm probably spending way more than necessary, but at least my back gets a little relief.

I was heading down to Nova to pick up a new wireless router anyway, as the old Graphite Airport Base Station was periodically hanging under the strain of Bittorrent, so I could hit the nearby Apple Center where they happened to have a power brick in stock. I've been meaning to upgrade the home network to 802.11g anyway, but I wasn't quite sure what wireless router to pick up. It had to be compatible with Apple's implementation of Wireless Distribution System, because the APEx will only act as an Ethernet bridge if it was in WDS mode. I also liked some of the cool Linux hacks that was available for the Linksys WRT54G routers, but Linksys doesn't seem available in Taiwan at all, and an American brand was due to be more expensive than the home-grown stuff. The routers are based on the same few OEM chipsets, and Taiwan companies OEM-manufactures almost all these routers anyway, so it was just a matter of finding out which Taiwanese company's model is the equivalent of Linksys & Friends. Thanks to an Internet forum in the Netherlands, of all places, I found out about the Asus WL-500g, which uses the same wireless chipset as the Linksys and Apple routers, which means compatible WDS implementations. It's also based on Linux like the Linksys, which allows all sorts of hacks and mods. In fact, its default software already includes a features only available as hacks on other models, like statically assigning IPs to MACs via DHCP. It even has built-in parallel and USB ports for print and file sharing, adding to the hacking possibilities. All that and it's cheaper than the other Broadcom-chipset routers, too. Yay, even if it's got the ugliest configuration pages ever.

Came back from my Sunday-morning jog to find the special delivery envelope from home sitting on the dinner table, which was quite a surprise considering it was Sunday and all. Well, it's not as I've got anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon than setting up network equipment. Apple stuff never takes long to set up anyway. Except dad didn't include the software install CD in the envelope. That's usually not a problem since I can just download it from the company website, right? Except Apple hasn't posted the APEx software itself, only a small update that requires the original install in place to work. So all I had was a very white and very expensive brick. Thankfully Sam was at home over the weekend, and I could call home and talk/IM him through the process of ripping the software CD into a disc image and SCP'ing the image onto my webhost. The process wasn't exactly swift, due to the damn A in ADSL, but I was just being impatient. The goal was to set it up as a WDS remote station to the Asus, use it as an Ethernet bridge to get the HTPC online at 802.11g speed to replace the USB 802.11b network dongle, which also puts it next to the receiver so I can stream iTunes to it, too. That turned out to be a little trickier than planned, since the APEx started out on a different subnet than everybody else, then the WDS settings are scattered around three different screens, creating a large number of settings permutations. Not to mention the work of setting up of the Asus router, too. Took a little trial-and-error, but it was happy days once the Airport's lone LED (boo!) finally turned green. Even more wires scattered around the upstairs TV now, but uncle's a good sport about it. Although I'll have to be careful with using the TV as a screen since he may not be as kind if I burn out his $10K plasma monitor. That's a lot of overtime.