Problem upgrading firmware on Billion 7300G ADSL Modem? Try using Firefox. + Hidden config pages.

I was trying to upgrade my Billion 7300G modem to firmware ver. 1.36 using my iMac, and kept getting up to a certain point and then bomb out around at the 24% mark and return an alert/dialog box that just had:

http://192.168.1.254
Error!

Great, talk about informative error messages!

After a bit of Googling, I found out that this problem only occurs when performing the upgrade from Safari, and Billion have supposedly promised to fix this. I But there haven't been any more firmware updates after ver. 1.36 anyway. The only solution is to use another browser like Firefox.


On another note, I've also sorted out my issues with my wi-fi at home simply by boosting my wireless signal.

My modem/wifi router is in a room on the second floor, while my main computer, a 24" iMac, is downstairs. Now the problem was the iMac would keep losing the wi-fi connection when it came back from Sleep mode. After this any open tabs in Safari would no longer work, and the only workaround I've had was to turn off Airport, then turn it back on again.

The Billion has some hidden configuration pages, and going to http://192.168.1.254/wireless_txpower.asp shows the Wireless signal is only transmitting at 70% strength! Setting the value to 100% sorted out my issues.

Google's Blogger widget for Mac OSX is rubbish

I wanted a quicker way of making posts to Blogger, so I downloaded Google's Blogger widget. Absolute crap. You can't even put a link or an image. All you can do is enter plain, bold and italicised text.

The only thing I found interesting was that it encodes punctuation marks so you end up with ' instead of the (') character. But that's probably Blogger itself, and not the widget making those changes.

WTF? It's 2008, guys. I'm sure you can do better than this!

Problems connecting to WiFi from 24" aluminum iMac

I finally solved my problem connecting to my wireless router. I couldn't believe that I was having more luck connecting to my neighbour's unsecured WiFi connection than to my wireless modem/router (a Billion 7300G) in the same room.

My wireless setup was:

Channel 6
WPA-PSK
Encryption: AES

Now all along I was thinking it was one of these reasons:

1. the Airport card was faulty
2. it was an OS X config problem - WPA2 encryption-related
3. it was a Leopard problem

Now I was really hoping it wasn't #1, because it would have been a royal pain in the ass to try and send back a 9kg computer in the mail. It didn't seem likely because I was able to connect to my neighbour's wifi network without problem. Which leads us to #2 - well, no way was I going to leave my connection unsecured, but just to test out this theory, I turned off the wifi security for a while. And for a couple of times it worked - I could connect to the network and use a browser, etc. Until it stopped doing it.

The last one was #3, and I was all ready to update to 10.5.1 - but I remembered that when I first set up my wireless connection I was using Channel 1. I moved to Channel 6 because I was getting some trouble connecting from the Powerbook downstairs. So I hooked up the iMac to the router, changed to Channel 1, unplugged from the router - voila! all working!

I later found a forum posting (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1822533#1822533) which claimed that Apple engineers had mentioned a conflict between Bluetooth and Channel 6 on wifi. Looks like that was the problem I was having. Bluetooth is on by default, so I turned it off. But I haven't changed the router back to Channel 6. I figure it's better to leave things alone once they work!

Solution to Problem:

4. change wireless channel from channel 6 to channel 1. In some cases Channel 6 conflicts with Bluetooth. So either turn off Bluetooth or stop using Channel 6.

Unable to mount .dmg files in OS X - "Device not configured" error. How to fix it.

I had downloaded some DMG files to install some software and kept
getting these error messages:

Unable to attach "Foo.dmg" - Device not configured.

It was happening for more than one .dmg file, and I'm sure the
download was not corrupted.

At first, I tried using the Disk Utility, thinking it was related to
disk permissions, but the option wasn't present when I selected the
DMG. Clicking on "Verify disk" didn't help either, and resulted in the
same error "Device not configured".

Tried the instructions below and they worked.

1. Go into terminal

2. type

su [username that has admin rights]

you will be asked for your admin password.

3. Then run these commands. (I don't know what they do but they worked)

sudo kextunload -c com.apple.AppleDiskImageController

sudo kextload -b com.apple.AppleDiskImageController

4. Now try to mount those .dmg files.

Addendum: It's still not fixed. Now I'm just getting a new error message - "no mountable file systems". Oh great.