Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!!

I promised myself that I would be proactive in the blogging stakes this year, not to mention with MacBites, and now look … it’s February, in fact it’s half way through February, and not a single post from me.

I do have plenty of excuses, err, reasons Including an enforced hospital stay … please don’t think I went in there willing!

Anyway, back to the point of the post *yes originally it did have a point* I will be making a concerted effort to post some interesting stuff on a much more regular basis. So if you’ve got any requests or suggestions for either me or MacBites now is the time to let me know.

Look forward to hearing from you

Elaine

As listeners of MacBites will be aware I have been suffering greatly with streaming Flash video problems in the last few months.

The purpose of this post is provide details of the configuration settings I’ve used on a Netgear router to solve my problem, so if you’re affected read on and see if it might work for you.

I first noticed a problem a few months back when I was accessing AdobeTV via the web site or the Adobe Media Player. The streaming video would start to play but after 3 minutes the router reset itself taking up to 20 minutes to reconnect but faster if I manually reset it a second time. This was completely repeatable right down to the exact 3 minutes the stream would play before resetting the router. All the lights would come on the router and these would be static not flashing as usual.

I then noticed that the same thing happened when using the BBC iPlayer – this was now getting beyond a joke. There were anomalies in that using the same physical machine but accessing each site using Windows XP running in Parallels the router wouldn’t crash!

I mentioned it on MacBites a couple of times more as a curiosity than expecting anything to come of it but I couldn’t believe how many people contacted me with similar stories or just to say they have been following my progress with it.

As I said on MacBites episode 14 all is well here now but only because I’ve reconfigured an old Netgear router to connect to Be and stopped using the BeBox. Many people asked about the BeBox with the problem – it’s a SpeedTouch 585 r.7 manufactured by Thomson. Thomson are the manufacturer of BT home hubs so if you’ve got a similar problem but are with BT that might explain it.

There are no more details from BBC/Adobe/Thomson/BT or Be regarding what they’re doing about it if anything so if you’ve got access to another router it might be your only hope at the moment.

My, formerly, spare router is a Netgear GT845PN and I set it up as follows:

1. Backup any existing settings you may need to retain on the router.

2. Reset the router to factory settings.

3. Connect to the router – usually at http://192.168.0.1 using admin/password as the user and password

4. Select basic setup from the menu on the left

5. In answer to the “Does your ISP require a login” Click No

If you have a Static IP Address follow 6.1 if you have a dynamic IP address skip to 6.2

6.1. Select Routed IPoATM and enter your IP Address and Default Gateway as provided by Be

6.2. Select the “Get Dynamically from ISP” option

7. Specify your selected DNS server addresses: Be’s DNS addresses are as follows:

Primary DNS: 87.192.0.51
Secondary DNS: 87.194.0.52

You may elect to use alternative DNS addresses such as OpenDNS (which I use)

8. Click ADSL Settings from the menu on the left, configure the settings as follows:

Multiplexing Method LLC

VPI = 0
VCI = 101
DSL Mode = ADSL2+

And if you’ve got the problem at least you know you’re not alone – I thought I was going mad when I figured out what it seemed to be – assuming nobody else could be having similar problems or that there would be an outcry.

If you’re having problems let me know how you get on using these instructions or just drop me a line to share your pain!!

I love the .com button on the iPhone keyboard but often wished it was configurable – what I hadn’t discovered is that it already is!!

Clicking once on the .com does indeed add .com to the current address but holding your finger or thumb on the .com button produces a fly out menu containing extra options.

The precise options vary country by country and a full list is available from iPhone Central at Macworld.

The options shown here are those available in the UK.

How cool is that?

The impetus for this quick tutorial was a post on the MacBites shownotes site from Gazmaz. We’d mentioned our requirements for sharing calendars and Gazmaz wanted to know if there was a way to share calendars on the same Mac but in different user accounts.

After some pondering I gave the following a try and it works perfectly … hope you find it useful.

