Decided that home was the last place I wanted to be today, so struck out across the neighborhood today with no serious agenda outside of wandering and maybe finding a place to hole up and write. It?s fun to be out walking on a Saturday morning when folks are picking up groceries from the farmer?s market, getting coffee, and running errands. You get to see all the little stuff you miss when you drive by insulated in your car with climate control on and the radio going full blast.
I wound up at the Hollywood Library, where Personal Telco is supposed to have a free Wi-Fi node. Since I had the iBook stashed in my satchel I thought I would check my mail and blog a little about my morning.
Tried sitting in all the different areas, but I wasn?t able to pick up a signal. I felt sort of silly putting it on sleep, setting up at the next table over, then putting it to sleep again when I couldn?t detect a signal. Think I need to invest in one of those little Wi-Fi divining rods so you can find a signal without wandering aimlessly in a building with an open laptop in your arms, watching the signal meter for any sign of life.
Maybe Personal Telco isn?t providing service to this location anymore. I checked out my books and asked the clerk about the availability of Wi-Fi, and they weren?t sure if it was still available, but to check at the reference desk.
At the reference desk, a guy about my age told me that people usually have good luck on the benches by the windows, and he was able to get on there this morning. I tried it, but again, no luck.
I?ve heard a rumor that there?s something about the iBook that interferes with the reception on the AirPort card, and I?m starting to believe it might be true because I?ve had connection issues in certain areas of Backspace as well.
You should contact Trailer Park Girl (http://www.crossroads.net/jnazak/blog/) ….she wrote about a quick fix for the iBook’s AirPort card a few weeks ago. It was something simple, like opening it up and slightly bending a little piece of metal. You might ask her or search her site. She’s very cool, and would probably be willing to walk you through it if necessary.
Yeah, you can crack open the case and futz with the internal antenna but there’s always the chance that it will slip back. That’s a pain in the ass.
The best fix I found to get past the metal case interferring with the signal was to get a card with an external antenna. I’ve got an Asante FriendlyNet AeroLan -XG (its model # AL5402-XG) card hanging out of my TiBook and I haven’t had ANY problems outside of the normal ones. (like microwaves, tvs, radio… who knew there were so many things clogging the airwaves?)
It was like $80 bucks, but considering everything I spent on building a wireless network in my house, I thought it was well worth it.
If you need help futzing with the internal antenna, let me know. I can walk you through it as well.
I’m starting to wonder if it is just the network strength in the free Wi-Fi spots, because the iBook worked impeccably on Denise’s wireless network last night. Thinking I should go coffeehouse hopping around town and do a compare and contrast between the signal strength of the different locations.
i have a powerbook & my office has an ibook. the ibook always gets a much better signal. for me, i think it’s the metal case.
but maybe they don’t provide much signal strength in those free areas. or maybe airport doesn’t pick them up as well as it should.