Last year Developer Simon Støvring released Festivitas, a delightful app that lets you adorn your Mac’s Dock and Menu Bar with holiday lights.
This year, Støvring has outdone himself. There’s a new update for Festivitas for Mac that adds fully customizable snowfalls, including size of flakes, snow amount, fall speed, wind speed and direction. You can even determine how much (if any) the snowflakes will be repelled by your pointer!
And Festivitas now has Shortcuts support, which (when combined with MacOS Tahoe automations) can let you turn the lights or snow on and off based on events occurring on or off your Mac.
The first thing I did is built a Shortcut that randomly chooses whether it’s going to snow or not. I set a 10% chance for snow, and if it hits, it chooses a random amount of snow and wind to add.
A shortcut that will start Festivitas snowing… one time in ten. (Early versions of Festivitas required a random number between 0 and 1; now it accepts 0 to 100.)
Unfortunately, running an automation every n minutes is not offered as an option even in Tahoe, so I had to add this line to my crontab in the Terminal:
*/20 * * * * shortcuts run "Random Snowfall"
Now every 20 minutes my Mac will give me a 10% chance at a surprise snowfall, which (I have scientifically calculated) is the exactly right amount to surprise and delight me when it does happen.
It’s a lot easier if you don’t want the random dice flip—you could, for example, use Shortcuts to tell Festivitas to turn on the lights at 4pm every day and start the snow at 5pm. Or whenever. Festivitas for Mac is available now for a suggested price of €4.
Meanwhile, on iOS and iPadOS, Støvring has introduced an alternate version of Festivitas that lets you build widgets surrounded by animated holiday lights.
It’s Thanksgiving week, and Myke and Jason are using the occasion to draft their favorite Apple TV shows. There’s also some drama at the Rumor Roundup corral involving Apple’s succession planning, and Google engineers AirDrop for Android.
For those who find the fall 2025 Liquid Glass interface that Apple applied to all its operating systems a bit much—too transparent, too shiny, too hard to read or interpret stuff through layers—Apple introduced a new option in its 26.1 releases in early November to dial things back.
This choice can bump down the glassification of Apple’s interfaces. The overlap of type, search fields, toolbars, and other objects now has a bit more solidity at each layer, reducing transparency, and making them easier to read on their own. It also reduces the interference of multiple overlapping bits of interface, image, and type, so you can visually interpret something without puzzling out which layer it’s on.
The Tinted option only goes so far. Apple already added a slider for Liquid Glass for Lock screens in its 26.2 releases, already out in beta—maybe that will extend further? For now, you can combine Accessibility options on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac to dial in more precisely how you want Liquid Glass to appear.
I can see clearly now
I originally found Liquid Glass almost offensively illegible and shiny. I thought I’d never get used to it. But Apple refined the interface through what must have been an enormous amount of feedback, with the release version—particularly in Tahoe—dialing down and working around some of the worst interactions.
However, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, where type overlaps images or translucent fields or buttons are too see-through to see easily.
The 26.1 releases of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer relief in Settings: Display & Brightness on an iPhone or iPad or System Settings: Appearance on a Mac. The option is shown via the Liquid Glass label, with a small simulated preview to help visualize the change. Clear is selected by default, and represents the default Liquid Glass as implemented in the 26.0 releases. Tinted reduces transparency a little—it varies by element and layer—and increases contrast slightly.
Liquid Glass’s Clear and Tinted options in the 26.1 releases offer only a slight distinction.
In the 26.2 betas of iOS and iPadOS, you can see a different approach to tuning Liquid Glass on the Lock screen editor. With your device locked, tap the screen to wake it, then touch and hold the lock screen, tap Customize, and tap the time elements. You now see a slider below the typeface selection and Glass and Solid buttons at the bottom of the view. Use the slider to control intensity or tap Solid to remove the Glass effect entirely.
Starting in the upcoming 26.2 release, you’ll be able to adjust or disable Liquid Glass on the Lock screen for the time display.
