Weak Wireless Signal on MacBook Pro

My MacBook Pro is lovely, but even Macs have problems. Yes, it’s true. Recently I was traveling in England and stayed at a lovely B & B in Edinburgh (The Sandaig which I highly recommend!). There was free wi-fi, always a bonus, but unfortunately I could rarely seem to get on it for more than a few seconds before it booted me off. My partner’s laptop, a MacBook, seemed to connect just fine with rapid connection speeds even with only two bars of signal. This situation was highly frustrating – as we’re both excessive Internet users, so only having one active laptop was a pain. I mean, what were we going to do instead? Visit Edinburgh’s beautiful sights? Pah.

The solution turned out to be a non-solution, but rather a clarification of how MacBook Pros work. It turns out from a bit of research that the beautiful aluminium case that surrounds the MacBook Pro forms a Faraday cage – which is relatively impervious to radio waves such as wireless internet connections. Ah. Apple’s solution to this was to leave a ‘hole’ in this cage, where the laptop is not made of aluminium, and that is the rubbery looking strip you see just underneath the laptop screen. That strip is your wireless antenna.

Now compared to a normal MacBook, which can pick up un-impeded signal from all directions, this means your new MacBook Pro not only has a very small area through which to receive signals, it is also highly directional. Ah hah. So now you have the following options to improve your wireless reception when you have a weak signal:

1. Plug in your MacBook Pro: When you have a power supply connected the wireless power ramps up and you’ll see a huge improvement in reception. Unfortunately you can’t seem to configure this manually when you don’t have a power supply to hand, so I guess it sucks battery super fast.
2. Point your MacBook Pro in different directions: Use your laptop like a divining rod to find the direction of strongest signal. Given the small window available this can yield good enough results but it is a pain to move around.
3. Move closer to the wireless source so you get a stronger signal. Obviously not the most useful solution but sometimes the only one. In my case moving outside of our room, past a solid brick wall, gave four bars of signal and perfect internet.

Come on Apple – next generation of MacBook Pros admit your short fallings and add a nice external connector for an antenna or similar. I’m sure your legions of product eco-system partners will jump on the opportunity to create many beautiful and functional designs, something this time you omitted to do.

Squidoo – Crowd Sourced SEO Friendliness

For some reason that escapes me now I started to spend a few hours playing around with Squidoo to create my own ‘lens’ on Smorkin’ Labbits, those cute little collectible rabbits that smoke. Squidoo was created by Seth Godin, amongst others, to enable experts (and fans) with minimal internet experience to create, manage and write their own spiel about the subjects they love. It’s sort of a crowd-sourced About.com, with the added fun of having to identify spam type posts.

The overall experience of creating my lens was straight-forward and powerful, although I found that one limitation of Squidoo is that it doesn’t like you uploading pictures to make lists – something that I really wanted to do to list out the colourful little toys. The solution: create a false Flickr account, upload my pictures there, then hand transfer every image URL since the ‘Plaxo’ image grabbing code seems not to be working right now. Ug. What’s interesting now is whether or not I make any money off this activity, as Squidoo borrows another crowd sourced site idea (ePinions’) to share any affiliate revenues they make with us, the creators. Somehow I think the percentage payback on a $5 plastic toy ain’t so great, but guess that’s why all the camera focussed lenses are already highly developed.

Spare a Penny for a Poor Rock Band

The first set of ‘statistics’ have turned up from Radiohead’s innovative “choose your price” sale of their In Rainbows album. As you may recall, Radiohead decided to let their listeners choose a price to download the album – anywhere from nothing to £99.99 (+ 45p handling fee). Now comscore are claiming an indication of how much people have paid, but purely based on a survey they carried out.

Comscore reckon the average price paid was £2.90 – with US customers paying more than the rest of the world, averaging £3.85 compared with £2.22 elsewhere. Obviously this is a lot lower than the usual price of a CD, but consider how much of that money is now going direct to Radiohead and not a middleman… 100%. Plus one thing that Comscore doesn’t indicate is how many albums have been sold so far, only Radiohead and their partners know that for sure. Either way it seems that their experiment has been a success.

As an aside, In Rainbows is a wonderful album full of great songs – so go get your copy now, at a price that feels good to you.

10 Ways to Make a Book Popular

The UK’s premier yearly book awards, the Man Booker prize, has just been won by the rank outsider Anne Enright, for her book ‘The Gathering’. The Booker prize has a habit of being un-predictable, and it certainly isn’t a popularity contest, but winning the prize is a boon to any novelist’s sales. To help the rest of us who haven’t won, the BBC offers a handy list of ten ways to make a book popular, ranging from word of mouth, TV shows like Richard & Judy or Oprah and three for two marketing offers.

Radiohead: Re-inventing Music Sales

A week or so ago, Radiohead announced they were selling their new album ‘in Rainbows‘ online. Doesn’t sound like anything new, until you hear that they are asking you, the customer, to say how much you want to pay for the download. Sound too good to be true? Well it was for the website, which crashed under the volume of Radiohead fans wanting to get their hands on the latest effort.

The other day I pre-ordered the album, and today (or soon I hope) my download link will turn up, although I’d imagine the site is spreading out these emails to prevent another overload. The in Rainbows website is intense to look at, and minimal in terms of information and fields. Normal trust indicators (Verisign, PayPal and the like) are visibly absent. Instead, you get to choose between a ‘meat space’ box set at a fixed price of £40, or the download at whatever price you choose. Yes, really. You can say you want it free, or pay them up to £99.99 (plus 45 pence processing charge with credit card). One wonders why the super-rich Radiohead fans can’t pay them more than £100, but there we go – they’ll just have to order multiple downloads for their friends and family or offer to pay Radiohead to play at their birthday party or some such thing.

This is an another genius move from one of the world’s outstanding bands. Radiohead album releases have always been widely anticipated, and even without this ‘gimmick’ it would have flown off the shelves. But is it a gimmick? Radiohead recently completed their contract with their record company and now can do whatever they like with their music. So instead of doing what most other artists do, and negotiate bigger payouts for themselves, they’ve innovated in a way that only Radiohead can, in a way that I’m sure everyone in the record industry is watching with half fascination, half impending doom for their livelihood.

What would be really fascinating is to know the stats on what people paid. Surely some people have paid nothing, but I’m sure many have paid a considered, reasonable amount. In reality at a minimum you have to pay the processing fee of 45p, so they will be getting your credit card details at the very least. Also when you pay they ask for a lot of personal information, including mobile/cell phone, so there is an inherent value in that as well – which makes me wonder what deal the processing company is on. But is the distribution of prices exponentially towards 0p, tailing off towards £100? Or is it normally distributed around some value that is akin to current CD prices – baring in mind that in the UK a CD normally retails at £12+ whereas in the US it’s $12+ (or £6 at current exchange rate)? This is all fascinating, and I suspect we’ll never find out. Radiohead are innovative but are they that innovative as to give away the album, and the store?

And no, I’m not telling you how much I chose to pay – other than it was between 1p and £99.99…