Category: Life

I’ve been carrying this device for a few years now. I think I bought it in the midst of the pandemic. It provides internet backed by the local cellular network. I’ve used MiFi’s of one form or another since the mid 1990s. In the beginning, the devices were dreadful and the service matched. This devices isn’t bad at all. One of it’s most powerful features is the ability to piggyback it’s network on the wifi provided by your hotel. I use this feature to connect a carried Apple TV in remote places.

The problem with Apple TVs on Hotel Wifi: T&C acceptance

Most hotel wifi requires you to accept terms and conditions on a splash screen before you can use the wifi. This T&C splash screen is a once per device occurance so blindly connecting an Apple TV means that you would have to accept but as far as I know, the Apple TV has no way to show this screen. If you are reading this and you know that I’m wrong, email me at chris / at / vindaloo / dot / com. I’m curious to know what works for you. I have gotten my Apple TV onto the hotel’s network by spoofing the Apple TV’s MAC address to get the Apple TV checked in as having accepted the T&C but that’s the only other way that I know how to do this.

Apple TVs really want a private broadcast domain

Apple TVs heavily advertise their existing on the local network or broadcast domain. This is totally fine in your house where you control the broadcast domain but putting an Apple TV directly onto the hotel’s network is really asking for trouble. All the hotel’s guests can see it, ask me how I know, and any hotel customers who have Apple products can attempt to use your Apple TV as a broadcast device. Now, I know for a fact that an Apple TV that’s directly connected to any modern television via HDMI can wake up, turn on the TV and start broadcasting video when asked to another Apple device. Yes, this can be prohibited by setting a password on the Apple TV but that’s a changeable setting. Finally on a private broadcast domain, this is a really useful and powerful feature.

The mifi solves both of these problems. You check the T&C screen once for the mifi and since it’s using NAT, everything behind it works. And the mifi using that NAT to create a private, local broadcast domain. Furthermore, if you join your iPhone, or iPad, or MacBook to the network created by the mifi, you can use the Apple TV as you would if you were at home.

Setting up the MR5100

The feature that you want from the Mifi is called Data Offloading. You get to choose whether to rebroadcast the internet from either local WiFi or ethernet if you are lucky enough to have working ethernet in a hotel room these days. With data offloading you choose the network you want to consume and off you go.

Data Offloading weirdness

So I’m actually writing this to document some quirks that I’ve discovered on a two week long jaunt through western Europe.

You need to bring some sort of a wireless analyzer because if you want to rebroadcast the hotel’s wifi, the Mifi’s wifi must be on and it must be set to use a different channel from the hotel. Further, if you are lucky enough to have ethernet in your room, you actually just want to use your MiFi’s network backhauled against ethernet.

• Configuring the Mifi / Apple TV against hotel wifi: String and ethernet cable between the Mifi and the Apple TV. Configure data offloading to use wifi and to connect to the hotel’s network.
• Configuring the Mifi / Apple TV against hotel ethernet: Connect the mifi’s ethernet port to the hotel. Configure data offloading to use ethernet. Connect your Apple TV to the mifi using your network and credentials.

This combination is useful in other ways. At one of the hotels during our stay, the wifi was very week except by the hotel room door. It turned out that I could connect the mifi to power near the door. This created a local network that I could use anywhere in the room with more reliable, but more latent, connectivity to the internet that I could get from the hotel alone. Note well that in this hotel where the wifi was strong it was awesome. In the lobby I clocked a speedtest of 200Mb/s up and down. I was able download a 9Gb virtual machine image over dinner and drinks without a problem. In our room, the wifi analyser showed nearly no 5GHz network activity and a middling to weak 2.4GHz signal except for a spot on a table about 2m (6ft) from the door. Placing the mifi on this table and using data offloading to broadcast a 5GHz network created usable signal within the room.

In conclusion

The Netgear MR5100 with data offloading is a useful device by itself. It’s essential if you want to carry an Apple TV on a long trip to keep up with your streaming. It can also help to fix wifi problems in hotels rooms where you just get blank stares from the hotel staff. But, if you are lucky, it actually really shines in a situation where you can feed it local ethernet.

I don’t think I’m an Apple fan boy but I definitely like their stuff. That said, everyone could stand some improvement. One place Apple could improve is resets, and general controls.

The Story

I used to run a desktop machine 24/7 as an NFS server for backups. During the summer this heats up my office almost to the point where I can’t use it. I decided to change the Desktop to only be on when I need and to be suspended or off when idle. something has to be a target for the backups though. I chose a Mac Mini that I had. I brought the mini to my office and refreshed the machine with a new Operating System. Then I moved the NFS service to it. Finally, I turned off the desktop.

The Mini runs headless. At somepoint, Apple decided to be “helpful”. they changed OS X so that machines without any keyboard at all will plead for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse at periodically. The keyboard that connected to my work laptop obliged and connected and paired without a pin code exchange.

This morning I spent 20 minutes of my time trying to figure out why my keyboard didn’t work before I realized that pairing without a pin code was even possible.

I get that pairing in this manner reduces support calls and I understand that my use case of a Mac Mini running headless is a corner case by far but decisions that theOS X UI team have made lately really don’t help me. I disconnected the keyboard and turned off bluetooth on the mini but I’ll be surprised if that’s the end of things. Apple’s in the midst of a war on wires these days so if you connect your computer using ethernet and turn of wifi, your machine will pester you forever to turn the wifi back on. I’ll see if bluetooth is the same.

I just bought an Apple Magic Keyboard. My initial reaction is awesome. This is because of the ease of pairing with another Apple device. To pair this you literally turn it on and then plug it into your computer with the supplied lightning cable. No passcodes, no discovery mode, just plug it in and it works. Given that Bluetooth and USB go hand in hand these days, I really think that nearly anything that requires bluetooth pairing should work this way.

