I have had many routers from many different manufacturers. Never did any router I purchased stood out like this Belkin N+ Wireless Router.

A quick run down of this router:



Belkin's N+ Wireless Router features a USB Storage port on the back of the router for connecting USB storage devices such as an external hard drive or thumb drive to the network. Now you can centrally store and share media content and files from the USB hard drive to every computer on the network.

This router also features gigabit Ethernet ports for a wired connection that can handle applications that take up a large amount of bandwidth. The N+ router is based on the draft 802.11n 2.0 technology which provides the wireless range to easily cover any-size home or office. The N+ Router has the bandwidth and speed for handling media intensive applications that take up large amounts of your bandwidth.

Since I connected it to the internet box, this router has not failed me a single time. I have this router now for about 2 months and I am quite impressed in regards of reliability and performance! I am in a three story home the router is in the basement and I still get top reception in the attic! Fantastic speeds. It just works. I bought a second Belkin N+ in case the one currently running ever goes down.

What do I like about this router?

The admin section is easy to navigate and operate. I like the additional public access mode (dual SSID)! This is quite a cool feature. Currently I have the regular wireless network which I password protected. The router allows a second wireless network for public use. What it does is it lets you offer an additional access point for people so they can connect to it and access the internet but they are excluded from the local network. A nifty feature I learned to appreciate when I have friends/guests over. I don't have to fiddle around with their computers to get the wireless setup going since I always add special security implementations. All they do is launch the browser and they get to see the Belkin Public Access Landing page. They enter a from me defined password and they can start surfing. Just like with airport/hotel internet access just without the charges :). I wished the landing page would be customizable.

The reliability is unseen in any of my previously owned routers. Top job on this one Belkin you really did impress me with this router.

I was facing the following problem with my 13 inch aluminum unibody MacBook:

On the go the 13 inch MacBook screen is quite convenient. At home, on the other hand, I would prefer to use one of my larger external displays I have available. What I am trying to accomplish is to use the external larger display as the primary and only display when working with my MacBook. Working with the small MacBook display and the large external display for me was quite uncomfortable due to the large size difference.

First I had to run out and get the optional Mini DVI Adapter for the MacBook in order to connect my external display to the MacBook. The question was which of the two Mini DVI Adapters to choose. The one is for VGA displays and the other one for DVI displays.
At first I took the one for DVI displays since I had a mix of VGA and DVI displays, from which I had DVI adapters for all my VGA displays. Turned out the DVI adapters for VGA monitors that you attach to your VGA display cable (even the adapters supplied by Apple) are NOT compatible with the Mini-DVI to DVI adapter for the MacBook.
Needless to say I went back and Apple swapped the Mini-DVI to DVI Adapter with the Mini-DVI to VGA Adapter without any problems. The only pain was the total driving duration of 1 hour and 20 minutes to and from the Apple store.

Ok at this point the monitor was connected to the MacBook and responded immediately. Through 'System Preferences > Displays' you can setup the external monitor in a way to extend or mirror the MacBook display. You can even define the external monitor as the primary monitor by dragging the menu bar within 'Displays > Arrangement' by simply dragging the menu bar to the external display. All this is awesome but how does someone use the external display as the only display while working with the MacBook?

This is what I figured out to accomplish what I needed to do, which was to use the external display as the primary and only display using my MacBook:

Within 'System Preferences > Displays' setup the external display to 'Mirror' the MacBook display. Close the lid of the MacBook to put it into sleep mode. Now we have to wake up the MacBook by leaving the lid closed. I do this by simply moving/mouse clicking my BlueTooth mouse. If you do not have a BlueTooth mouse you can use pretty much anything that plugs into the USB port of the MacBook, like a memory stick for example.
This wakes up the MacBook while leaving the lid closed. You will see that the external monitor is responding and Mac OS will even resize the display screen resolution to match your external display resolution. I recommend as the next step to open the lid for proper circulation and avoiding excessive heat build up within the MacBook. Even if you open up the lid at this point the MacBook display will stay blank.

This is the only solution I have found so far and seems a bit of an overkill compared to the software solution within BootCamp :).

Working with the new 13" aluminum MacBook on a daily basis turned out to be one awesome addition to my office Mac Pro. It is small enough to carry around virtually anywhere and it surprisingly is powerful enough to do my daily work on it on the go or away from the office.

Working on it on a daily basis there were two things that really started to annoy me. It has two dim options activated by default. I decided to turn both of them off. Looking through the internet it seems I am not alone. I decided to put this in the tutorial section of this blog to visually show how to do it.

Both dim settings can be accessed through the System Preferences:



The first one is easy to find. It is accessible though the Energy Saver icon of the System Preferences. It particlarly annoyed me when I was reading something on the computer, like an e-book, or looking at the art work I am working on. After 3 minutes on battery the display dimmed significantly. I understand this is a energy saving setting but in my case I like to decide when I want to dim the screen especially when I am working. That is why we have the nifty F1 and F2 keys to adjust the brightness.



The default setting is shown above, it is set to 3 minutes. Just adjust the 'Display Sleep' setting accordingly. I pulled it all the way to the right where it shows the 'never' setting. First dim problem solved!