Tahoe does have one additional trick up its sleeve with Safari—and in previous versions of macOS that support Safari 26 or later. The current foreground tab in a Safari window passes the dominant color scheme of the page you’re visiting onto the entire upper bar of the interface. In Safari: Settings: Tabs, uncheck “Show color in tab bar” to have the standard interface color and contrast.
Accessibility options
Two options found in Accessibility can give you more vividly distinct results. Both interact with the Clear and Tinted options for Liquid Glass. These options are Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. You almost certainly have read about these features with the release of the fall 2025 operating systems, because they provided the only real ways to mitigate Liquid Glass.
With the 26.1 releases, you can combine Clear and Tinted with the above in a sort of matrix I show in the image below for iOS (and iPadOS by extension). Use Settings: Accessibility: Display & Text Size on iPhone or iPad, and System Settings: Accessibility: Display on a Mac. In Tahoe, enabling Increase Contrast also forces Reduce Transparency to turn on and locks it in that state. Not every combination of Clear and Tinted with those Accessibility settings appears differently, so I’ve listed only the ones that are distinct.
This comparison lets you see how common interface elements and overlaps work with the Liquid Glass and Accessibility settings. Only combinations that have a distinct difference are shown; others are identical to existing combinations.
The Clear and Tinted options produce far less difference in Tahoe and on an iPhone or iPad. I’d use Accessibility display options on top of Tinted to get the best outcome. I find the Dock in Tahoe particularly irritating because of how Liquid Glass has made its outline illegible. Only using Increase Contrast provides what I’d like there.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Today I updated a story I wrote back in August about folder automation in macOS Tahoe. One of the great new features in Tahoe is a whole slew of automations attached to Shortcuts, including not just time-based ones but ones based on when files or folders change on your Mac.
Shortcuts is a little impenetrable, so I thought I’d give a couple examples of how you handle building an automation when a folder changes. (The trick is to repeat through the list of changed items and act on them one by one, perhaps preceded by a filter to limit the items to the ones you actually want to act upon.) Using this technique, I’ve built automations that convert files of the wrong format into the right one when they appear on my Desktop, file downloads to the appropriate places in my filesystem, and run scripts to modify downloaded calendar files from my airline of choice.
It’s all very useful, and one of my favorite features in Tahoe. But the reason I updated the story is that half of it used to address how you get an automation to act only on files at the top level of a folder, rather than within subfolders. There were several ways to solve the problem—all of them tricky. Fortunately, Apple subsequently updated Tahoe to add a “Ignore subfolders” checkbox that does all the work for you. So I ripped out that whole section, and things are a lot clearer now.
If you are running Tahoe and haven’t explored Automations within Shortcuts, I highly recommend giving it a look.
Apple tells us Tim Cook may be going out for cigarettes soon and he’s not coming back. The Mac Pro may also not be coming back but London thieves will if you try to slip them an Android phone.
To everything, Ternus, Ternus, Ternus
There is a season…
Ternus, Ternus, Ternus.
Yeah, you get it. And Apple hopes you get what they’re laying down because the company is spending a lot of time these days greasing the skids for Tim Cook’s retirement.
Is that duck fat? Whatever it is, it is designed for minimum possible friction.
Despite the “retirement” rumors, Cook is expected to stay on with the company in an exciting new role: Apple SEIC.
That’s Sin Eater In Chief. What does this role entail? Glad you asked.
See, at just 50 years of age, heir apparent John Ternus is too young and sweet to have to have to perform the more disgusting duties of the job, duties such as giving the president a glass award and then standing there while he fields questions about his close personal ties to a pedophile.…
As we reach the potential end of Tim Cook’s tenure as Apple CEO, we consider how the company might manage an orderly executive transition. (More Colors and Backstage members, this episode also contains your monthly Q&A session.)
Today, we’re introducing a way for Quick Share to work with AirDrop. This makes file transfer easier between iPhones and Android devices, and starts rolling out today to the Pixel 10 family.
It’s currently only available on the Pixel 10 family, though Google says it is “expanding it to more Android devices.” It also requires you to set your AirDrop visibility to “Everyone for 10 minutes”, as it presumably has no visibility into your contacts.
