Enjoy the video

A year ago, I’ve seen the iPhone 4, presented at the WWDC 2010 via a Web-Video-Stream. I was amazed – looks nice and was THE phone to update to from our 1st generation iPhones that we were using since 3 years.

But – I wanted to look out for other phones, too. I was a user of Simyo, a pre-paid service and rarely paid anything for calling or mobile web. Sure, the 1st generation iPhone didn’t had 3G support and EDGE/GPRS – uhh… slow! What I wanted to avoid is to get into a contract with T-Mobile, the only provider that time in Germany who had the iPhone as option. (Meanwhile you can get it from Vodafone and O2, too).

So I ordered the Samsung Galaxy S, my very first Android device. I must say, these days, I was a bit of an Apple fanboi myself and was happy with my new iMac and everything Apple was “cool” and “good”. Oh dear – the following months should told me better.

The Samsung Galaxy S had a brilliant display and was very light. So light that it felt cheap – in a bad way. I played with it for 3h’s or so and thought: no, that’s not the right one. Want an iPhone 4 *drool*

I’d bought the Samsung Galaxy S via Amazon, so returning it was not a problem. Thumbs up for Amazon

Then I started to call phone shops in Belgium. I had a international flat booked that time, so it luckily didn’t cost me anything. Belgium had unlocked iPhone 4. I was surprised about our neighbors, because they were very angry and sounded very right-oriented “Beglians only.” and they hang on the phone. With some more or less solid dutch knowledge, I was lost. Most were just speaking french, which I don’t – and english? Pfft! No way. But that’s a different story.

A few weeks later, I had just ordered the iPhone 4 for my and my wife from T-Mobile directly, I went to a store in Moers to ask for a free-speech kit for my car. I saw that they are T-Mobile resellers and asked “Do you have 2 iPhone 4 16GB here?” “Yes.” Woah! T-Mobile told me the same morning it will take up to 9 weeks to get some. So I grabbed them, paid 500€ for both (each with a 29€/month contract) and went out of the store. My wife was happy and I was, too. This happiness with this cellphone lasted pretty long – if you use it as iPod touch with a phone function. I often lost and still loose calls. I have a bumper, yes. Meanwhile the 2nd one, because the crack easy above the connection port – the rubber is very thin there.

I had enough of that last week, when I everytime I picked up the iPhone, lost the connection to T-Mobile (or Telekom.de). The provider “logo” completely disappears for a few seconds. Annoying! My first thought was: SIM card? But I was told those SIM card work, or not. Like a power supply – on or off. Hmm..

So I called AppleCare. After 1:30h in the hotline, speaking with different people from their support, I was told the following:

- I’ve no AppleCare and in a few days, I will have no support.
- I’ve no AppleCare.
- I should buy AppleCare for the iPhone 4 NOW.
- AppleCare will cost me 69€.
- I’m dumb, because I don’t want AppleCare.
- I’m crazy, because I don’t want to pay 29€ for shipment of a faulty device, that Apple has delivered to T-Mobile who sold it to me.
- I’m a strange person, because I don’t want to drive to the Apple Store in the CentrO. Oberhausen and get a new one for free there.
- I’m a more strange person, because I’m banned there.
- I will receive the iPhone 4 free, because I’ve a big bunch of other Apple hardware registered.

The next day, the new iPhone 4 indeed arrived with UPS Express. The first thing I noticed was the palish display. All colors – well, how to describe – they look a bit like those Instagram photos – wrong colored and that palish. Also – the bumper for my surprise doesn’t fit very well. By gently hitting the top of the bumper, the iPhone switched off/to power saving mode. Crazy!

Oh! The phone quality was NOT better – picking up the device still let the logo disappear. Hmm…

Ok – so maybe this is how it is and T-Mobile has a bad range here (what I can’t believe). But the display sucks! Really!

So I called AppleCare again yesterday. After 30 minutes discussing with a person of their support, he wanted to ask his teamlead if they could send another one for free. The line dropped.

A few minutes later, I’ve got a call back (the only plus on their side so far). The teamlead was a very arrogant and unfriendly guy and told me I did the restore wrong. Woah. I mean, I’ve been working for a long time in a hotline on my own and I know a lot about technique stuff. When I say the display looks strange, creates stripes when scrolling and the phone calls are dropping, I’m 100% sure a restore will not help. Of course I understand they have their procedures…

The next point of the discussion was the payment for the shipment. I was really pissed when I told me that I will HAVE TO pay for the next shipment. 29€ – or I could buy 69€ – then, other shipments will be free. Uh?! More iPhones? Does this guy really told me that all their iPhones are crap and I should expect more issues!?

