Orinoco wireless card working again

With Mac Powerbook G4 sometimes wireless coverage is pretty weak. The problem is that antennas are in aluminium case and external plastic stripes are not always enough to catch weak signal far away. Then I use my Lucent (Orinoco) WaveLan card that has small antenna.

In Panther Sourceforge drivers worked just fine, but not in Tiger. There are not too many drivers available, few drivers for which you have to pay $15-19.

I accidentally found wireless driver for my Lucent (Orinoco) silver card from download page select project development page. Choose Beta 6 for Tiger from here.

Just in case they loose the fail or change the page here is the driver in my server.

Not mac related post...

...about how I woke up my Orinoco RG-1000 and configured it to support the PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) and work together with Nokia M5122.
About tools - for mac I used AirportBaseStationConfig utility and for windows Freebase and Orinoco AP manager 1, 1.90 that has latest build of RG-1000 firmware.

Updated my RG-1000 firmware since it seems that existing version on RG did not support PPPoE. I had to use crossed ethernet cable and to set IP on computer to 153.69.254.1 after I put RG to force reload mode. Firmware update was also needed since after I configured it to call via PPPoE it did not allow me to access it anymore since it restarted in every 5 sec.
With combination of using Freebase and AP manager I succeded to upgrade the firmware. Not clear how I exactly did it.

Then enabled ADSL (PPPoE) and entered username/password. I have the slow "you have to log in" ADSL. Now RG-1000 keeps connection up all the time. Enabled DHCP and NAT. Internal IP set to 192.168.0.1 and same to DHCP router section.

Notice that when PPPoE active, lower led on RG-1000 is on!


Few links to help you out (all further links from there are obsolete, that is why I uploaded these tools to my own server for you to download)

How to upgrade RG-1000 firmware Links to AP Manager are dead, download above.

How to set it up in different mode

Good FAQ about Orinoco

Different crash pictures

All macusers know the darkened picture with many languages on it, when OS X crashes.


Now I got the picture above, any ideas about what does it mean? Error message is pasted over everything.

iDVD hangs but finishes

Made a 1h 20 min movie in iMovie (6.0.2). Sent it to iDVD (6.0.2). Choosed a theme and started to burn DVD.
Menus were created and then iDVD hanged. Just shows that Encoding Audio and that is all!

Processor load is at max, Activity Monitor shows also that iDVD takes about 60-80% of processor time while being (Not responding). From View > Inspect process shows some development, iDVD interface gives you spinning wheel of death :P

It is possible to see open files and ports. Since there are files coming to that list constantly I presume we still have some action going on. So it is better to wait?!

UPDATE: All good things come to those who can wait! So it took 10h to encode 1h 20 min movie to MPEG2 from DV captured from camera (1.5Ghz Power G4, 1G RAM). Pure processor time taken from Activity Monitor was about 5h. Most of the time iDVD was "Not responding" and at the very end it woke up again and interface was accessible again.
Just in case I had it burning image rather than straight DVD. iDVD created DVD image and then at the end it hanged again. This time no remarkable processor load.
Burned DVD with Disk Utility and after it was finished and DVD worked fine, then quit iDVD.

Average user... mhh hard to belive he would wait all that time. No progress indication etc.. Does Apple has any testing for its software at all?

iMovie or not to iMovie

Well, it looks simple and stupid at the same time. I am used to PC version of Adobe Premier in earlier life, now tried to do something more with iMovie.
There are some issues I found and some other people have found. My issues:
- Titles... it is not clear for user whether the title duration is per title in title set or in total
- Fast/Slow/Reverse video effect is not working (no picture after apply)?
- Themes are not working - plays well in preview mode but after rendering screen remains black?
- Only time indication on playhead, impossible to figure out what the zoomlevel is. Why not to add timecode to timeline divisions?
- Crashes alot, seems very poor quality code.

All in all it seems that this software is made by stupid people for stupid people or something!

I will go for Final Cut Pro in future mac video projects.