I just demo'd my older black plastic Macbook right next to my new aluminum Macbook (2.4). My black one was getting full reception while the new Macbook was getting no reception at all.

I have read that the aluminum housing in other models could interfere with reception, but this is kind of silly. In other parts of my house I go from full strength to barely a signal within 8 feet.

Add that to the weird screen refresh problem I am having (see link to youtube that I found that affected a macbook pro) and I am less than impressed with the new machine thus far.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngurt41PyZo

Any thoughts on how to improve reception? I am using a Netgear Rangemax G router but was thinking about switching to an Apple Extreme for the router and an Express to link to my stereo. Perhaps that could improve my reception?

Any thoughts or anyone else experiencing the same troubles with this new machine?

Stray Blog has written about his visit to North Korea's Kaesong City.  His was one of the last tours before North Korea put a stop to cross-border travel.   Stray Blog writes that the North Korean are disadvantaging themselves by this action.

My visit to Kaesong City, North Korea last weekend was timely. This week, relations between North and South Korea took a turn for the worse, and the North responded by canceling any cross-border movement. The unfortunate aspect of this decision is that the overpriced tours made a great deal of revenue for the people of the North. Canceling them is really just a further punishment on North Koreans themselves, who are already struggling to combat a debilitating food shortage. I was fortunate to be able to take one of the last tours of the North for potentially a long time.

Visitors to the country are struck by the lack of advertisement banners and colour as Stray blog observes.

- absence of colour: all of the buildings are very drab, and the people were clothed in primarily dull brown and black jackets. Only some of the children were dressed brightly - usually bright red jackets

Flickr user Kernbeisser has posted images of his earlier journey along the Pyongyang-Hyangsan motorway.

This motorway was planned to connect the capital with the city of Huichon in Jagang Province but the last section was never completed. The completed part which was opened to traffic in 1995 ends rather abruptly in Hyangsan at the entrance to the Myohyang Mountains. So the original “Pyongyang-Huichon Motorway” ended up as “Pyongyang-Hyangsan Tourist Motorway”.

North Korea Economy Watch announces the launch of the website of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (website link). On the website the founder Dr. james Chin-Kyung Kim writes about the motivation behind the institution.

PUST is an experiment to determine if it is possible to train generations of North Korean students-who have been shielded from many international influences-in the technical skills and knowledge required to make positive contributions to a global community undergoing rapid and constant change. PUST will also encourage the students to become aware of the cultural influences that create the differences in international thinking.

In North Korea, you will find people wearning pins (badges) featuring Kim jong Il and Kim Il Sung. These pins are coveted by foreign tourists and hard to get if you are not a North Korean citizen. the bloggers Lianlian Films managed to get one while in North Korea.  They describe how they hold the pin in reverence even when they are abroad.

At the Pyongyang Restaurant in Kathmandu, a North Korean waitresses squealed when shown The Pin - they don't normally wear one in Nepal. The young lady picked it up very carefully, whipped out a piece of tissue and polished the little disc to a shine. Then she took out another piece of tissue and wrapped it up before giving it back. All throughout, she barely spoke a word but the message was clear - The Pin is sacred. Treat with care.

Talking about the North Korean restaurants, there are several of these across East Asia and are official North Korean investments.  In addition to the food, a big attraction of these restaurants are the singing and dancing North Korean staff. 

Here is a clip from one such restaurant in the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh.

h4Can Cyber Monday® save etail?/h4 pEconomic gloom hasn't plundered the stockings of US online retailers nearly as much as some had been expecting. In fact, online sales were up on Black Friday, the traditional start of the US holiday shopping season — but just barely..../ppa href="http://whitepapers.theregister.co.uk/paper/view/609/?td=btmtl"Free Download - The emReg/em Guide to Storage and Storage Platforms/a/p

We left SFO at 11am yesterday, and got into BOS at 3am. The delay in the middle was at ORD: O’Hare. We arrived at 6pm to find that our 7pm flight had been delayed to 9:10. After going to dinner at the Macaroni Grill (chosen after tweeting a request that was answered nicely by Todd Storch), we parked our butts at the gate, where the departure time kept moving back until it was nearly 11pm. For a long time there was no gate agent at all. But the board behind the counter kept rolling the departure time outward. I finally became one of those travellers who stretches out and sleeps with head on knapsack.

The plane for our flight never arrived, so United put us on another one with fewer rows, which made for even more fun. I felt sorry for whoever didn’t get to Chicago on the plane we couldn’t take.

I did sleep for the whole flight to Logan, then got to bed at 4, and up at 6. Now I’m back in the saddle, at my desk in our apartment.

The biggest relief here is Internet speed. On the road everything seemed slow. The hotel in Morgan Hill, CA barely cleared dial-up speed. The house where we hung out was okay (about 500k up and down), but seemed to take forever to bring anything up. My Sprint data card outperformed every wi-fi connection I encountered.

Here at the apartment we have 20Mb symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS. The hub-router thing craps out a lot, but otherwise it’s rock-solid and makes Net access into a relatively wide smooth highway. The only better connectivity I’ve experienced is at universities.