I told him (I think for the 5th time this day) that I don’t WANT AppleCare for “my” iPhone (or any!). I just want a working device that I paid for a year ago and still pay for every month with my monthly fees.

So – 29€ – NO! I said that clear and he understood – “For a last time, a very last time, and he will note this into my database record that this was the very last time, I will receive it for free”.

The fancy thing that annoys me here is: Why do have I to pay ANYTHING for a shipment?! That’s 100% manufactures part to pay for. Funny enough: I had some switches of stuff in the past, keyboard, graphic card and mice (yes – more than one, 3! because some Magic Mouse(s) suck, and some are great). I NEVER had to pay for a shipment. And 29€? I could send a complete Mac Pro to UK for that money! We’re speaking about a freaking light iPhone!

Even other manufactures NEVER asked me to pay anything for broken stuff. HP send meanwhile 2 new displays and a new feet for one of my displays. For free! For the displays, even a guy from HP came around and replaced them.

Samsung had send me a technician for my color laser printer – for free. WD even sent me a HD for free and put in a free voucher to send the broken HD back to them.

I really can’t understand why Apple treats their customers this way. This is just another episode of Apples bad service.

Oh! Just to mention – the 2nd replacement iPhone (the replacement for the replacement) just arrived a few minutes ago, and the display is great! The logo still drops and I think I will ask T-Mobile for a new SIM card next – maybe that helps, but I guess the “Antennagate” is not off the desk. Even here in Germany, where T-Mobile has a very good coverage (they say ).

PS. If you wonder what will happen, when the 3rd one will become faulty, I will ask them to send me the money a new iPhone 4 costs. With regards to the german law, the manufacturer has to has the chance to fix it 3 times. If it’s broken after that, they will HAVE TO transfer you the money (or a part of it).

No problem here! I just had to move one APE from the kitchen into the dorm room, where we have a LAN socket and also a power socket next to it.

The simplicity behind the setup is to do something that sounds (at least in my ears) a bit “uncommon”. You have to create 3 separate WiFi networks, all with the same SSID, password (WPA2 recommended!) & channel. Then, connect each station to the LAN sockets and voilá – it works!

Here’s are some screenshots of my setup:

At the “wireless” tab, be sure to have the same settings on all your access points!

On the internet section – select “Bridge mode”…

I prefer static local IPs for this kind of device

That’s all! I tested it and got the max. speed out of the DSL connection throughout the whole house!

Many thanks to @sl1974 for pointing my nose onto page 40 of this document!

Turns out that I was wrong – more or less.

What I did is to have 1 local access point – that is the AirPort Express in the living room. This one is connected to the local network and is in bridge mode. Means: the DHCP server is NOT the AirPort Express, but another box. In the current case, it’s the FritzBox, connected to the Telekom DSL line. This works fine so far, every client receives an IP address from this box incl. gateway, subnet and DNS information.

Here is an overview of our AirPort Express stations:

The one on the ground left is the living room APE, the one on the right is the kitchen APE while the upper one on the left is the home office APE.

Living room APE is the ONLY one which is connected via ethernet cable. It’s absolutely possible to attach the other APEs via ethernet, too, but the WiFi extension does not support that. As far as I know meanwhile, the only way to use this (perfect way in my mind) is to use a Radius server, but that’s a bit too much for 2 persons using a WiFi

With the setup shown above, I was able to use the wireless network throughout the house and also in the complete garden. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, the transfer rates are poor. Using only APE in the living room gave me up to 8MB/s which is fine for wireless, but with every attached WiFi extension, the rates decrease dramatically.

One option to go around this issue is called “WDS”. And indeed, with 2 connected APEs, I was able to get the 8MB/s I wanted – in a testlab which looks like this:

I thought it’s a nice idea to put all 3 APEs to a single power socket bar for configuration. This saves me a lot running around through the house, because in a 5h session, I had to reset all of them several times. The bad thing here: While it was working fine in this combination (of course, this is a wireless dream, because everything is very close together), in reality, I was not able to do this WDS setup when I plugged in the APEs back to the position where they belong to.

It’s always a good idea to have a label printer handy Saved a lot time while testing the setups.

What works: APE living room & APE kitchen. There’s not much walls between them. Out inner walls are made of plaster blocks, which are very light and does not hinder any signal to run through it. Additionally, because of the ground floor layout, the signal can “fly” through the open doors (we’ve no doors in the ground floor, except for the guest toilet room). So that was not the issue.