For me the second dim option was not as easy to find. Since the built in iSight is functioning as a sensor to adjust the dim of the screen I looked for anything iSight. I was on the completely wrong track and finally found it though the 'Displays' icon of the System Preferences. It particularly annoyed me when I had a light source behind me and moved my head. Almost every time I moved my head the screen dim adjusted. On the other side I have to say I am always impressed by the way Apple invents new things to improve the overall user experience. For me I rather have it turned off.



Above you can see a screenshot of the factory settings. To turn the ambient light function off just uncheck the 'Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes' option.

I added a second DVD writer to my Mac Pro which also supports HP's lightScribe. I wasn't really interested in the lightScribe feature as much as just adding a second optical drive to the Mac Pro. At time of purchase I wasn't sure if LightScribe is even supported by Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.x).

My test hardware:

LightScribe DVD Drive: LITE-ON DVDRW LH-20A1H LL0A 136
LightScribe Media: DVD+R Memorex (label is gold colored)

I came to find out that there is indeed support of lightScribe for Mac OS X. Drivers and two application can be downloaded free of charge at:

Driver:
LightScribe System Software for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher

Application:
LightScribe Simple Labeler for Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher (Very basic application)
LACIE LightScribe Disc Labeling (Offers many more options than the LightScribe Simple Labeler)

There are many commercial application available for Mac OS X that support lightScribe.

The LightScribe Simple Labeler is very easy to use and guides you from the beginning up to the lightScribe process. If you like to add image/photo resources to your label and/or like to place text yourself, you would need to use LACIE's LightScribe Disc Labeling or one of the many available commercial lightScribe applications out there.

All of these applications have one thing in common, which is the use of the same lightScribe drivers. Following are my findings about the lightScribe feature/experience:

Pros:

• - Water resistant.


• - Very crisp and clean results.

Cons:

• - Very SLOW, depending on the quality it can take up to 35 minutes.


• - Even at best quality, the result seems quite washed out in color. It might me possible that it depends on the media brand but I don't think it would be significantly different from what my results were.


• - At this point lightScribe only creates monochrome labels.


• - At least double the price compared to regular writable CD's/DVD's.

Personal Opinion:

I am personally not impressed by this technology. It is too slow. If you need to create a label quick, which usually is the case for me, then LightScribe is not an option. To print a label takes little time compared to lightScribe. And the good old Sharpie beats both of these methods :) ...

I have already posted about the crash of one of my four 1TB Seagate hard drives. It seems the saga continues with another 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive.
Every time I started my local journal application my system froze for 2-4 minutes showing the ball of doom, you know, that little colorful twisting ball. Every time I would backup the hard drive in question it would have the same result during the backup process. I figured I am dealing with a corrupt file which causes the system to 'freeze' temporarily, when accessed.
I ran the Disk Utility and click on the Verify option. Following the screen with the results of this hard drive:



Looks like a more serious problem. I don't really know what to make out of this. Is it my Mac Pro (first generation) causing these drives to fail or is it the hard drive? All other drives I have up to 750GB work without a hitch for over a year now. Just these (4 weeks old hard drives) cause a huge headache.

As if this morning didn't give me enough problems, I saw the following screen as I tried to pull up my website at PixelGrinch.com:



Can this morning present anymore 'positive' surprises for me? Judging by this screen I assumed all files are gone and lost. My last backup dates back over a month. You know what that means if you are talking about regular blog entries. I connected to my server and the files seemed to be available. I contacted my webhosting specialist and there was an issue with the ip address assigned within the Apache configuration file. No clue on how this happened. The website is running fine again and I am happy.

But what a bad start in the day. Both these issues wasted 4 hours of my day.

This is NOT the way I like to start the week.
Many people refer to me as Jack of all trades due to my knowledge in many different areas. Besides my graphic design background I am also A+ certified and know my way around computer hardware.
A habit that I created throughout many years of building/customizing computers is to test a new hard drive over a period of time, within a stress test, before employing it as a boot drive, your system depends on.
I never had a new hard drive fail on me running it through a 7 days 24/7 stress test period. Thats just what I did with all of my 3 1TB hard drives, I recently purchased.
I put one of them to work as a boot drive. Today I shut down the computer properly as usual and booted from the BootCamp hard drive to work in native Windows XP for a project.
After I finished what I was doing I shut down and tried booting from the Mac OS X Leopard hard drive, but all I got was a gray screen with a blinking gray folder and question mark icon. I knew at this point I might be dealing with a huge problem.
Using the option key during startup didn't show the Mac OS X Leopard hard drive as a boot option at all. It just vanished. The way I could hear the hard drive spin up and initialize was just fine, no out of the ordinary noises. So I considered a gone bad hard drive controller on the motherboard.
Since the Bootcamp partition showed up fine it could still be a hard drive controller problem if the hard drives were connected to separate hard drive controllers.
Out of personal worst case scenario experiences in the past I made it a habit to backup my hard drive at the end of every day (full clone).
It was time to put the software I used for the cloning process, to the test. I replaced the Mac OS X boot hard drive with the backup hard drive. And the backup hard drive booted up just fine. This excludes a hard drive controller problem and pin points the problem right to the original Mac OS X Leopard boot hard drive. I connected the original hard drive again together with the backup hard drive and using the Disk Utility from Mac OS X Leopard, the original hard drive was not even visible within the Disk Utility. Since I lost 'only' a days work I did not even bother employing recovery strategies since they are always lengthy. I ran out and got another 1 TB hard drive to make a backup of the backup hard drive which is now the main boot hard drive.
In all my years of experience I have never had a hard drive go bad after passing a 1 week 24/7 stress test. This hard drive was at most 4 weeks old.
Even though I have been smacked with a hard drive crash and lost a days worth of work I was almost feeling like having a party because of my backup and the way it worked instantly as a new replacement.

