Last week I had my laptop in the living room and it was getting miserable wireless performance. This was outrageous and unacceptable because my laptop has a 802.11n card and the Time Capsule that plugs right into the DSL modem has 802.11n as well and it was less than ten feet away, in the same room. This made me decide to make the plunge and set up tiered WiFi in my house. I had the Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and the Airport Express all participating in a single 802.11b/g/n network which meant I had great coverage throughout the house and yard, but performance was pretty sub-par. The first thing to do was to make the Time Capsule run a separate 802.11n only network. This has a much lower range - it only reaches about half of my office, but that's OK, because if my laptop is in my office I usually plug it into the LAN with a cable. This was pretty easy, configuring Airport stuff has gotten a lot easier since the last time I tried it. The next trick was to make take the Aiport Extreme (which was in my office for coverage) and make it the main base station of a new 802.11g only network. I also moved it to Karin's office for a more central location. I suppose in practice I could put it in the living room, but since it can reach the Airport Express in the kitchen as extender putting those on either side of the center of the house is good. Once I got the Extreme running 802.11g then I connected the Airport Express up to that and we're off to the races. The Wii is happy to talk to the 802.11g network, and it's the most primitive home device I had. The iPhones all all of the laptops talk to g without a hassle. Lorax (my Macbook Pro) can connect to N through a large chunk of the house and will gracefully degrade onto the G network at the extreme edges. There are two devices that won't talk to the G network: the PSP and the DS. I'm not sure what the PSP's issue is, a lot of people online claim it will connect to a G network and it does try, but it fails. It used to talk to the exact same hardware when it was running b/g mode, so it almost has to be a G issue. The DS won't even TRY to connect to the G network. The solution for that is pretty simple: plug Lorax into the wired LAN, and run internet sharing on it. Set up a basic poor-man's b/g network and you're off to the races with the PSP. The DS is odd, it complains about not being able to find DHCP. The solution is to give it a manual IP address, which is a minor pain to configure but it works. For the record, Lorax sets up a subnet on 10.0.2.x and becomes 10.0.2.1. I gave the DS 10.0.2.3 for an address (since I had just been messing with the PSP and figured it might have taken 10.0.2.2), 10.0.2.1 for the gateway, and then gave it my ISP DNS servers and it works. A hat tip to Tony who told me how he had configured his DS to work with Mac internet sharing. Speaking anecdotally, the performance of the g-only network seems better than the b/g one. Since the only reasons I was keeping the b network alive were the portable gaming systems and I can't tell you the last time I actually USEED either system online this seems like a win. Plus I have the fancypants n-only network with the "wide channels" for super-plus-fast WiFi for the newer hardware in the house. Of course this means if you've set up your computer or phone to use my WiFi you'll have to redo that on your next visit. :-) Keeping everyone on their toes!

Yesterday was a particularly successful day of technology acquisition. I ended up buying and configuring an Apple Time Capsule (802.11n WiFi + network storage for backups) as well as a Wii Fit. Of course setting all that up took a big chunk of time, but there you are. I needed to acquire some more data storage and I had been debating a Time Capsule or biting the bullet and getting a Drobo. But in the last week I had several network outages that ended up being fixed by rebooting the Airport Extreme (my router), so it seemed like the Extreme needed to be replaced. As a bonus that meant I could move the Extreme as a relay in my office (the iPhone has been having some problems lately getting a good signal when I'm in my office). The thing about configuring WiFi is it's always a mess. There are three nodes in the network - the new Time Capsule, the Airport Extreme, and an Airport Express (which also streams music to the kitchen). Getting the Time Capsule to replace the Extreme was pretty straightforward, but getting the Airport Express to reconfigure took well over an hour. And the frustrating thing is that I can't say what I did differently. I'd swear I configured it the exact same way three or four times and then suddenly the last time it went "Oh, you want me to join the existing network? I can do that." And the Time Capsule insisted that my previous WiFi password wasn't the correct length so I had to change the WiFi password and then go teach it to all of the relevant devices. Whee. But now I've got a Time Capsule and can backup Horton (the Mac Mini) and Lorax (my new laptop) using Time Machine. On Wii Fit, they are fairly difficult to find (surprise! Stupid Nintendo!) On our recent vacation we checked out a fair number of Wii games, and Wii Fit, which is only sort of a game. Karin ended up wanting WarioWare and a Wii Fit, and neither is very easy to find. (If you want WarioWare the only choice I found was ordering it from bestbuy.com. It wasn't in any local stores and it's not available from Amazon or Gamestop.com.) Several Amazon Marketplace stores are selling WarioWare at higher than MSRP, so it must be out of print. And what is up with that? If I grudgingly accept some sort of hardware issue with Wii supply and then with Wii Fit, but WarioWare? That's just a DVD for crying out loud! The Wii Fit had worked out that I was just calling a few stores every week and trying places like Target or Best Buy when I was there anyway. We were at Target on Sunday and I figured I'd ask in the electronics department and they seemed to have just discovered they had "two to four units" in the back. Which makes no freaking sense, but whatever. There was a guy already waiting for one, a girl asked for one while I was waiting for them to find the stock in the back. So if they had four they sold three of them before they could even get them. Frankly I have trouble believing that the Wii Fit board is tough to make. It's a neat piece of hardware, but there's nothing cutting-edge inside it. Nintendo really needs to stop screwing around and get their manufacturing sorted out. I'm done trying to guess what the problem is, but it's really getting ridiculous now. Having WarioWare not be in the stores is just absurd. They have plenty of shelf space in the stores for crappy third party titles, and it seems like WarioWare is a game that people might actually want.