Between the ground & 1st floor, the ceiling/floor is made of heavy concrete which also contains a lot steel for stabilization. That is something that WiFi signals (and other wireless frequencies) don’t like. What I’ve learned from the setup: WDS decreases the output – or uses it in another way. As result of this bad combination, the living room & home office APEs were not able to speak to each other. No WiFi coverage in the 1st floor anymore.

I had the hope to be able to simply attach the home office APE to the wired network, but as mentioned before, that is not possible.

WDS uses:
- 1 main station
- 1 relay station
- x remotes stations

There are a ton of great tutorials on the web, but in a case like mine, it does not make sense to use them. Unfortunately.

In the end, I moved to another wireless channel and reactivated the “extend network”. It’s now on a “802.11n (802.11b/g-compatible)” mode. This works more or less as before. I could say: I’ve learned something, but in the end, I’ve wasted 5h’s.

Test results:

That is honestly not what I had in mind with “n” devices :/

The AirPort Utility shows all stations working fine, but is that true? It is, but “working” is relative

I would highly appreciate your ideas on this topic!

UPDATE

Read about the solution for this issue!

But a friend of mine had to show me iA Writer for the Mac. I admit, this is the most sexy wordprocessor I’ve seen so far. I mostly do my notes in TextMate, just because I like the Mono-Font which makes doing some quick tables pretty fast. He told me there’s a pretty cheap iPad version, too. Hmm iPad? For writing stuff? Nee…

A few minutes later I saw myself spending 79¢ for this iA Writer for the iPad. I thought “Ok, well – I’ve some unused Apple Bluetooth keyboard laying around – why not use them for a funny test ride?”. So I connected one of those spare keyboards and – wow. I’m impressed. Possibly it’s some days ago since I last wrote something positive about Apple and their stuff, but the integration of the BT keyboard into the iPad is awesome! Seriously! Of course, have a great stand for the iPad is mandatory I luckily have (since last christmas) and TwelveSouth Compass and so it’s great to type thing here in the kitchen without having a MacBook running.

I even agree to the iA principles: Concentration! I’m not disturbed by chats and can fully concentrate on writing. To type this post, I’ve just downloaded the (free) WordPress app. Super-quick-review: nice, but linking is very bad implemented. When I start typing the a href tag in HTML a box pops up… annoying. Maybe I can switch this off somewhere

Experiencing this, I hardly wonder if especially the keyboard-switch between different languages will find it’s way into Lion. Simply pressing CMD+space on the keyboard and space again let me switch between the keyboards I’ve configured in my iPad (German & Japanese Romanji). VERY GOOD! Also, the Eject key pops up the keyboard – funny! Of course, also brightness, Rewind, Play/Pause, Forward and the Mute, Increase & Decrease volume works fine. Fancy thing I’ve noticed yesterday: When locking the iPad and pressing Play/Pause on the keyboard the previously started YouTube video resumes. Very handy.

Looks like sometimes I need a bit longer (1 year ) to adopt something than others. Oh – and I still have the “Original” iPad – there’s no need to update to a newer version in my mind. Maybe with version 3. Who knows.

Have a great Sunday!

All you need to do is edit the plist file of the plugins. Mail.app has a new UUID with every version, which means: you need to add 2 lines of code into each of both info.plist files, drop the plugins back into the Bundles folder and launch Mail.app.

Growlmail (this is taken from the German ApfelTalk Forum)
Close Mail.app.

Go to: ~/Library/Mail/Bundles (Deaktiviert) (disabled)
You should see a folder called GrowlMail.mailbundle
Double click the folder and open the info.plist file with the plist-Editor that comes with Xcode or simply with a texteditor like TextMate.

The highlighted lines are the new ones. For better Copy & Paste – here they are:

		9049EF7D-5873-4F54-A447-51D722009310
		1C58722D-AFBD-464E-81BB-0E05C108BE06

Now, save the file and drag & drop the GrowlMail.mailbundle in the Bundles folder.

That’s it! Launch Mail.app and you should have it enabled.

Widemail
Follow the same steps as for the GrowlMail.bundle. The info.plist should look like this (SAME strings used!).

This shows me how often I used my MacBook, it’s deeply within my workflow. At this point, I would love to thank you guys for commenting on my last blogpost about the Apple ban. You guys told me that it’s wrong to switch the brand because of some people in a little store. That’s right! I’ve bought a bunch of software in the last year, all for Mac – and of course I will need to continue to use it for my work.

