I got my wife an iPad 2 for Christmas and she soon started complaining about the Wifi dropping its connection. I suggested she try turning off the “auto join” wifi setting, but that didn’t help. She’d be doing something and get the “Sorry, there’s no internet connection” error every 5-10 minutes. We’ve had FiOS for quite a while and we have 8 or 9 other devices connected (including Macs & iPhones) to the router without issue, so this seemed weird. I was starting to think it was a problem with the iPad, but we went to a friend’s house and used his wifi (with a Netgear router) and the iPad had no issues.

Back home, I logged into the router and tried assigning her iPad a static IP through DHCP. I had her release and renew and she got the new IP but the problem continued. Since we ruled out a problem with the iPad and I knew there was nothing “wrong” with the router, I figured I’d check and see if there are any reported issues with iPads and the Verizon router. Sure enough, there are. The first thing I clicked on, Fix for Verizon FIOS vs. iPad Wi-Fi Issues, suggested changing the wifi channel from “Automatic” to “6″ (it also suggests switching from WEP to WPA2-PSK, which I’ve always been using). I did that and it hasn’t dropped the wifi connection at all in the past 3 hours. Very odd issue. If I could get into the Actiontec (or the iPad for that matter) I’d like to check the logs and see what’s actually happening, but a win’s a win.

I’ve always hated iTunes. It’s a huge pile of bloatware and it’s slow as poo. It’s like 100 mb or more for an mp3 player. I remember winamp playing mp3s when it was a 500k download. Anyway.

I keep all my music on a Linux machine running samba. This way it’s available to every machine in the house. When I had Winamp on all my machines this was wonderful. But now that I’m forced into iTunes (thanks to having an iPhone), it turns out to be a major pain. In iTunes I unchecked the box for “let iTunes keep my libary organized” to prevent it from copying the entire library to each computer’s local disk. Initially adding my library of ~4000 tracks to iTunes takes over an hour (100 mbit wire) – it would take about 5 minutes in Winamp, even reading the ID3 tags for each track as it was added (rather than lazily as the song was played).

But the thing that iTunes does that is so annoying it prompted me to write this whiny rant is:

iTunes 'Song Not Found'

If, for some reason, my M: drive (where the Samba share is mapped) is not connected when iTunes starts, every song in the library gets this “!” exclamation point of doom. If I attempt to play any of these tracks, I am given the option to locate the file. Nice in theory, but locating all 4000 tracks isn’t realistic. If I quit iTunes, reconnect the M: drive, and reopen iTunes, the ! persists. The only solution I’ve found to this is deleting the entire library from iTunes and re-adding it, which as I said, takes an extremely long time.

I have other reasons for hating iTunes, this is a blog, not a book.

I know nobody cares, but I figured I’d hop on the hypewagon and write down my guess for the Apple tablet. I think a “big iPod Touch” would be pretty boring, and not worth making. My guess (based on nothing): the unit will be controlled by eye tracking, and it’ll be able to zoom in on whatever you’re looking at.

That is all.