The Lance J. Technoweb

Repairing and upgrading an older 12-inch Apple iBook G4 laptop. A great friend of mine had a 12-inch iBook laptop from 2005 - with a broken keyboard.  She asked me to help her shop for a new Mac to replace her old tried-but-true laptop. Whenever anyone asks me for computer advice, I ask them what they want to do with a new computer. She told me that she used her computer for basic email and surfing the web - she said the old iBook was great for many years, but that now, with a broken (and dirty and gross) keyboard, it was time to move on. After thinking about it for 15 minutes with her, we concluded that the best approach was to fix her old laptop.  A little upgrade is a LOT easier than going out and buying a new machine, and then migrating 6 years of data and apps.  Also, the price is a lot less than a new machine. We went on-line and bought two things: A replacement iBook keyboard , for around $40, and A 1 GB memory stick , for under $20. The ...

MIDI and the Mac.  It's easy, fun, and shockingly inexpensive! I enjoy fooling around with musical instruments, and so when Garageband originally came out several years ago, I was very excited to start using it with my cheap little Casio keyboard. Initially it seemed expensive and complicated to get the right parts together to connect the Mac to my keyboard via MIDI. I didn't want to spend a ton of money in professional-class electronics. I wanted to fool around. Happily, I discovered that it's inexpensive and easy.  If you know where to look, a Mac-compliant MIDI adapter can be purchased for under $10! That's right, for less than $10 I connected my Mac to my MIDI keyboard and by MIDI drum kit. I bought an MIDI-to-USB interface, in particular, one like this really inexpensive USB MIDI Cable available through Amazon . The adapter is a simple device that has a MIDI "in"/"out" connectors on one end, and a USB connector on the other.  The adapt...

802.11b and 802.11g are utterly obsolete and must now be disabled by all access points, routers, and clients. 802.11b first emerged in 1999 - a hot new standard that provided inexpensive networking over the air. But by January 2003, a faster standard became commonplace - 802.11g. And since 2006, 802.11n based products have been on the scene. Both 802.11b and 802.11g are inefficient.  These protocols consume valuable wireless bandwidth and manage to slow everyone down. And therefore, I proclaim that 802.11b and 802.11g must be immediately banned from the world. Doing so will speed access for everyone. So log into your access points and disable the mixed modes that support anything below 802.11n. Throw out your old interface cards and routers. You, and 99.99% of the rest of the world will see much better performance.  Never buy a product that doesn't support 802.11n or better. Upgrades are very inexpensive: 802.11n USB client interfaces are available for under $15 ...

Some folks are under the mistaken assumption that Chicago is not actually a windy city.  They look at the NWS weather data and see that Milton, Massachusetts is the windiest city, and that Chicago is a bit down on the list. The problem with this logic is that NWS weather stations are often not actually in the cities themselves, or at least not downtown. The Milton, Massachusetts weather station is on Great Blue Hill (the namesake of WGBH), the highest prominence on the coast of Massachusetts.  In contrast, the Chicago NWS station is at O'Hare International Airport, which is far west of downtown Chicago and as far away from the shore as one can be and still be within the sprawling limits of that city.

For years my cousin was suffering with the WIFI of his MacBook. His MacBook would drop its WIFI connection every few hours (or minutes), and he'd have to manually stop and start the WIFI on his MacBook to fix it. The bad behavior made web surfing, Netflix, and anything else on-line quite unpleasant. The Bad WIFI card, as pulled from my cousin's MacBook. I tried everything to try to fix the problem. I replaced his router, tweaked OS settings, and even re-installed the OS. The on-line forums weren't particularly helpful - a lot of people had a lot of ideas how to fix it with software, but ultimately none of their suggestions worked. So I concluded that the problem was with the MacBook's WIFI card. Some of you might think that the MacBook has its WIFI chip soldered onto the MacBook's main board, but that's not the case - the classic MacBook uses a fairly common WIFI card. Getting access to that card isn't trivial, but if you're able to drive...

Well, the old Dell X200's keyboard gave up the ghost. Not entirely, but the good old backspace key stopped working, and it's really hard to use a keyboard without a backspace key. Happily, it was easy to fix, as follows: Buy a replacement keyboard (I bought my "like new" replacement keyboard through eBay for about $20) Remove the battery Unscrew the six screws from the bottom of the Dell marked with a (K) Lever out the old keyboard from the bottom left. There is a little latch there. Before fully removing the keyboard, un-snap the ZIF ribbon connector Remove the keyboard completely Slide the new keyboard into place Push the keyboard cable into the ZIF connector; lock the ZIF connector Screw the keyboard back in place with the six screws Reinstall the battery The end result? My 8 year old Dell X200 laptop is still running strong! It'd be awesome to get 3 more years out of it. Its only real shortcoming is its limited RAM.

My MacBook keyboard and trackpad has worn out to the point where it was hard to use. The trackpad and its button was behaving poorly, and the keys were less than perfect. Furthermore, the "palm rest" was stained and developed a crack. Figure 1: T he Yukky old keyboard/trackpad. Cracked, stained, and worn out. But excitingly, there is a simple fix! I've replaced the keyboard and trackpad with new ones - and it was easy to do and inexpensive! It was the best thing I've done to my MacBook ever. This article covers what I did. Figure 2: My clean new keyboard & trackpad! Awesome! Background: The MacBook Top Case design The MacBook keyboard and trackpad are integrated into a single part called the " MacBook Top Case ". Due to the MacBook's design, you just can't replace the keyboard or the trackpad - you have to replace the entire "Top Case". That sounds bad, but it really isn't, because the "Top Case" ...