Interestingly, there’s no indication that Apple did anything to make this possible. The provisions of the Digital Markets Act in the European Union do currently stipulate that Apple will have to allow for competing standards to AirDrop (which might very well include the Android Quick Share feature that Google is leveraging here) as well as bring interoperability to the feature. Of course, the company has made its disagreement with the DMA known, so it’s unclear if this development has any bearing on that. Apple hadn’t responded to my request for comment at the time this article was published.
While this feature is hardly seamless, it is nice to have a cross-platform file transfer system. It’s unclear whether or not Apple will (or can) alter AirDrop to block this. The most recent beta versions of Apple’s platforms do contain a new AirDrop feature for sharing temporarily with people via one-time codes but it’s unknown whether or even if that will interact with Google’s feature.
Apple’s been making interesting tweaks to its operating systems after the release of the 26.0 versions in September. Back in October, the 26.1 beta cycle brought Slide Over back to iPadOS, a feature that’s now released for everyone. We’re now three betas into the 26.2 beta cycle, and this week brought interesting new features for both Mac and iPad users.
On the iPad side, Apple continues to tweak the edges of its new multitasking model, most notably the reborn Slide Over feature. This week’s feature updates all seem to be focused on kicking off multitasking functionality by dragging apps out of the Dock while in multi-window mode.
While the new Slide Over still doesn’t offer a built-in app switcher like the old one (which, personal opinion, still seems like a bridge too far and a metaphor too mixed), in 26.2 beta 3 there’s a new way to quickly replace which app is in Slide Over: You just drag an app’s icon out of the Dock and drop it on the Slide Over spot. That’s it. The app you dragged replaces the app that was there.
In 26.1, you could kick an app into Slide Over via the menu bar or by tapping and holding on the Stoplight buttons or via a keyboard shortcut. The 26.2 beta brings the Dock into the mix: if you drag an app icon out of the Dock and drag it to the left or right edge of the screen, you can drop it and it’ll be added to Slide Over.
Finally, if you’re in multi-window mode and you drag an app icon to one side of the screen, but not to the edge, the preview of the app window will change from more horizontal to more vertical (when holding the iPad in horizontal orientation, anyway), and an arrow will appear on the edge of the screen. These are both indicators that if you drop the window, it’ll automatically be tiled to that half of the display. So it’s a quick gesture to add a window already in one half of Split View.
Meanwhile, Apple has made good on some of its M5 chip speed claims that were previously hard to verify because they relied on pre-release software. Apple’s open-source MLX frameworks now support the M5’s Neural Accelerator, which enables dramatic speed improvements.
Federico Viticci of MacStories was also able to test the pre-release MLX frameworks on an M5 iPad Pro and reports some pretty spectacular results. Obviously, these are the earliest days, and it’s a prerelease framework, but it seems like the 26.2 updates will unlock a lot of the promised horsepower of the M5—at least on the AI-related GPU front.
Another Apple update in 26.2 will enable even higher-speed Mac performance in clusters of Macs. This new feature uses the 480Gb/s of the Mac Studio’s six Thunderbolt 5 ports to run shared workloads across (for example) multiple M3 Ultra Mac Studios, creating AI clusters that have enormous processing power while using potentially an order of magnitude less electricity than a more traditional processing cluster.
I have no idea how practical that is, but it’s clear that Apple sees a place where high-end Apple silicon Macs can play in the AI space, and it’s moving further in that direction with these 26.2 updates.
All of this stuff is in beta right now, but you should expect 26.2 final to ship before the end of the year.
Veteran TV critic Alan Sepinwall joins Jason to discuss the current state of TV criticism, the future of scripted TV, why streamers can’t make sitcoms, the difference between recaps and reviews, and the best shows of the year.
A new iPhone accessory available in the U.S. Apple Store prioritizes accessibility for users with a variety of physical and motor disabilities.