Anyway, good to be back. Now off to work.

pIt's a question you've probably asked. Why is it that when you are looking for a house, driving slowly down a darkened street straining to see the numbers on the fronts of the homes or on the mailboxes at the end of the driveways, you automatically turn down the car radio? Why do you need silence when focusing, concentrating? You do so, I suppose, because you instinctively know that music and voices are a distraction. You know on a subconscious level that you cannot focus as well on the task at-hand when there is noise in the background. Noise is a distraction./p pI find that when I am writing, and especially writing something that requires deep thought and consistent logic, I need to remove background distractions, whether that means I turn down the music playing from my computer or close the door to my office to drown out the sounds of squabbling or playing children. I do this without thinking about it. As I strain to collect my thoughts and to put words to them, I automatically turn down the music (as I did just now). I am often surprised, when I have finished my writing, to find that the music has been turned off or the door has been closed. I may have no recollection of doing so. It must be a natural reaction./p pMany years ago I heard a sermon, one of the few I remember from my younger days, in which the pastor suggested that we try turning off the stereos in our cars, especially when we are driving alone, and spend the time thinking or praying. He had apparently developed the practice of praying aloud when driving alone. It earned him some bemused looks from other drivers who saw him talking, apparently to himself, but because he found it a beneficial practice he swallowed his pride and continued to talk to God. I guess this was in the day before bluetooth headsets; today it seems as if every driver is talking to himself. I often make a decision--and it has to be a deliberate decision since I am accustomed to pressing the "play" button immediately after starting the car--to turn off the radio or MP3 player when I drive. I have found such times extremely valuable. My mind can process things and mull things over far better where there is silence. This is particularly true if the song I might be listening to is one that is familiar to me as then, whether I am aware of it or not, I tend to sing along. It is hard to think deeply when singing!/p pIn our culture we have allowed ourselves to become notoriously busy. And all the time, while we are busily going through life, there is a great deal of "noise" in the background of our lives. It may be music that plays when we drive, when we work and when we play. It may be a television that is turned on every time we have a few minutes to spare. Perhaps when we find fifteen empty minutes between picking the kids up from school and beginning to cook dinner we watch an episode of emJudge Judy/em or catch a re-run of emThe Simpsons/em. The background noise may be a Blackberry that constantly beeps and buzzes as it receives emails or stock quotes, even when we are far away from the office. It may be a cell phone that keeps customers or employees in contact with us even on weekends and holidays./p pIt seems to me that, as society continues to move in its current direction, and as we become ever more "wired," Christians have to be increasingly deliberate about moderating and perhaps removing some of this ever-present background noise. If we are to be thinking people, people who think deeply and deliberately about spiritual matters, we simply cannot allow our lives to be overshadowed by the noise of technology./p pI wonder how much we miss because of our busyness. I am often challenged to think just how much of life I miss while I check my email for the seventh time in a given evening or while I follow along online with a football game that I really don't care about. Technology, it seems, is a great distractor. Technology sticks its foot in the door of so many areas of my life. When I sit down to read to my children we may be interrupted by a phone call. As we head outdoors to play, I may do a quick check of my email and spend fifteen minutes typing out a reply that could easily wait until the next day; and then, while I play with the children, I am distracted, mulling over what I might have or should have said. Maybe we duck out of church before the time of fellowship is complete so we will have time to get home, make a sandwich and fluff the cushions on the couch before kickoff time./p pTruthfully, I cannot think of anything that distracts us so fully and completely and consistently as technology. For too many of us, technology is a master and not a servant. It is our owner, not our possession. We let it run and rule our lives. We allow technology to determine the course of our lives, taking us where it leads. We determine our schedules with TV Guide in one hand, a Blackberry calendar in the other. We invest countless hours in online friendships, many of which are shallow and insignificant, while ignoring people in our local churches and communities. Perhaps while ignoring even our own families./p pTechnology is a great servant but an evil master. Technology is proof of the greatness and grace of God and something we ought to be thankful for. But why, then, have so many of us allowed it to rule and govern our lives? Why do we allow it to play such an important, transcendent role in our lives and in our families?/p pIt may be as simple as escapism. Technology, and especially its many applications to entertainment, provide unparalleled opportunities to escape from reality, even if only for a few minutes. Through technology we can leave the drudgery of our lives to listen to music that glorifies freedom or to watch television or film where what happens is far more thrilling than what we experience at home and in the office. The purpose of much of modern technology is to allow us to take our entertainment with us no matter where we go. MP3 players allow us to take thousands or tens of thousands of songs with us in the car or on the train. Video iPods allow us to escape from work or school for a few minutes by watching (ironically enough) emThe Office/em or unlimited amounts of pornography. Portable DVD players allow us to keep the children quiet in the car while we take a vacation. No matter who or where we are, we can use technology as a brief escape./p pPerhaps we use technology to hide. Maybe we hate to be alone with our thoughts. We have become so accustomed to constant noise that, like a baby who can only sleep in a room with a white noise machine softly humming, we can barely stand the sound of silence. Maybe we have lost the ability to think or even the desire to think, and so we anesthetize our intellects, we lull them into inactivity, by replacing them with noise./p pMaybe we need constant noise from the cell phone or laptop so we feel like we are accomplishing anything. Perhaps we have bought into the lie that we need to be accomplishing something significant--something that either pays the bills or leaves us with another bill to pay--at all times. And so we take phone calls during dinner and answer emails in church. We check email compulsively and work while we should be resting./p pOr it could be that we prefer the anonymity and safety of online relationships, relationships that allow us to be almost exhibitionist in what we reveal about ourselves, all the while hiding behind a mask of secrecy. We would rather tell our deepest secrets to strangers on the other side of the continent, strangers we know only by their online personas, than find and nurture deep and lasting friendships close to home./p pWe are busy. We are distracted. Too often we hide behind the noise. As Christians we need to ensure that we are mastering the noise, not allowing it to master us. We need to be in control of our cell phones, Blackberries, laptops and inboxes. We can and often should use this technology, but we must now allow it to control us./pa href="http://www.monergism.com/freeshipping.html"img src="http://www.adgrab.org/www/images/mbbanner468.jpg" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=zJ8GO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=zJ8GO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=wKZ4o"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=wKZ4o" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?a=cUuMo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/challies/XhEt?i=cUuMo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/challies/XhEt/~4/471340698" height="1" width="1"/

