Slow AirPort File Sharing
I have an AirPort network set up at our office. The Internet works perfectly, but file sharing is painfully slow. Why?
—Harley
You’ve discovered that AirPort is drudgingly slow at upstream data transfers. It’s only a little bit slower than wired 10Base-T for downstream transfers, but it’s significantly slower for upstream. I am not really sure why this is from a technical point of view but I have confirmed it many times in my own systems using my own servers and clients.
Virtually every Internet connection method is slower than the AirPort’s data rate, so even if you are plugged directly into a T1, you won’t suffer slow downloads or uploads compared to a wired Mac. But once you start connecting clients to other clients on a LAN, you will notice that AirPort cannot keep up. Try comparing it to wired, full duplex 100Base-T, or worse yet Gigabit. It’ll make you pull your hair out!
Nevertheless it’s nice to be able to walk around with no AC cord or Ethernet cable hanging out the back of your laptop. Life is full of compromises I guess. —Evan Trent
Connecting a Local Network to the Internet
I’ve called every tech support for every piece of equipment I own but to no avail. I hope you can help me out or lead me in the right direction. I’m trying to connect to my little Mac network with a new iBook over the Internet.
This is the setup: I have a B&W G3 running Mac OS 9.1 and an old PC hooked up to a DSL modem with a Linksys 4-port DSL router. I just bought a new 14" iBook, which I successfully hooked up to the router and was able to share files between the two computers. But when I try to access my G3 from a remote location, it doesn’t work. How do I figure out what the IP address for the modem is and how do I open the ports on my Mac so I can get through?
—Mike
First go here on either your PC or your Mac hooked up to the router. That will tell you what the router’s public IP address is. Keep in mind that if you are using DHCP to connect to your DSL line, that IP may change periodically.
Then go here and refer to that list for mapping ports. It should tell you everything you need to know for which ports to open for which types of activities. —Evan Trent
Invisible Preferences
Help! The Preferences folder in the System Folder has become invisible. All preferences that were loaded still function, but I don’t know how to make it visible again. I don’t even know how it became invisible.
Can you give me some idea how to make the folder visible again. The folder doesn’t show in the System Folder, and the only way I can locate it is with Sherlock II, by requesting Show Invisible with the name preference.
I know there are applications that do this but I can’t remember their names.
A loyal reader,
—Cracker1a
There are a variety of applications which can toggle the “invisible” flag of a file or folder. ResEdit is one which you may already have on your computer. If so, load it up and then go to “Get File/Folder Info” from the File menu. You will note that you can select even invisible files and folders from the resulting dialog box. Select the Preferences folder and then you can make it visible again by unchecking the “invisible” checkbox.
Another good program that will make this process simple is Greg’s Browser. I use FileTyper all the time for this sort of thing, and it is useful for other purposes as well but it can sometimes be confusing to use it to work on folders because it will also work on the files contained by the folder you edit, unless you are careful in how you set the preferences. —Evan Trent
Importing QuickTime Into iMovie
I read in a serious iMovie tutorial that you could import QuickTime movies to both iMovie 1 and 2, and I certainly supposed you would be able to. But QT movies are not included in the list of file formats you can import, and the program doesn’t show them in the dialog box when you select Import and Show All Importable Files; dragging and dropping doesn’t do anything either, of course.
Indeed, the ReadMe says, repressively, and without explanation, “You will not be able to open the tutorial project or complete the tutorial in the online help”; but that isn’t even true: you can double-click on the 1K tutorial project-file, then the tutorial DV movies are imported, and you can edit and export to QT without problem… odd that someone at Apple should want to stop people from learning how to use a program they’re trying to push, and even odder that they didn’t manage to do it when they said they had.
I wondered what would happen if I renamed a QT movie to look like what iMovie was expecting in the tutorial, and put it in with the others; the program showed it on the shelf, but couldn’t read it, and wanted to move it to the trash.
The Swedish v. 2.0.1 won’t even start up, saying “can’t find the language resource file, please reinstall the application”; but there is indeed a file called “Sweden” in the folder Resources > Languages. Perhaps the problem is that I use the system in English.
—David Kettlewell
There was an old trick for getting iMovie to work on computers without FireWire ports, specifically the beige G3s that had video in. Basically, you’d capture the movie via analog and save it as MOV format. Then, you’d use QuickTime Pro to convert the movie from MOV to DV format. Finally, you import the DV into iMovie.
I think if you have QT Pro, you’ll be able to do it. Also, version 2.5 of Movie Player with QT 5 might be able do the conversion—it seems to pick up the new format support when you change versions of the QuickTime extensions, but it didn’t pick up any of the free/pro restrictions. I used this approach to convert images/moves between formats at work. —Eric Blair
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