The Hikawa MagSafe Phone Grip and Stand functions as both a stand for the phone, and a tool for gripping it, for users with limited muscle strength or ability to hold a phone independently.
The silicone grip and stand snaps onto any MagSafe-capable iPhone, and works in portrait or landscape mode. It’s available in chartreuse and crater – a recycled colorway exclusive to Apple’s U.S. Online Store.
The grip and stand was created by Bailey Hikawa, a Los Angeles-based designer who has also designed iPhone cases. It sells for $69.95.
Black Friday tech deals we’re eyeballing, Meta features that should go retro, whether decentralized internet was better, and how we troubleshoot tech issues.
Tim Cook’s succession planning hits another gear, Tesla may be embracing CarPlay, Apple shifts its iPhone release plans, and Jason considers the place of the iPad Pro today after traveling with it for a week.
It’s the milestone 10th anniversary of the iPad Pro. iPadOS 26 has dramatically improved the iPad’s power-user functionality. And the new M5 iPad Pro has brought unprecedented power to the platform. With all that in mind, I decided to revisit one of my old experiments and travel (to London, for a week) with only an iPad Pro and without my Mac.
The result of the week says a lot about where the iPad Pro is, ten years on, and why it’s incumbent on Apple to figure out where it goes next.
Productivity capability
The truth is that, outfitted with a Magic Keyboard, my iPad Pro was able to do pretty much everything I wanted to do with it while I spent a few days working in Myke Hurley’s London studio.
Being in Myke’s studio means I didn’t need to bring any recording equipment with me, but iPadOS 26’s support for local recording means that I could’ve brought a microphone along and recorded podcasts on my own without any issues. As it was, after recording the Six Colors podcast on Myke’s Mac, I AirDropped the files to my iPad and edited the whole thing by hand in Ferrite Recording Studio. Uploading the final files and getting the podcast out took a little longer than it does at home, but that’s mostly down to my having built automations on the Mac that I haven’t bothered building on my iPad.
I was also able to use the iPad to do something that the Mac just can’t do: record a multi-camera project via Final Cut Camera from right within Final Cut Pro. Strangely, after a year and a half, that’s still an iPad-only feature. After having produced the video version of Upgrade that we shot in a Memphis hotel room in September, I was confident that I could edit the show on my iPad pretty easily, and I did. Exporting 90 minutes of 4K video did take a while, though—that was the moment when I missed the power of my M4 Max MacBook Pro.
There were a few side effects, though. We shot the entire thing using the standard camera settings—which meant 4K HDR. In Memphis, I was dissatisfied with how Final Cut Pro for iPad had exported my project in non-HDR format, so I decided to export it in HDR this time. In hindsight, that was a mistake—video versions of podcasts do not need that level of dynamic range, and YouTube viewers thought it was too bright. I also had the audio volume set a bit too low in the export. But given how long it took to export the file, I was reluctant to give it a second pass—and so we suffered with a less-than-ideal export. That wouldn’t have happened on a Mac, I think.
(Also, impossibly, Apple has still not updated Final Cut Pro to support background exports using the new feature in iPadOS 26 that was seemingly built specifically for Final Cut Pro. Myke and I spent quite a while just staring at the progress bar on my iPad as it churned through the export.)
I also needed to make an edit in the podcast after the fact, due to a portion of the show we decided to remove late in the process. You can use YouTube’s editing tools to make those sorts of edits, but those tools are on YouTube’s website, and while they’re accessible in Safari on an iPad, it felt very much like I was fighting Safari the entire way through the process.
In terms of writing on the go, though, the iPad Pro continues to be a dream—especially now that I can pop in and out of multi-window mode and write in one window while having a Safari or Preview window open for reference. I wrote a link post in the waiting area at Heathrow. I wrote an entire Macworld column sitting at Myke’s spare desk. That level of versatility and lightweight productivity is one of the reasons I enjoy using the iPad Pro to get work done.