Why buy the keyboard?  I’m one of  the many software developer/devops engineer/sysadmin guys who’s avoided upgrading to the latest generation of Apple laptop mainly because of the new keyboards:

• Forcing me to use the touch bar for the Esc key is honestly a complete non-starter.
• and, the reduced travel of the butterfly keyboard, combined with the fact that if you get a crumb in it you need to take it back to apple to get it repaired. This is another non-starter.

So, I’ve been slogging through life with the top of the line 2015 15″ MacBook Pro for quite a few years. To pull me over the hump, a new MacBook Pro would have to be:

• Quad-Core i7 or better
• 32GB of RAM
• 15″ Display

If such a machine had the keyboard from the the 2015 MacBook Pro, I would have already bought it.

But my current laptop is starting to show it’s age. I have to recondition the battery before a long flight to maximize battery lifetime. The current machine’s dusty enough inside that the fans have lost some of their efficiency.

For $99.00, and even less from Amazon, I can try out the new mechanism and make a better evaluation of my ability to use the new laptop. I’m typing this blog post with the new machine and I have to admit that the new mechanism is nice. And, in the worst case, this would always be a good media center PC keyboard.

Because of this. All things considered, I spend most of my time Deleting Email. This is easiest to do in a text based mailer.

As I write this I’m listening to Squeeze’s Argybargy which I ripped from vinyl to MP3 a while ago. After doing this with a couple of albums, Argybargy, The Pretenders Learning to Crawl, I’m really happy with the results. Vinyl ripped to MP3 sounds very good. In some cases better than CD. It’s been a good experiment but wonder if I couldn’t make things even better by upgrading my equipment. I’m using an old technics direct drive turntable with a grado cartridge and a reasonably good Denon integrated amp. I wonder how much better it would be if I upgraded to a low end Music Hall Turntable like an MMF 2.1 or a Rega RP-1 and exchanged the Denon for the Adcom Pre-Amp that’s filling in for my broken A/V amp downstairs. On the other hand I wonder how much I would use a new turntable.

My biggest problem with the latest MacBooks is Apples insistence on selling them without user serviceable batteries. To me that means that the battery life is what it is and you can’t do anything about it. I own an older MacBook Pro with the replaceable battery. And I have a pair of batteries for the machine. What a pain in the neck it is to have two batteries. The webs advice on battery storage is to keep Li-Ion batteries in a cool place at about 40% charge. Also, under no circumstances let your battery discharge to nothing. I have two batteries because I don’t want to be stuck on a trans-continental flight with no laptop but more and more airplanes have empower and a trans-continental length flight is only 5 hours of laptop time when you add it up. The new Apples advertise a 7 hour battery life. Mine does slightly better than 5 on each battery depending on the workload. So in the past few trips I’ve never gone on to the second battery. Given all these things the Empower to Magsafe charger is probably a better investment than a second battery.

When I was younger I read an essay that told how the leaders of Soviet Russia enforced a standard of low quality in the creation of their toys. The reason for doing this was to instill  low quality expectations from future Russian Citizens. While this was obviously a propaganda piece designed to make me think less of communist Russia, it resonates with me because I’m forced to do tech support on my son’s toys. The toy provoking this blog entry is the EA Sports Voice Command Pitching Machine. I’m going to put a new set of batteries in the thing and give it one more chance but given that it started out with new batteries in the first place I’m not holding out much hope. Now, this is in contrast to the Nintendo Wii and the Easton Junior Pitchback Elite. The problem with the Wii is that it’s made so well that he cannot unplug the Nunchuk attachment. The pitchback is a solid toy  that does one thing but does it extremely well.

Jay’s growing up in a Mac/Linux/TiVo world so when toys disappoint like this it really bugs him. When I look at his face I have to ask if we are doing our children any good when we provide them with poor quality toys. In consumer goods I believe that your choice is: cost, feature set, quality: pick two. It’s hard watching my son learn  this.

— Chris

If you’re expecting something about the latest Transformer movie, I’m sorry to disappoint. This venting of my spleen concerns or societies move towards a deception-ocracy. I’m coining a new word o describe a system where the market protects those producers who do the best job of deceiving their customers. The credit card companies have been doing this ever since they discovered that they make more money from customers who cannot pay of their bills. There entire business model now is to deceive people into getting in so deep that they can’t pay off their balances. They live fat and happy on the finance charges. It used to be that credit card companies were happy to make money from yearly fees they charged consumers and the convenience fee that they charged merchants. But that changed when they started offering consumers cards with no annual fee as a means of boostin customer retention. It wasn’t long before Jack Welch famously called the people who paid off their GE platinum cards in full each month “Dead Beats” because they didn’t make any money for the GE. The financial analysis is spot on but I can’t help but think that Jack’s got something wrong there.

I’m currently dealing with a PC from eMachines. If you know me you know that as far as windows recovery goes I’m with Ripley, Hudson, and Cpl Hicks on the recovery of Windows machines that have been hit with viruses: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” In a normal world when you spend $400.00 on a PC the manufacturer includes recovery media at a cost to him of about $2.00. Apparently, eMachines is so starved for cash that the extra $2.00 is the difference between staying in business and not. It’s too bad considering that the overwhelming majority of Windows boxes would benefit from a periodic re-install even if there were no viruses. And that re-install process changes the recovery media from a luxury item into a must have. Or, perhaps Acer/eMachines has found a way to turn the $2.00 recovery media into a profit center generating $18.00 in “handling fees”.