By Andrew - Does your wireless internet suck? Do you constantly loose that weak signal? Are you trying to get on to your neighbor’s un-protected internet from a short distance away (whether they are aware or not)? Does your MacBook/MacBookPro/PowerBook’s wireless signal seem like a tin can with a shoe lace compared to the massive transmitting power of the Echelon Project?

The QuickerTek Quicky is a very useful device to really boost the strength of your wireless signal (and sex appeal and testosterone and manliness). QuickerTek advertises that it boosts your ‘Book’s wireless strength from a wimpy 30 miliwatts to a sexy 500 miliwatts (basically, you boost your signal range to half a mile). This slender aluminum transceiver is also compatible with wireless standards 802.11b, g, AND n!!! The package contains the transceiver, the connecting cable, an installation CD, and user’s guide. It is so easy to set up that a trained monkey with a basic knowledge of quantum mechanics and an affinity to smashing things with a sledgehammer could do it.

The drawbacks are that 1) you cannot use the Quicky and the built-in Airport at the same time, 2) the Quicky heats up pretty quickly and is painful to the touch, 3) since the Quicky hooks on to the back of the ‘Book, it might cause damage to the screen in the future, and 4) it drains the battery very quickly, so the laptop should be plugged in while using the Quicky.

Overall, this is a great little device, especially if you are in an area with a free, weak WI-FI signal where service providers charge exorbitant amounts for slow service. Within a short time, the QuickerTek Quicky really proves its value.

I stumbled upon this today: I just found out that Spotlight (in MacOS X for you people using OS from the darkside) can do some maths on the fly. Awesome…

Among all the MacOS X releases, 10.5 (leopard) is definitively not the most stable. It’s getting better update after update though. In my experience 10.3.x was the most stable.

If for some reasons you get the infamous grey screen which last for ever during the boot, or if the mac keeps on doing loops during the boot, here a solution to your problem by booting in single user mode.

1- reboot the system or force reboot the system if it is stuck by pressing : ctrl+apple+start button

2- immediately after the starting chime, press and hold apple+s

The mac will start in a single user mode which is just a hoardcore unix terminal mode. At this stage, be very careful because you will have full privileges on the system.

3-  type:   fsck -fy  then press enter. fsck command will check/repair your hard-drive.

4- type:    mount -uw /  then press enter

5 –  type:   chmod 775 /  then press enter

6 – type:    reboot   then press enter. The mac will reboot and the glitch is gone…(hopefully)

This other day, I tethered my cellphone (Samsung SLM A747) on my MacbookPro over a bluetooth connection. Now I can use my cellphone to connect to the internet virtually everywhere. The nice thing is that you don’t have wires in you way. How to do it ? First you need a cellphone with an edge/3G network and bluetooth . After it is very straightforward using with Mac OS X (10.5) . Once your cellphone and mac are able to see each other, go to Preference panel / network / bluetooth. Click on “configure a bluetooth device” and follow the instructions, select your cellphone in the list. When it asks  “do you want to connect to internet using your cellphone ?”  select yes. When you are done on the bluetooth panel (network preferences), select “display modem status in the menu bar”. Done ! To connect, just go to the menu bar and select ” bluetooth connect”

The good thing: Internet pretty much everywhere totally wirelessly. The speed depends on the strength of your cellphone reception. The bad thing: expensive since without DATA plan, ATT charge $0.01 per 1Kb. So I added the unlimited DATA plan (MEdia Max Unlimited) to my contract so I won’t have to pay a ridiculous expensive bill.