Back in the day, those of us who tried to get work done with the iPad would end up hitting the proverbial brick wall—there were just some tasks that could simply never, ever be done on the iPad, and once you hit one, you had to give up or find a nearby Mac. (I was surprised on this trip to find that a specific charting feature in Numbers doesn’t seem to be available on the iPad—the first time I’ve hit a wall on the iPad in quite some time.)
Most of the brick walls are gone now: I can pretty much do anything on an iPad that I can do on a Mac. Unfortunately, many tasks just take longer on the iPad. In my lowest moments, it felt like I was operating machinery while wearing a pair of mittens. A lot of operations that feel like a single step on a Mac took multiple steps on the iPad. I’ll grant you, some of them might fall into line if I only ever used an iPad and optimized my workflow, but a lot of them are just the consequence of a more limited pool of software and more limited apps.
A few years back, Apple boasted about how it was bringing desktop-class browsing to Safari on iPad. And in many ways, today’s Safari is much more usable than it used to be. I uploaded a 40GB video file to YouTube via Safari, and it just worked! But when it comes to running web apps, too often Safari reveals itself to still behave more like the limited, weird version of Safari from the iPhone, rather than the one I expect on my Mac. Safari may be better now, but when the iPad is as capable as the modern iPad Pro is, the browser should be just as capable.
You’ve reached the base. What now?
The other day, David Pierce of The Verge wrote a think piece about the iPad Pro after a decade. The headline is kind of brutal (“a decade of unrealized potential”), but I share a lot of his sentiment. Thanks to iPadOS 26, we’ve reached the point where we can stop talking about Apple’s software letting down its hardware. It shouldn’t have taken a whole decade, and during a lot of that period, it felt like Apple had no idea what it was doing with the iPad, but it’s in a much better place now.
Still, that place is not the end state of the iPad: it’s the starting point. The iPad Pro has reached a functional, complete state, complete with background tasks and true multi-window support and support for local audio recording and all sorts of other esoteric stuff. So… what now?
As Pierce wrote:
The hardware, the operating system, the accessory ecosystem — everything is in place for this to be not just a full-fledged computer, but maybe the best computer Apple makes. Now Apple just needs to finally let it act like it.
This is the challenge the iPad Pro faces over the next decade. What is the purpose of this device? Is it just to be a more expensive version of the iPad Air that appeals to those who prefer to pay more to get a nicer product? Is it to continue down the path of being more Mac-like? (And how would that manifest?) Is it to be content filling certain niches that it’s very good at, while ignoring others that the Mac serves best?
I don’t know where Apple and the iPad Pro go from here. I’m sure there will be some tinkering and refinement around the edges—a “clamshell” mode that allows you to run the iPad attached to an external monitor without also needing to keep the main iPad display open seems like the next step—but unless Apple’s App store model changes dramatically (which, let’s face it, will require lots of legal intervention), things probably won’t change dramatically.
Maybe that’s okay. The iPad Pro is great for artists and writers, and even for podcast editors and many other professionals. It doesn’t need to be the equivalent of the Mac, just as the Mac doesn’t need to be the equivalent of the iPad. That all seems healthy, other than the fact that when I travel for work, it means I’ve got to bring both devices with me.
You may never have heard the term Extended Service Set Identifier (ESSID), and why should you have? It’s a mildly esoteric term in the Wi-Fi world for how multiple routers with the same name form an extended network. In fact, it’s not even a protocol; it’s just a name, which makes it even more confusing.
So why would I bring it up? Because the notion of an Extended Service Set affects how we connect to Wi-Fi networks, and why you sometimes have a rotten connection when you’re bathing in the soothing high-speed waves of a nearby router.
The problem is easily stated: your device connected over Wi-Fi has poor throughput, even though it’s close to a Wi-Fi gateway or extender, while other devices nearby experience terrific data rates.
I’ve got an explanation and some solutions that may help you overcome a common problem readers have asked about many times over the years, plus a question that is coming from inside my house.1
The name is the same
This question is brought to you by my spouse and her home office. Because we have an aged house—that’s pronounced EH-jed—it is nearly impossible to run new wires through it except at great expense. While having some basement renovation done a decade back, we managed to get Ethernet strung from one end of the house to the other and to our connection point, also in the basement. We should have done more!
