lyncd

Posts tagged ‘mac’

Firefox 4 for PowerPC Macs: TenFourFox

Mozilla hit me with a double whammy of “your hardware sucks” last week, when they released major new versions of Firefox 4 and mobile Firefox 4 for Android (the first!) … but left me out of both parties.

My Android phone, the LG Optimus S, is only a few months old, but its ARMv6 processor isn’t supported. There’s a faint glimmer of hope there, but with the ARMv6 test builds already pulled, I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, the stock Android browser and Opera Mobile are both great (Opera’s font rendering needs work in the hinting/character spacing department, but that’s it).

Meanwhile, my Powerbook G4 is still running happily along on OS X 10.4 Tiger, so I was happy to find the answer to my Firefox 4 woes in TenFourFox, a Firefox fork with builds optimized for various G5, G4 and G3 processors. Here’s a mini-review of my impressions after a week, and a look at what’s coming up in browser-land for those of us clinging proudly to the last generation of PowerPC Macintosh computers. more …

Filed under: Reviews.  Tagged: , , .

Replacing MacBook’s AirPort card with an Atheros AR5BXB6 from an IBM Thinkpad

Four years of 85°C CPU temperatures took their toll on my friend’s MacBook. Her AirPort wireless card still functioned, but suddenly her wifi signal had become unusably weak.

I checked her system configuration, opened up her first-gen MacBook, and everything looked fine. But with plenty of others reporting similar issues, it was most likely the card had succumbed to heat. It could sometimes maintain normal wireless range for several minutes — when started totally cold — but after the system temps warmed up, would go back to only a few feet of range.

The model number printed on the AirPort card is an Atheros AR5BXB6. A Google Products search for “AR5BXB6” turned up these $13 Thinkpad pulls among others available online, and for $13 we figured it was easily worth a shot as a drop-in replacement, compared to the cost of a new Apple card. It turned out be only a little tricksier than that. more …

Filed under: Systems.  Tagged: .