The MacAlba

It’s now been a month since moving from 2-way satellite “broadband” service to a wireless broadband network connection.

Since then an external UHF antenna has been installed to get a better signal from the 3G base station. The signal strength has increased from “low” to “low to medium”. It’s not the magnitude of signal gain that I was looking for, but, given the amount of gum tree foliage that the signal has to bore through, it’s better than nothing.

The antenna was installed by professional riggers sub-contracted to the broadband carrier; it sits extremely solidly on the roof. Given that the Telstra 3G wireless broadband terminates on the same or nearby tower to where our telephone-over-microwave service sits, I got the compass out and took a bearing. The microwave antenna is sited about 150 metres south of the house and has a clear line-of-sight to its base station. The UHF wireless broadband antenna was about 20 degrees too far to the south; I swung it around but, surprisingly, it made little difference - the quantity of foliage is being blamed for this.

The peak download speed to date has now been 2800 kbit/s with a peak upload speed of 1100 kbit/s. Compared to the 512k/128k satellite service, I’ve got nothing to complain about (so far).

I live in a rural location. I have no copper telecommunications cable to the house; in fact I’d have to install a kilometre of cable to get to my property boundary, and then Telstra, the local carrier, would have to lay about 7 km of cable to connect me to the local telephone exchange. But then, the local exchange doesn’t have ADSL or ISDN!

My telephone service is delivered by a voice-over-microwave radio link.

For the past couple of years my internet connectivity has been delivered by 2-way satellite. While I can’t complain (OK, I can think of lots to complain about), it was better than a dialup modem - just. While I could live with a maximum 512 kbit/s downlink speed, the latency injected due to the huge distance the packets had to travel was a major pain in the neck.

Just recently, Telstra, the same local carrier, finally dropped the tariffs on its 3G wireless broadband service. For $129 (which, while expensive, is cheaper than the 2-way satellite), I have managed to get a peak downlink speed of 2600 kbit/s (2.6 Mbit/s) and a latency to my place of work that’s now 100 ms instead of 1700 ms.

I can now access the internet just like most of the rest of the people I know.

Oh yes, and while my monthly quota has now “jumped” from 5 GBytes to 10 Gbytes, I still feel like a poor cousin to those using Comcast in the USA who now have to live within a monthly 250 Gbyte quota. The poor cherubs.

Rumour has it that we’ll see the iPhone in Australia in June. No carrier has been selected yet. I can only hope it’ll be Telstra and 3G (a purely selfish hope - we don’t get any other high speed mobile phone service in my part of the country).

Also rumoured is that the iPhone and iPod Touch will see an update in June that brings us 802.1x wireless authentication (which means that at long last these devices will work on enterprise campuses).

My blog reading tool of choice for a long time used to be NetNewsWire. It’s a great piece of software and a great tool - I had purchased it after trialing it for a short time. But, being on a 2-way satellite link with a finite download quota, I began to resent the amount of bandwidth being consumed by NetNewsWire as it went about its business of checking for new blog articles every 2 hours. To be factually correct, much of the problem was due to bloggers not being aware of, or not being able to utilise, their ability to turn on data compression when their RSS feed was being checked.

My solution to this issue was to turn to Google Reader (again). I had tried Google Reader some time previously but, at the time, I didn’t like its user interface. And some time before that I had used Bloglines as an online reader before likewise becoming frustrated by its user interface.

In the intervening time Google had released a new version of their Reader. And I liked it. Google looked after the periodic checking for new blog articles - my own bandwidth use was reduced. Google Reader used Ajax to feed me only a couple of handfuls of blog articles at a time, thus trickling the data to me rather than spiking my bandwidth use.

And them came feed overload. Each time I came across an interesting blog article from a person whose blog I wasn’t subscribed to, I would immediately subscribe in the hope of continuing to find similarly interesting articles.

After I had reached some 535 feed subscriptions I came to the realisation that the signal to noise ration wasn’t especially good. I was having to wade through far too many articles that I wasn’t interested in before coming across something that was of interest.

So began the Great Cull.

Over a period of weeks I unsubscribed from over 200 blog feeds - I’m currently subscribed to about 320. That’s manageable. It now takes me less time to reading a larger number of interesting articles. I win.

There’s no doubt that a few hundred thousand Apple iPhones have been sold in the USA over the past few days. It’s been highly anticipated and talked about and written about for months now. The new owners must be having a great time.

Then there are those of us in the rest of the world. Will it / won’t it be sold in Australia? The iPhone, currently, is a GSM device. Telstra, the largest carrier here, has pooh-poohed the idea of their supporting it - they’re moving away from GSM and CDMA to their new 3G network. If their advertising is to be believed, their nationwide CDMA network will be switched off in January 2008.

In the meantime, instead of the real thing, we’ll just have to make do by operating an iPhone by proxy. Here’s the link to the iPhone’s User Guide, read it, then imagine yourself using the new techno-thing.

If it’s any consolation, just remember that’s it’s never a great idea to buy something that’s version 1.0. Let others work out the bugs first.

I borrowed an Apple 23 inch Cinema HD screen from another system today and connected it to my new MacBook Pro. I’ve not run a dual monitor system before and wasn’t quite sure how to work with such a setup (and still amn’t). I sat the LCD screen behind the MacBook Pro and configured OSX to have the laptop screen below the Cinema screen in the display preferences menu. This works as you’d expect from a technical perspective - but I don’t really have a feel for how work-day workflow should run.

What do I mean? If I start Microsoft Word, for example, and open a document, the file opens in the laptop screen. That’s OK - I can drag the newly opened word window up onto the Cinema screen. The window is the same size as it was on the laptop’s screen though. I then have to manually increase the window size to enable me to see the entire word document at roughly actual size. I haven’t yet found an “adjust window to actual sizeâ€? command in Word - there may not be one.

I’ve been giving Aperture, Apple’s post-processing tool for photographs, a trial run and have been really impressed by the brightness and clarity of my photographs on the big 23 inch screen. The big plus though, is the ability of Aperture to present me with a fluid, natural workflow. I’m (currently) convinced that this software will, in time, replace my current use of Adobe Photoshop.

I’ll probably end up purchasing a Mac Mini for home use and connecting a 23 inch screen to that.