Hold down Option and click the Wi-Fi menu to reveal a host of technical detail you definitely usually don’t need to know.
Due to a lack of network wiring, we’ve had to use powerline networking, which generally works fine, but can perform erratically at times because of some of the eh-jed electrical wiring in our home. Our kitchen was apparently accidentally (?) designed to be a Faraday cage, so we had to add a repeater in there over powerline.
We have wound up with an embarrassing number of Wi-Fi access points in the house: six, if you count the one that the ISP provided because of the fiber-optic setup they use; we only use that router’s Wi-Fi connection to check when something is wrong.2 (Did I mention our house is not a mansion, but a small two-bedroom?)
The way we unify a network like this to allow our devices to roam seamlessly is the same as in a million-square-foot convention center: all the Wi-Fi gateways or access points have the same broadcast name. Here’s where it gets a little tricky:
The broadcast or network name is the Service Set ID (SSID). It’s human-readable and meant to be seen in a list of Wi-Fi networks.
Underlying the SSID is a Basic Service Set ID (BSSID), which is a unique numeric tag that is the same format and used in the same way as in Ethernet. Called the Media Access Control (MAC) address—an unfortunate overlap—it’s is a series of six two-digit hexadecimal numbers separated by colons.3 The uniqueness allows a bazillion devices to be on the same network without fear of collision, or two devices having the same network ID.4
Now, you wouldn’t want to select a Wi-Fi network by MAC address; even if you did so, you wouldn’t want to be stuck associated with that base station when you were moving around with your mobile device. You would like the device to connect to the best signal it can find.
And that’s the problem: Mobile devices define what’s they think is the “best signal.” Apple offers a full description of how its devices make this decision,5 but we have no control over that process. I can, however, give you advice for troubleshooting and improving your setup if you find yourself having poor throughput when you know you could do better.
A slow, strong connection prevails
Any device that uses Wi-Fi swims in a sea of BSSIDs. We see just the tip of this, even when it seems like we’re drowning in Wi-Fi names. You can get a better sense by examining a WiFi Explorer Pro scan from my home Mac, where my network and some near me have many base stations.
Open up WiFi Explorer Pro, and see the hidden Wi-Fi environment around. Particularly note how one network name, like Portage Airbasestation, can have oodles of networks in multiple frequency bands.
Each device you use has a unique formula for selecting among available BSSIDs that share the same network name. That’s true of a home sensor, like an alarm component, or an iPhone, Mac, Android, game platform, or other devices.
Generally, the strongest network signal with the highest data rate gets picked. If you’re relatively near within a building or have a good line of sight to an access point, the 5 gigahertz (GHz) or 6 GHz band is chosen. These bands can carry hundreds of megabits to multiple gigabits per second due to the breadth of frequency available.6 Modern Wi-Fi devices have a variety of tricks to work around overlaps in usage in the same area that produce high throughput rates even in crowded environments.
However, the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands have relatively short wavelengths—the “length” of the signal. They can be readily absorbed by walls, ceilings, and floors, as well as other materials. (This is why you shouldn’t put a Wi-Fi router inside cabinets or behind furniture, as you’re decreasing range.)
When a high-frequency network can’t be used at its higher speeds, your device may opt for 2.4 GHz, the original “home” of Wi-Fi. With narrower ranges of frequencies and heavier use, 2.4 GHz nonetheless penetrates objects better, and thus can have a higher net throughput at a distance than the comparable 5 or 6 GHz network.7
As you roam around, your device may choose to maintain a lower-speed connection with a more distant or more obstructed router, even as you approach or are standing next to one that could offer 10 or 50 times as much throughput.
You can improve the situation, typically only in three ways:
Check your routers’ channel/band/signal strength configuration. Every router is different, but many let you pick preferred channels or use a reduced signal strength. Read up in the manual on whether a particular channel or setting will help increase range or tune performance.
