Directionality of Mac Pro Bluetooth

So I finally got round to testing my theory about the Bluetooth on the 2009 Mac Pro. I reorganised my desk so that the Mac Pro is behind my 24“ Mac Cinema screen with the right hand side (as seen from the front; the side with the panel) facing me. I’ve had no keyboard dropouts nor jerky mouse movement yet. The mouse was almost unusable with the Mac Pro in the same position but with the other side facing me. So it seems that the bluetooth signal can only penetrate out of one side of the case! That must have been a facepalm moment for the designers.

Happy Mac

Well, the Mac is working much better now that I have stuck a Bluetooth dongle into it. I think that the antenna design in the Mac Pro is poor from what I am reading on the forums. The keyboard and mouse are working flawlessly now.

Mac troubles

Well, I’ve tried reducing the power on the wireless network to 28mW from 70mW, enabling Bluetooth Coexistence, moving the cordless phone and putting some white paper underneath the mouse. I’ve not had the keyboard drop out tonight, but it isn’t a perfect mousing experience either. More tinkering needed.

Imported some photos to iPhoto. I can’t seem to zoom into them and it imported circa 800 items from a directory containing 1200... yet more tinkering.

I did fix the calendar on my iPhone by finding out which entry had a start date after the end date though. Tinkering successful!

I did decide that I liked MacJournal enough to buy it though :)

MacJournal

I’m going to give MacJournal a try now that I have a Mac sitting on my desk at home. It is certainly prettier than Journal4 running under Windows. It is also more journal oriented than Notebook. I have 15 days to see how it goes.

Finishing CryoSat

For the last several years, I've been working on the IPF2 software for Cryosat. Well, I think that I just finished it. Tonight I did a test compile of the final release to fix the problems spotted in the test meeting this week. Everything seems to be fixed. I'll sleep on it, check again and then the next stop is the launch of the satellite this autumn and the start of the commissioning phase.

It looks like Monday will be the first day in over a month upon which I will do no Cryosat related work.

Blogging from Word

Word now has the ability to post to a blog. Why on earth would I want to use it to do so, apart from trying it out this one time?