Since I’ve had my MacBook I’ve always noticed incredibly poor performance on WiFi when I’m on battery.

It’s so poor that Adium can’t even maintain a connection to any IM service, it starts to lag and messages don’t get delivered. Web pages only half load, videos stop 20% through, etc. The connection just does not sustain when it’s on battery.

I finally took the time to search google and see what I could find. It appears the issue plagues most MacBook’s that were manufactured before week 36 of the MacBook production cycle.

I found miscellaneous workarounds that included hiding your SSID, turning off your routers encryption and using an ACL instead. This isn’t really an option for me, I have people who use my wifi when they come over and setting them up with an ACL would be a huge pain in the ass. Another option was switching the router channel to something other then 6, unfortunately, my router doesn’t let me.

I then came across this fix, basically, it constantly pings a domain (google in my case) so airport never has the option to idle. Of course, this is going to drain your battery much faster, but for me, I’d rather have lower battery life and actually use the internet, then have fantastic battery life with no internet.

You’re supposed to enter the command into Terminal:
nohup ping -i 1 google.com > /dev/null &

This isn’t exactly ideal for me, I don’t want to type that everytime. So I came up with something else:

In terminal:
touch ~/.bash_profile
open -e ~/.bash_profile
Note: The first line is only necessary if you’ve never modified your bash_profile before.

This will open the contents of .bash_profile in TextEdit, append the following two lines to it:
alias airport_on='nohup ping -i 1 google.com > /dev/null &'
alias airport_off='killall ping'

Save, and then close. Back in terminal run:
source ~/.bash_profile

Now you can simply run “airport_on” to turn the idle-prevention on, and then “airport_off” to turn it off.

Hope this helps, if not, at least I have it written down for the next time I reinstall.

The upload processing server for QuickShareIt is currently experiencing some technical difficulties.
We’re doing everything we can to get these issues resolved and we’ll keep everyone updated as we learn more and resolve the issue.

Update 3:55PM EST: We’ve fixed the issue that was causing the problem and we’re now back online.
We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing […]

A lot of people have been asking us when MobileChat is going to be updated and when we plan on releasing a new version. If you’ve taken a look at the SVN lately, you’ll have noticed that not much activity has been taking place. While we have been working on some internal things, we haven’t […]

I love GMail. I mean, I really love GMail. If it weren’t for GMail, I wouldn’t use email at all.  Let’s face it, if you’ve used GMail, you know it’s not the same as email…why? I have no idea. I can’t list specific reasons (it’ll take forever), fact of the matter is that it just is. […]

I logged in earlier today to see yet another update to Gmail. My labels didn’t look anything like they used to. Looks like Google is still rolling out features of Gmail 2.0. On a side note, since my account has been updated with the new label feature, it seems to work much better then it did previously.

More after the break..

It’s been the buzz around the internet/office for a few months now. Virgin America, the new airline from Virgin with domestic flights in the United States, has been much talked about and even applauded for their taking a strong intiative to bring innovation to the economy cabin through the usage of technology. While the marketing is done well and the overall concepts of all their ideas are great, the execution leaves much to be desired.

More after the jump…

It’s assumed you have OpenSSH and the BSD Subsystem installed via Installer.app or whatever else..
I’m also assuming you use a Mac or Linux, Windows guys, it’s really not that much harder just look up a tutorial on how to create a public key with PuTTy
Open Terminal on your Machine (not logged into the iPhone) run […]

I just wanted to thank the countless people who have written in and posted on blogs, forums, etc about how great you think MobileChat is and how grateful you are for us to write it.
We don’t make any money off of MobileChat, it’s open source, so the public response is really what keeps us going. […]

Twenty08 is proud to release the latest version of MobileChat to the public. Thanks to a lot of hard work put in by Anthony and Shaun, we have what is the largest release since the programs inception just a few weeks ago.

New features are as follows:
Far more stability than the original beta.
New Official MobileChat Icon
Profile Viewing
Native Vibration Support (No External Application Calls)
Buddy List Sorting
Multiple Account Support
Settings
+ Plenty More…

Just wanted to write a quick note regarding MobileChat’s development. While I’m currently not on the development team for this project, Shaun’s been doing a great job adding features and keeping everything going smoothly. On top of that, we now have Anthony working on the project as well. They’ve been doing an awesome job and as a result, new versions of MobileChat are on their way very shortly with some cool new features:

…I hate when people tell me to “Read more after the jump…”, but just do it.