I explained in my open letter in the last blog post what was wrong with the MacBook Pro i7 13″ – the noise of the fans. I’ve read a lot through different forums on the web, and it seems that it’s not better with the i5 13″ not with the 15″ versions. Hm… I also looked out for ThinkPads. The T410s is a VERY nice one, the T400 is a better one (because of longer battery life). But let’s be realistic: I would not use Linux, because I’m not a real fan of Linux on the desktop – as I maybe mentioned earlier here and there. Alternative OS? Windows… Yey… Well, you guys know I’m also not a fan of Windows. It was fine working with it when it were the computers of my employees like the ThinkPad R51 that I’ve got from Cisco. Windows XP – I could live with that, but it was not pure fun. I can see myself sitting in front of my ThinkPad T400 in a few weeks and thinking “Why the hell have I bought a Windows machine?!”.

So I decided to go another route. In a forum I found a hint that Amazon sells off the previous version of the MacBook Pro’s (13″ Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz) for 999€. Hmm… that’s not a bad deal! It has keyboard backlit, LED display, FireWire 800 (yey! My G-Drive will love that) and I could recycle my 8GB of RAM (DDR3-1333 2x4GB) and the Intel 80GB SSD that is currently built into my dead MacBook. Sounds like a good plan. As an Amazon Prime member, it will be delivered tomorrow

More on this: Tomorrow, once it arrived.

A few last words about why I bought something from Apple again: Some may not understand this, because of the way I was treated; for me – the consequence is not to buy ANYTHING from ANY Apple Store (Hardware) anymore – Amazon is a reseller; that’s the reason why I bought it. Not to mention, in a real case of returning something, Amazon was ALWAYS very good and fast. Just because a store manager thinks he should ban me, it’s no reason to change my own workflow. Sorry, but with Macs, it’s the very best workflow I ever had.

Other people banned from the Apple stores:
- Banned for buying iPads
- Banned for bad Apple Store service
- Banned for downloading a 3rd party app

I’ve chosen the (in my mind) best way to be able to use the “wake up” function and cheapest way. A good USB stick drives you easily to 20-30€. So I bought a cable (UFP to RP-SMA) and a huge RP-SMA antenna from WLAN-Box. They delivered the next day! (WOW!).

I then drilled a 6.5mm hole into a backplate and put in the UFP to RP-SMA cable, fixed it and mounted the external antenna. Next, I installed it into the Mac Pro. For this procedure I had to remove the graphics card and the CPU & RAM tray. I had to remove the original antenna UFP cable and attached the new one which I routed behind the alu frame. Pretty easy

Here are (on request by @theinsanecow) photos of the result.

So far, it works great Bought a new wireless keyboard yesterday and use the Magic Mouse that came with the Mac Pro.

On Thursday, I should have been able to grab my shiny new iMac “Mid 2010″ edition from the Apple Store CentrO. I’ve got the UPS tracking code from AppleCare in Cork, IE and saw that it arrived on time. But to be sure, I thought: better give them a call. They guy on the hotline was not really in the mood the check it for me. He said “If the UPS tracking says it’s here, you can pick it up – no worries!”. Ok.

So we went to the Store again, happy to close this chapter. Couldn’t be that hard to simply get a machine that you paid for a few months ago, right? Let me take a look on how the iMac should be configured… ah yes:

iMac “Mid 2010″ 27″
2.93GHz i7 CPU
4GB of RAM (upgraded to 8GB as promised)
256GB Apple SSD (maybe most important)
1TB HD

When we arrived and went to the Store, I directly asked for the Store Manager (name of course hidden here). Turns out that he was there and came to me, with the Genius/Technician who supports my case. Both were very friendly, but – the Manager told me that (again) something went wrong. Eeeeeek! Seriously!? It was not a bad joke as I thought in the very first moment. No – they really had forgotten to built in the SSD. The had already booked the 675€ upgrade price from my VISA. Uncool. Really. Was a bit upset and so we sat down and talked about options. He mentioned that I had asked to replace the iMac with a Mac Pro last week. That time he said that this is not possible, because everything was already in process. But now, and he also seemed a bit annoyed by AppleCare, he asked me if I want to get a Mac Pro and take it home directly. I answered that I need some time to think about it and so Soja and I went out of the Store, deeply disappointed and went to the “Coca-Cola Oase”, a huge round hall in the front of the CentrO. to get some food. (No – I’m still “dry” of Coke – and went with a Sprite – uargs :S).