Follow Up

Another Seagate hard drive incident (hard drive number 2 of a total of 4 I purchased at the same day.

I have two weaknesses. One is that I seem to have a hard drive fetish which would explain my 4 internal hard drives and 11 external harddrives. The second one is that I constantly need to buy gadgets or upgrades to keep myself motivated.

So I went out to BestBuy feeding both of these bad habits and purchased the following items for my Mac Pro:



Seagate 3.5" 1TB Internal Hard Drive Kit

I currently have 4x 500GB hard drives filling all four hard drive bays of my Mac Pro (1st Generation (2007)). Apple's advertised maximum upgrade was 750GB per hard drive bay. I searched the internet but found nothing that really confirmed that a 1TB hard drive would work in a 1st generation Mac Pro. Having the tickles in my hands again I wanted to find out myself. I purchased the above hard drive, took one 500gb hard drive out of my Mac Pro and replaced it with the new 1TB hard drive. I figured if it doesn't work I can use the 1TB for the external eSata hard drive enclosure. Well it worked just fine, my Mac Pro didn't even flinch at all. This should solve the mystery, that a 1TB hard drive can in fact be added to a 1st generation Mac Pro.



Rocketfish SATA Hard Drive Enclosure


I have purchased quite a bunch of external exclosures from cheap to not so cheap. This one makes a really good impression. It comes with an all black screw driver , which is a bit small for my taste. I was not able to put enough twisting power to the hard drive screws that got a little bit harder to move, towards the end. I used one of my own tools which made it less painful. I put in the 500GB hard drive and connected it to the eSATA port of the card I have purchased below. The enclosure also offers a backup button, card reader and a 2 port USB hub. I just read in the manual that in fact the USB hub and memory card reader only operate through the USB connection. The hard drive works and is blazing away, this time externally



ProSpeed eSATA card


eSATA being a long time standard I was surprised to see there is not a single external eSATA port available on the Mac Pro. Well that is actually just half the truth. There are two eSATA ports on board but you would need to get the cables and the bracket to make them available as external solution. I looked at the ports on the main board and got the creeps on how I would ever squeeze my big hands in there and connect the cables to it. Instead of fiddling around I just purchased this 2 port eSATA card. I would have loved to get a 4 port version but I was astonished to see that BestBuy even had this 2 port version for Mac! I connected the above eSata enclosure to it and it worked like a champ. It is blazing fast and beats all other external port solutions the Mac Pro has to offer.



I am pretty happy with my purchase and will probably replace my other three remaining internal 500GB hard drives with each on 1TB hard drive.

I pretty much upgraded my Mac Pro to somewhat of a designers dream machine. I did it over time, bit by bit. The first thing I added was four 500GB hard drives and took out the 250 GB hard drive that it had. After that followed 8 GB Ram which makes 9GB of total ram counting the one that this Mac Pro came with. I added a second light-scribe capable optical drive. The only major thing I was missing is a decent graphic card. I am not one wildly purchasing anything just to upgrade my computer. I research and make sound purchase decisions. That is why I had problems upgrading my nVidia GeForce 7300 GT. The only upgrade available was the ATI X1900. After reading reviews and researching it, this card would be everything but a sound investment. Many owners complain about heating problems, system freezes, etc. I thought I rather add another nVidia GeForce 7300 GT before adding this ATI x1900. Then they came out with the nVidia GeForce 8800 GT, the only problem was that it was only compatible with the second generation Mac Pro models. My Mac Pro is considered a first generation Mac Pro and was not compatible with this particular card, due to its lack of support for PCI-Express 2.0.



Reading about it on the net you could hear the frustration from first generation Mac Pro owners. Then there was good news! The nVidia GeForce 8800 GT is now also available for the first generation Mac Pro. That's all I needed to hear and I looked around for the best deal, just as I almost gave up and was going to buy a second nVidia GeForce 7300 GT. This card currently goes for $279 plus Tax. I would be damned if I can't find this card for a lower price. I finally found it for $208 and purchased it right away. Now is the time I dislike most, the waiting time for the card to be shipped to my office.
I hope this card arrives in working order so I can enjoy it the moment I put it in. I will keep the nVidia GeForce 7300 GT in my Mac Pro as well, this way I can connect up to four displays which is actually quite nice for my work as a designer.