A couple of weeks ago, on the inaugural episode of MacBites, I mentioned the very useful shortcut feature in Saft and how I’d globalized my shortcuts so they work across all the browsers I have installed. I’ve had so much feedback asking how I implemented this system that I decided to detail the process here.

The shortcut feature was incredibly useful to me when I switched from Opera on Windows to Safari on a Mac as the same feature is built in to Opera and I’d made massive use of it during my time using Opera. The only downside to it was that my shortcuts were marooned in either Opera or Safari and I have a total of 7 browsers installed – Safari, Camino, Opera, Firefox, Netscape, Shiira and Flock (why I have 7 browsers installed is a whole different post!).

So enter Typinator, a utility, from Ergonis Software.

This snippet expanding utility automatically replaces typed text ‘codes’ with longer user-specified ‘snippets of information’. In Typinator a collection of these ‘codes’ is termed a ‘set’

Out of the box Typinator includes an 800 word AutoCorrect dictionary, a real boon for those who constantly make the same typos. However, in addition to this the free TidBITS AutoCorrect Dictionary adds another 2,300 auto-corrections for common mistakes and is available from the Typinator web site.

While both of these ‘sets’ are fantastically useful they, and the Typinator auto-correct features, are not the main subject of this post.

For my global shortcuts we are going to need to create a new blank set of shortcuts, as follows:

Click the add button under the Abbreviation Set list, per Figure 1

Figure 1: Click the add button under the Abbreviation Set list

Specify a name for the new set, URLs in Figure 2

Figure 2: Specify a name for the new set

Now it’s a matter of adding individual abbreviations to expand to full URLs.

To create a new Abbreviation:

Click the add button under the Abbreviation list, per Figure 3

Figure 3: Click the add button under the Abbreviation list

Specify the text you want to type to activate the abbreviation, per Figure 4

Enter the full text in the Expansion area, per Figure 4

Figure 4: Specify the abbreviation and the full text required

There are a few options which add to the configurability of the system, as follows:

Whole Word

There is a check box for specifying whether the abbreviation will expand every time it is typed or only when typed as a whole word.

For example, I might choose to create an abbreviation ‘cook’ which I would like to expand to the word ‘cookery’ if I do not specify whole word this abbreviation will not function correctly. Attempting to type ‘cooking’ ‘cook’ would result in ‘cookerying’ appearing in the text.

Ticking the ‘Whole word’ option corrects this behaviour. Now the word ‘cook’ will only be expanded to ‘cookery’ when it is followed by a space or other punctuation character.

Case Options

There are 3 case options applicable when the abbreviation consists of letters:

1. Case must match – Here for the abbreviation to activate it needs to be typed exactly as it is defined.
2. Case does not matter – Here the abbreviation will activate irrespective of the case used.
3. Case affects expansion – Mixed case in the abbreviation is carried through to the expanded text.

Now the key thing to making my global shortcut system function correctly system wide is that I use a special key as the first character of each abbreviation to ensure that it is extremely unlikely to ever be used in any other application and expand URLs in an inappropriate place. The character I use is the section key (§) just under the escape key on a standard keyboard. So my abbreviation for the BBC news web site becomes §news which in turn expands to the full BBC news URL of http://news.bbc.co.uk.

Another tip is to enable the whole word option for all the abbreviations for your shortcuts. The effect of this is that pressing enter after typing the abbreviation immediately loads in the required web site. The benefits are:

1. Your URL loads in fractionally faster than waiting for the abbreviation to expand and then pressing enter.
2. The number of abbreviations allowed is increased. This is because leaving the whole word option unchecked means that the abbreviation automatically expands and as such each abbreviation must be completely unique with no overlap on the root.

For example, with the whole word option not checked §news would clash with §news2 but with the whole word option enabled on these two abbreviations both would be valid.

All you then need to do is create as many abbreviations as you need for your favourite web sites and you’re good to go!