After getting new jackets for the upcoming (or already arrived) pretty cold winter, we went back to the Store and the Genius said: “We will give you the Quad Core Mac Pro with a 27″ Cinema Display” – just as we had discussed before. Great. It was all on stock. Carrying this beast to the car was horrible. Uh.. very heavy and of course, there are no caddies in the CentrO.

The Mac Pro has the following configuration:

Mac Pro “2010″
Quad Core 2.8GHz Intel Xeon CPU (1)
3GB RAM
1TB HD
SuperDrive
ATI Radeon 5770

Nice base to start with. I was really hard thinking if I should get the 8 Core model instead, but those CPUs are just clocked to 2.4GHz, which makes it for my daily work slower than the Quad core. They don’t had the 3.2GHz Quad model on stock and I really wanted to complete this “task” that day.

Meanwhile I had already ordered some hardware to “max it out”.

240GB OCZ Agility2 E SSD (275MB/s read, 285MB/s write)
16GB of RAM from a contact on Twitter

Friday, I started using the Mac Pro by trying to get my iMac content to the Mac Pro. I thought: Well, I’ve a TimeMachine backup on the OS X Server, can’t be that hard to move it back to the Mac Pro. It was In the end I used the Migration-Assitant to copy over my stuff. Bad idea, because my account was already in use – so I decided to use my MacBook for the work and wait for today when the SSD should arrive for a fresh install.

But there’s one thing that didn’t fit into my plan – headache. Yes – again. I don’t know why, but using the Apple Cinema Display with 27″ makes my head feel bad. After 4h’s I was ready to switch the Mac Pro off and call the Store. They already had a complicated case with mine. The Store Manager asked my to wait until he would come back to me.

At 21:55 CET, a few minutes before the close, I received an eMail from the Genius. No problem! I can bring the display back. He also mentioned that my DDR3-1066 RAM from my old iMac is still in the Store and I can pick this up, too.

Speaking of RAM/memory, however you call it – I had ordered 4x4GB of RAM for the iMac so that it’s here when the iMac should arrive. Of course this will NOT fit into a Mac Pro, but I found a very useful job for those RAMs. I upgraded Soja’s “Indy” to 12GB of RAM and my MacBook to 8GB. Putting it into the MacBook was more like “let’s see if it boots”, because I had read that this MacBook “Late 2008″ does support up to 6GB of RAM (which is a strange number – there are no 3GB RAMs and it has just 2 slots – hmm). I can herewith say, that the 2x4GB DDR3-1333 MHz RAM works great in my MacBook! I’ve used a VM to see if it really uses more than 6GB – and it does.

Soja is now also really happy, because 4GB is around about nothing for an iMac, today. I also had set the bootdrive to the right one. A known “bug” in the current iMacs – if you are not sure it’s selected, your iMac will take some time to find the right drive which will push your boot back about 10-20 seconds. Simply go to:

System Preferences -> Startup Disk and make sure your volume is highlighted (regular settings: in blue)

When the display will be brought back today, you may wonder what I will use as a display for the Mac Pro. Good one! I will use 2 of my old Samsung 226BW screens for the next days (already set it up this morning). But for future expansion, I ordered 3x HP ZR24w displays.

Yeah – seriously! Those are extreme cheap if you see that they are S-IPS panels with DisplayPort, DVI-D & VGA. They also come with integrated USB Hubs (1x in = 4x out / 2 on the bottom, 2 on the side). DisplayPort is VERY good, because my ATI Radeon 5770 in the Mac Pro has 2x Mini DisplayPort and 1x DVI (DualLink), so I also bought 2x Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cables. This stuff should arrive around Tuesday/Wednesday. I will keep you updated on this

For the price of ONE 27″ Apple Cinema Display, I was able to buy all 3 of them + the cables – and still could spend 10€ on anything else That’s amazing.

Something that is still a bit annoying is the bluetooth. When using the (delivered) Magic Mouse with the Mac Pro 2010, it stucks. I now have replaced the large keyboard with the wired small one and attached an older Mighty Mouse to this. This works, but – the cable is a BIT annoying

While I wrote this post, DHL has delivered the SSD – photos:

Hmm – cool Mac compatibility logo on it. When we return from our “taking back” CentrO. visit today, I will put it into the Mac Pro and give it a fresh install. Very excited for the speed.

PS. You may ask “what happens to your iMac 27″ i3 you got last week?” – Answer is: it was a temp iMac – I will return it. i3 is nice for normal tasks, but VMs on it is a nightmare