August 18, 2009
Japanese Gadget Goodies
One of the main reasons for choosing the Landmark Hotel Umeda for our one-night stay in Osaka, aside from being cheap, is its location across the street from Yodobashi Camera. The massive multi-floor temple to all things electronic is popular with tourists, thanks to its huge selection of the latest Japanese electronics and its proximity to Osaka Station. This particular Yodobashi was integrated with a full-line Comme Ça store plus other fashion and food outlets so the wife could find things to do while I browsed through the geek toys.
It was fun to play with all the latest cameras, including the most expensive DSLRs and professional lenses, but that's not exactly within the budget. Yodobashi's prices aren't that great for common items, anyway, even with the tax-rebate for foreign visitors. So it's all about finding the unique, not-too-expensive gadget that would be a pain to find anywhere else. Picked up some random photographic doodads like the DK-21M viewfinder magnifier, a filter organizer sleeve, and a case for the new digi-cam. But I was still missing that one cool find to make the trip worthwhile and taking my shopping basket up to the ¥10,000 tax-rebate threshold.
Finally something caught my eye in the notebook-accessories section: the (no "h" here) Logitec LAN-TX/U2H3S, a combination USB-hub plus Ethernet adapter in one compact package. The USB hub is nicely designed with individually rotatable ports for easy plugging. More importantly, being designed for the Macbook Air, it prominently advertised MacOS X compatibility on the box.
Now, I have no Macbook Air, and no intentions of acquiring one, so what good does this do me? Turns out that my old Aluminum PowerBook that dad left in Taiwan has a busted Ethernet jack, and that model is well-known for its poor wireless reception due to the metallic shell. PCMCIA and USB Ethernet adapters are fickle in their Mac compatibility and I didn't want to play chipset-roulette with random parts. The guaranteed Mac compatibility of the Logitec adapter made it well worth the slight premium over a generic dongle.
So we get home after the trip and I break out my new toy and plug it into the Powerbook. MacOS recognizes that a new USB Ethernet device has been added, but when I open the configuration screen it stalls with the Spinning Beachball Of Death and would not access the adapter. Went back to try to read the Japanese manual and it appears that no driver is necessary since it's built-in for Intel processor Macs, which doesn't do much for the old Moto G4 Powerbook. So much for that vaunted Mac compatibility.
But all is not lost, as System Profiler could read out the chipset of the dongle, and during my previous research I'd seen an open-source universal driver for that particular chipset family, courtesy of Sustainable Softworks. Once the driver was installed, I had to add the Logitec's device ID to the driver's compatibility list at
/System/Library/Extensions/USBAx8817x.kext/Contents/Info.plist
Under <IOKitPersonalities> I added the section:
<key>Logitec LAN-TX/U2H3S</key> <dict> <key>CFBundleIdentifier</key> <string>com.dsumorok.driver.USBAx8817x</string> <key>IOClass</key> <string>USBAx88772</string> <key>IOProviderClass</key> <string>IOUSBDevice</string> <key>idProduct</key> <integer>30506</integer> <key>idVendor</key> <integer>2965</integer> </dict>
A reboot later, I had network link via the third-party driver. Awesome. Now to explain to the wife why we need another computer sitting around the house. At least laptops are low-power?