Oh Apple, why do you (mis)treat us like this?

As I’ve mentioned before, my iMac G5 came with a hardware problem. The screen is way darker than it should and sometimes has fits and starts flickering.

Considerations about this kind of problem being there for far longer than is reasonable in the iMac line apart, Apple does know this happens and is well aware that lots of people suffer from this problem.

So anyway, I talked to the retailer where I got my iMac from and reported the problem. They acknowledged it promptly and told me they would order the required part (I’m guessing it is the video inverter, as this is what usually breaks). They have to get it from Apple Europe and they gave me an ETA of 10 working days.

This was a month and a half ago.

Anoying? Damn right! The screen is getting darker as time goes by and there was even one occasion when it refused to wake up from the sleep state.

Frustrating? Of course. I have this new dandy machine which is supposed to be all great and cool and stuff, and I can’t even edit my pictures in it properly, not because it isn’t up to the job but because the huge 20’ display looks like it was covered with a black stocking.

Typical? Hell yes, I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Sad? Well… not anymore, I’m starting to become more or less apathetic to this kind of thing from Apple. At this point I just wished there was a real alternative. And that is sad.

Home network

Yesterday evening was spent doing some changes at home.

I changed the layout of the office to make it more comfortable to work there and doing so entailed moving all the computing and networking equipment I have in the house.
It went rather well and I ended up taking out a number of devices that where just sitting there, accumulating dust, disconnected and out of service.

Just a note to self, though, if your dual homed box says it doesn’t have network access don’t bother fighting it. Even if you are absolutely sure that you connected the network cable to the right NIC. Don’t spend that half-hour fiddling with network configurations and whatnot. Just change the cable (which you know is right) and it will work. Because it was on the wrong NIC all along. The hardware is always right, stupid!

Anyhow, I ended up taking down quite a few services that were runing on the former-gateway-current-webserver in the process, so it was all for the best…

Oh and another interesting note, UPnP rocks! I was able, for the first time, to take full advantage of it using Azureus (now that I have a wireless router which supports it, even if not totally well) and it sure is sweet!

Aolynk WDR814g

The Aolynk WDR814g is a ADSL2+ capable wireless router.

It has a number of interesting features built-in such as a DHCP server, support for UPnP, firewall capabilities, DynamicDNS client capabilities and more.

Notes on firmware version “V1.00.15beta.1   Feb. 1, 2005  15:39:35”

• The UPnP seems to work quite well (tried it with Azureus) but there are still some kinks to be ironed out such as not cleaning up the assignments table after the connection is terminated and giving out information on the whole table, regardless of each entry being enabled or disabled;
• DynamicDNS support is not quite all there yet. It seems not to support protocol 2 of the [DynDNS.org)[http://dyndns.org/] service (which I use);
• The list of connected wireless clients is always empty, regardless of the number of clients actually connected;
• The logs are sparse and rather uninteresting. there is no detail on packets dropped from the WAN port, for example, only the indication that they where dropped;
• The data collected via SNMP seems to be mostly OK, except for the reported speed on the interfaces. No matter what speed I connect to my ADSL line or switch ports (10MBPS ou 100MBPS) I always have the same value for all of them (100MBPS).

Resources

• Product’s data page.