I recently had a crappy case from the Apple store, dropped my iPhone 3G (black), it cracked, and I recently got around to buying a new one.

I want a REALLY good, protective case this time around. iPhones are just too fragile in my opinion to not have a good case (my screen cracked as I attempted to slide the phone into my pocket and it fell from barely a few feet in the air).

Are Otterbox cases the best? Does anyone here have the Otterbox DEFENDER or IMPACT case? Let me know what yall think... thanks!

Kevin

img src="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sleet.png" title="I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica." alt="I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica." /

Hi all I seriously need some help as I am not despairing at what is happening.
I have a self built File server which is running a linux file server os and has run with anything I ever wanted untill now.
It has gigabit ethernet and normally gives me a 25-30 mbps linux transfer rate and a 8-10 mbps windows transfer rate but I am currently getting >1 mbps on my brand new MBP. I have it set up as i always have done ie manual ip and so on and it all works but the transfer is so slow I can barely use it.
When I use any other storage medium i have ie external usb/firewire drives i get really really fast speeds but something here isnt working.
does anyone have any idea what I am doing wrong or am I on my own here?
Please help me as everything is going so damn well transitioning to my MBP from windows but now its jsut all come crashing down...
I know I could hook it up to my windows box and then transfer it to an extenrnal hdd and then to my mac but I think you can understand that that just inst practical
thanks for any help
chris

One of the great fallacies in the "food as medicine" mentality is the post hoc fallacy. That fallacy in full is post hoc ergo propter hoc -- "after this, therefore because of this." If B follows A, then A must, so the so-called reasoning goes, be the cause of B.

And of course, since we are eating something all the time -- in order to stay alive -- then any disease or disorder can easily be attributed to something that preceded it, because some food did precede it. Now of course A might be the cause of B, but for the devotee of whatever food fad it might be, the only evidence that is required is the chronological evidence -- did A in fact occur before B?

The same kind of thing applies to cures. "I rubbed a stick of butter on my forehead, and the ache in my knees went away." Okay, the world is a funny place and I grant it, but let's do a little more work in the process of elimination, all right?

Beneath all of this is a desire to be in personal control. Our sickness and our health is in the hands of God, and we really don't really like it there. We would rather have the illusion of control than to trust, really trust, the one who does have control, and to follow His laws in learning how to function as faithful stewards of His with some real effect on the world.

We are like little kids in those little rides at the shopping malls, where the plastic car goes up and down, left and right, and the child turns the steering wheel to no effect, feeling that he is the master of his fate and the captain of his soul. We are faced with an array of electronic euipment that we barely understand, and we would rather twiddle the knobs aimlessly and assign values randomly, than to admit our helplessness and trust God for our health. So we will eat this (twiddle knob A) and assert that that effect over there (blinking lights, say, which were going to blink anyway) was the result. This is not trusting God; it is trusting random forces in the cosmos -- which is another way of saying that you are trusting yourself.

Hi,

Some weeks ago I dropped my MacBook Air (well, actually I couldn’t do anything, my bag was broken so it dropped) and got quite a noticeable dent in the bottom left corner on the screen (outside, you can see the dent while closed). I tried to live with it but with such an expensive machine I can barely do that. :p

So I tried to find a replacement part, the display housing. But - I can’t. I can find replacement LCD displays, replacement housings für MacBooks, for MacBook Pros - but NOTHING like that for the Air. Seems like this is Murphy’s law, eh? This really sucks.

If anyone of you has an idea where to get this housing - please let me know. I’d buy without hesitation.

Thanks, I really hope somebody has a clue.

Obama Girl doesn't take your comments lying down!

Author: barelypolitical Keywords: Obama Girl Barely Political sex humor Added: November 30, 2008

Barely used Dell Axim X50v PDA in perfect working condition, picture attached. Includes docking station and bonus leather Sena case. $100