On your device, turn Wi-Fi off and back on. You can use Settings/System Settings > Wi-Fi, and toggle the switch. (Airplane Mode on an iPhone or iPad won’t necessarily work because you can set it to leave Wi-Fi on.)
Break up one big ESSID into two or more smaller ones, either by location or by frequency band.
Toggling Wi-Fi causes your device to evaluate its network environment afresh and typically makes the “right” choice. It’s the least-frustrating option, but it gets old.
Reconfiguring your network requires some planning. I recommend this only when you’re having persistent problems and can’t move routers to improve roaming. If that’s the case, one of the following could help:
Create zones: Name routers the same in clusters. Maybe you have one set downstairs and another upstairs.
Separate by band: Most routers have at least two separate radio systems, letting you name 2.4 GHz and 5/6 GHz networks separately. Some have three bands, separating 5 and 6 GHz or offering two distinct 5/6 GHz networks with differently configurable features. This lets you force some devices onto slower but more reliable networks if they have weak radios or are far away from an access point.
Add specialized guest networks: Most routers let you set up additional network names under “guest networking.” You can keep these networks’ traffic private from the rest of your network, or allow it to bridge, so the guest networks just work like additional networks.
At one point, I discovered that some of my smart home devices that were limited to 2.4 GHz networking were having trouble consistently connecting. I realized they were often choosing a more distant access point, which caused their connections to drop. To fix the problem, I set up a 2.4 GHz guest network on the router closest to all of them and had them connect to it.
This is a lot of work to get consistent Wi-Fi. However, if you’re like those of us in our home, the frustration of having to manage and tinker with your device’s connection is enough that some rethink of your configuration could make for a happier household.
For further reading
Would you imagine I wrote a book about Wi-Fi? Yes! In fact, I’ve had at least one Wi-Fi book in print for over 20 years, since Adam Engst and I wrote The Wireless Network Starter Kit. My latest up-to-date title is Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
I’m writing this just before Halloween. By the time you read it, that will just sound weird. ↩
The fiber-optic terminal requires a modem that handles VLAN tagging and PPPoE. The former used to be an expensive option, and they gave me the modem at no cost when I signed up. ↩
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the trade group that came up with the Wi-Fi moniker and handles certification of devices complying with the industry’s IEEE 802.11 set of standards, was originally called the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance due to its close relationship to Ethernet (IEEE 802.3). ↩
Some operating systems, like those from Apple, let you create “private” MAC addresses on each Wi-FI network, which are randomly generated MACs that prevent third-party software operating on a given network from associating you across sessions in different locations. ↩
Only a network engineer can decipher “For macOS, the candidate BSS needs to have an RSSI that’s 12 dB stronger than the current BSS, whether the Mac is idle or transmitting data.” That RSSI is the Relative Signal Strength Indicator, a formula that provides a basis for comparing strong and weak network signals. ↩
Like broadcast TV channels, Wi-Fi and all wireless gear are designed around ranges of frequencies. Roughly speaking, with the same amount of signal power, the wider the range of frequency, the greater the potential throughput. I’m leaving out lots of provisos! ↩
Companies testing Wi-Fi penetration may use sacks of tubers to simulate human beings. That led to one of my all-time great headlines for an article I wrote for the Economist about tests Boeing was doing: “Coach Potatoes.” The illustration was also excellent. You’re welcome. ↩
[sound of thousands of ball bearings spilling out of your ears and bouncing on the floor for 15 minutes straight ]
(Everyone knows the brain runs on ball bearings. Read a science-type book before you @ me.)
The Pocket was announced on Tuesday, meaning people have had three whole days to make iPod sock and Borat mankini jokes, so you may be wondering why I’m even bothering to bring it up in this column.
I am doing so because I take my job very seriously, OK?…
My thanks to ZenStand for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Zenstand is the artisan wireless charger made for where you actually charge most: the bedroom.
A genuine walnut base blends in with your furniture; every piece has its own natural grain, no two are alike. It also has two MagSafe-compatible pads, so two phones can top up at night without juggling. No RGB glow. No whiny fan. Just quiet and calm charging.
