Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

Viewing Wi-Fi Details in Snow Leopard

In Snow Leopard, hold down the Option key before clicking the AirPort menu. Doing so reveals additional technical details including which standards, speeds, and frequencies you're using to connect, as well as what's in use by other networks. With the Option key held down and with a network already joined, the AirPort menu reveals seven pieces of information: the PHY Mode, the MAC (Media Access Control) address, the channel and band in use, the security method that's in use, the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) measurement, the transmit rate, and the MCS Index. In Leopard, some, but not all, of these details are revealed by Option-clicking the AirPort menu.

Submitted by
Doug McLean

 

 

Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions
 
 

System 7.1 Tip O' The Week

To get you into the mood for System 7.1, Robert Hess passed on this tip from Leonard Rosenthol, chief technical wizard at Aladdin Systems. Apparently you can put FKEYs and other resources in System 7.1's special Fonts folder and the system will open them automatically. When the system opens a file and leaves it open, as it will do for font suitcases, the resources in that file become part of the standard operating system. So, if you put a file containing resources of any type, FKEYs, sounds, etc., and change the TYPE of the file to a font file's type, either FFIL or ffil, the system will open that file.

When I asked about this, Leonard said "I tried to convince Apple to actually allow other file types to be opened by that piece of code, but they wouldn't do it (though it is REALLY easy to add)." I guess that would have been too easy and made too much sense, although then the folder would have needed a new name since it makes little sense to put FKEYs in a folder called Fonts.

Information from:
Robert Hess -- robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Leonard Rosenthol -- leonardr@netcom.com

 

MacTech Conference, for IT Pros and Apple developers, is Nov 3-5,
in Los Angeles. The 3-day event is packed with sessions & evening
activities. Learn from the best. Meet and spend time with peers.
TidBITS readers save $50 at <http://macte.ch/conf_tidbits>!