23 Friday Mar 2012
Posted in Apple, Internet, iPad, technology
Tags
apple, iPad, LTE, mobile, speed test, tablet, technology
Took Apple’s new iPad out for a spin Thursday, to a location where Bell’s LTE mobile coverage was more reliable than at my home.
As you can from the above screen shot, it’s doing very well, thank you very much. And that’s only with signal level fluctuating between two and three bars.
Signal maps below are courtesy of Bell’s website. Blue is current LTE coverage; brown is coverage coming soon.
Central Calgary:
Calgary metro area:
22 Thursday Mar 2012
Posted in Internet
Tags
Two years and eight months into my original Twitter adventure — for work, that is — I finally hit my 2,000th tweet on Wednesday. Didn’t think this social media stuff would turn out the way it did. Onward and upward, I suppose!
21 Wednesday Mar 2012
Posted in Flickr, Internet, photography, technology
Tags
I finally got switched over the Flickr’s new “justified” view for my contacts. My first impression is very positive. In fact, I like it very much. Nicely done!
15 Thursday Mar 2012
Tags
This little fella landed next to me as I was taking a break in San Francisco’s Buena Yerba Park.
I figured a picture of a bird would be appropriate to help announce the return of my personal Twitter feed.
You can find me at http://twitter.com/rleong101 — my handle is @rleong101.
My work-related Twitter feed will continue. You’ll find a link to that account in the Twitter widget in the right sidebar of this blog.
(Also, it now occurs to me there are speakers called tweeters. But I’ve never taken pictures of those.)
22 Tuesday Jun 2010
Posted in Internet
Tags
airport extreme, apple, browser, bug, chrome, DNS, fix, mac, prefetch, prefetching, router, safari, trouble
This whole Safari trouble got me surveying some people around me who use Macs and had upgraded to Safari 5.
My best bud, who has a late-model Airport Extreme, has had no trouble whatsoever. Another fella, who has a router as old as mine, was having the same trouble as I was. On the Internet, posts from Mac help forums users suggested people with no trouble possessed newer-model routers.
While skeptical about this Safari trouble being fixable by hardware, I figured I would sink some money on a new router. (I was going to do it anyhow.)
Lo and behold … all my troubles are gone.
And as a side bonus, I can better wireless throughput and can now print through my router. Just waiting to add a large network drive to back up my data.
But that’s not the point.
Not everyone can go and splurge on a new router just because Apple decided to upgrade their Web browser. Surely there is some software fix for whatever hardware trouble people are encountering.
This brings me back to my original hunch: Someone at Apple needs to add a check box to disable DNS prefetching. My gut tells me that’s been the problem all along. That’s how I “fixed” Chrome when its DNS prefetch feature continually caused my Internet connection to time out.
But is anybody at Apple listening?
16 Wednesday Jun 2010
Posted in Internet
14 Monday Jun 2010
Posted in Internet
11 Friday Jun 2010
Posted in Internet
Several discussion groups at apple.com suggest changing the DNS server settings on your computer to those from Google Public DNS instead of those from your ISP. I’m giving it a try … will report back.
10 Thursday Jun 2010
But the server is there, I swear!
I wrote early this morning I couldn’t replicate an error in Safari 5 I had been experiencing through the previous day, where the browser would tell me it could not connect to a server even though the server was just fine.
Since I posted that message, the error came up again — and I got some screen grabs for you.
When confronted with the error message …
… I hit the refresh button to reveal the webpages:
Anyone else in cyberspace experiencing this trouble?
10 Thursday Jun 2010
I installed Safari 5 on my computer last night. The vast majority of things work just fine.
I can’t really say I’ve noticed much of an improvement in performance but then I haven’t put the browser through its paces yet, either.
One major change is the introduction of the Reader feature, which allows you to read stories on news websites without the clutter of menus and such.
Just click on the “Reader” button at the end of the menu bar …
… and Safari will turn an article on a webpage from this …
… to this:
Just click on the “Reader” button again to turn the feature off.
Pretty neat trick, if I may say so — although I must admit advertisers and their representatives will probably have a different opinion on the matter.
One negative thing that did stick out, though, was behaviour reminiscent of Google’s Chrome when it first came out a few years ago.
The browser would intermittently be unable to resolve hosts and fail to display web pages.
It was eventually determined the trouble was its DNS prefetching feature, which you could turn off to solve the trouble.
Earlier today, Safari did something similar from time to time, too, although far less frequently than Chrome did.
And now that I am trying to replicate the failure, I can’t.
Oh well, I will share if it crops up again.
In any case, if anyone out there in cyberspace knows how to turn off DNS prefetching in Safari, lemme know. It might come in handy later!
Ricky Leong 