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2008-12-27

Starting over (again)

Lovely new MacBook Air — light as a feather pillow.

Power up.
Switch on.
My Air arrived with zero charge. I had a nervous few minutes with no response from the power button. I had time to read the FAQ, try again, and panic briefly before it eventually had enough charge to start up.
Setup admin account
Setup wireless
Software update
This may take some time (for me this was an 870MB download). While waiting you can Install Firefox
Software update again
Repeat until there are no further updates
Migrate user data from your TimeCapsule backup
Do this over ethernet, unless you want a long wait (I had 40GB to migrate. I get 2-3GB/h over a wire connected to my remote Express — 1.5GB/h with two wireless hops, and 7-8GB/h when wired directly to the Time Capsule.)
Setup user accounts
Include a working account for yourself
Configure Time Machine Backup for your new machine.
Start the initial backup.
This will take even more time (my initial backup is requires transfer of 55GB of data).
You can carry on with other tasks meanwhile. You can interrupt the process ("Stop Backing Up" in the Time Machine Menu), and resume later. Again, do as much of this as possible over a wired connection, to speed things up.
Use Calaboration to sync your Google calendars with iCal
Install Fink and Fink Commander
This allows you to install and manage various Unix utilities. I start with emacs-carbon.
Install MacPorts and Porticus
This also allows you to install and manage various Unix utilities and for many has more up-to-date versions. It also has a port of polyml. I start with polyml, tetex, bibtex2html and hevea. Porticus doesn't have carbon-emacs.
Install Kerberos Extras
Our "staffmail" imap server supports Kerberos authentication - just use the realm EASE.ED.AC.UK and your EASE user name and password. Unfortunately Apple haven't yet implemented this fundtionality on the iPhone — so syncing broke my email on the iPhone.
Change back to password authentication; sync again, so mail on the iPhone is back to normal; turn off sync; turn on Kerberos authentication on the Mac.
Install Developer Tools
Apart from anything else, this is probably the easiest way to get CVS installed.
Download iPhone SDK
Useful for the iPhone emulator which lets you see how your web pages will look on the iPhone. Maybe someday I'll write some code too!
Turn on the Safari Develop menu
To display the Develop menu in Safari 3.1 or higher, select the checkbox labeled "Show Develop menu in menu bar" in Safari's Advanced Preferences panel.

2008-12-12

Channel 13: Leopard Wireless Card Locale

Channel 13 is legal in the UK and many other locales, but not in the USofA.

Since most default setups use channel 6 or channel 1, those of us looking for uncrowded channels often find 13 is uncluttered.

When I did a recently clean install of Leopard, I found that my channel 13 network disappeared — invisible!

Update (2009-03-09) It seems that the 10.5.6 update (I installed it on 2008-12-27) has changed something so this tip no longer works!

Although my MacBook Time Zone was set to Edinburgh - Scotland (you can set this in System Preferences, under Date&Time), I found that my Wireless Card Locale was set to US (which disables channel 13).

You can check your Wireless Card Locale by going to "About This Mac" > "More Info ..." > "Network; Airport Card".

The solution was to set the Time Zone to Tokyo then restart. Wireless Card Locale is then "Worldwide" and channel 13 is enabled.

Setting the Time Zone back to "Edinburgh - Scotland" and restarting again gives me "Worldwide" — but setting Time Zone to "Los Angeles - USA", and restarting, sets it back to "US".