Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) useless after firmware upgrade

I upgraded the firmware using Airport Utility on Snow Leopard to 7.4.2, and the thing would not connect to the AT&T ADSL after that.

Debugging

I have a working Airport Express so I was able to copy every setting for TCP/IP, DHCP and alike but it would never connect again to the modem. The Airport Express works well, so I took my time researching the issues with the AEBS. I was not alone, others have part functioning ones that don't pipe data to/from the ADSL. "Ethernet Unplugged" seems a common issue.

Apple Store

In the San Francisco Apple store, with a Genius advising I find out that there's no repair available for a $169 item out of warranty. I buy a $99 Express (now has 802.11n whereas the older one I use for travel has the slower 802.11g only). I leave the old one with them; Cupertino might want to use it to help improve the line, but I'm told there is no mechanism to get them back to head office.

Ponzi Scheme

I'm increasingly coming to believe that Apple items are not designed to last three years. In fact I think they're running a an electronics Ponzi scheme. Sales for next year will cover warranty for this year. Similarly for those disgruntled outside of the warranty period, there is the allure of something better for effectively less to reduce the pain of writing the dead item off.

My advice? - buy the cheapest Apple products you can get away with. Don't buy multifuction devices. For example the TimeMachine versions of the AEBS seem to be a double trouble proposition. Ditto iMacs.

QuickPwn zips through the jail-breaking of an iPhone 2G.  Well, it hangs for me on an dialog that iTunes is sending "An iPhone has been detected, but could not be identified properly. Please disconnect the iPhone, then try again. An unknown error occurred (2001)".

It was a blocker until I read somewhere to put a USB hub inline, now it carries on, and the dialog is benign.  I could not find the option to get iTunes to just shut up while the iPhone was power cycling under QuickPwn control.  

Still its fixed now.

All this to get to be able to use a different SIM in a different country on vacation.  There's a European rule that forces handset makers to divulge unlock know-how after an initial contract period expires.  Lets see if Apple ignore that when the 3G folks in Europe come to the end of the their initial contracts.

Mail.app paste of image -> TIFF <- sucks

I never want to send a tiff in email.

I'd rather copy/paste as JPG.

Where is the preference in Mail.app ?

  -> paste images as   TIFF | JPG | GIF | PNG

Apple TV upgrade not upgradeable itself

Upgrade to 2.0 .... try upgrading to 2.1 : forget it, there is a bug whereby it can't download the 2.1 software. Rebooting the AppleTV does not work, nor does sitting there pressing it 80 times.

Restoring to Factory settings does - meaning back to version 1.0 before forward to version 2.1

Lame.

.Mac sync craziness - Microsoft could have done better

More needless policing from .Mac in respect of syncing files.  

I do have two Macs. The other has not been on for a week, whereas this one I use daily. 

.Mac is telling me there's a conflict.  Its wrong there is no conflict. Indeed there are not 76 conflicts.  It sees some incompatibility between file times on the server versus my MacBook Pro.  

I guess both use NTP for time synchronization, so this is confusing. 

More confusing perhaps as this did no

t popup yesterday or last week as an issue, and I've done nothing to affect this.

Then it vetoes my attempt to choose "use most recent version" making you wonder why it could not have known that in advance.

Lastly, why can't it understand something about the contents of a file.  That's revision control 101, and Apple seem to have missed it.  These files have not changed, its just that the dates are a little askew.

Apple pay your developers a bit more, and fix your usability bugs will ya.  Jeez, Microsoft could have done better.

There is a problem syncing the file "About your iDisk.rtf"

Can't see it in Finder of course, but from the command line it's like so:

    -rwxr-xr-x+   1 paul staff       64393 Mar 16   2007 About your iDisk.rtf

Its the extraneous + on the permissions that is wrong.  It gets restored properly to my local system when I sudo/rm the file. 

Good work Apple. 

Two MBPs, same problem, same stretch of freeway, same day

Yesterday, my MBP just froze on my journey to work.  I waited five minutes then powered it off. On reboot, it just sat on the boot screen with an Apple logo and the spinner going.  Further reboots just took me to the same place.

You can see multiple people talk about similar things in discussion forums.  

That was my corporate MacBookPro and my personal one was fine (but sulking from non-use) and it was able to see the failed Mac's hard drive in target mode.  Only after thinking about mounting it for 2 mins, and issuing a warning (which I cannot recall the wording to), did it mount in read-only mode.

My colleague Alex Chaffee arrived in work an hour later and reported the same problem encountered on the same stretch of freeway.  He could see his drive in target-mode his too. 

Mine the phammant.sparsebundle 'folder' had moved out of /Users/phammant/ and gone to the /Users/ directory.  I could copy the whole sparsebundle thing off the dead mac and onto the good one over firewire.  Mounting it was easy :

  hdiutil attach /path/to/sparesebundle

This morning my personal MBP froze on the journey to work (but rebooted fine). It froze last night too.  It does not have the sparsebundle stuff activated and is a completely different install of Leopard.  I have had that keyboard-driver death thing for a while, and applied the firmware upgrade - but it still happens.  Y'all know to press and hold a key for 30 seconds to reboot the driver for the dead keyboard right? 

While typing this posting, the MBP hang a second time this morning (but reboots).  The first thing to try (after waiting for a few minutes for it to recover) is Command, Control & the Power key.  That makes it attempt a soft reboot, whereas the power key on its own, triggers a potentially hard-drive harming sudden power-off.

This morning my corporate MBP has been re-imaged.  It passed all memory/drive/drive controller tests overnight.  I've yet to reinstall important stuff though.  Alex's has been re-imaged, but the saved .sparsebundle dir is not remounting in situ. He's going to have to mount it the same way I have and copy over stuff manually.

Thanks a bunch Apple!  You recently tossed your stability out of the window it seems.