I have made an interesting discovery: White is heavier than black.

So, here was the deal: I brought my new black MacBook upstairs to offload something from the currently-operational white. As I lifted it, I thought, “Boy, this seems heavy.”

Then I closed them both up and lifted them each, again, independently.

“Boy,” I thought. “The black one really feels heaver.”

“I think so, anyway,” (balancing them in each hand, lifting one, then the other.)

Needs empirical testing.

So, I put it them on my wife’s new super-duper ultra-cool Salter (german manufacture) digital cooking scale and, guess what?

The black MacBook is two ounces lighter than the white MacBook.

Repeated measurements: 4lbs 14oz (black) vs. 5lbs 0.25oz (white).

I therefore must conclude, that white is heavier than black.

Even though it seems the other way around.

Precise methodology and observation are invaluable in situations like this…

rickb

Picked up one of these little things, the other day, since my ‘A’ wireless setup at home frazzed out.

I’ve had my issues with Mac, but I have to say, this thing is awesome. Plug it in to the wall, plug the cable in from the DSL modem, run a little config utility to set a name and password, and it’s done.

The new version is ‘n’ capable (as is the MacBook, now). Just to test, I hauled the MacBook outdoors and across the street – it saw the net (from my basement) just fine.

It supports a/b/g/n, so my Win tablet with the Atheros ‘a’ card can see it just fine (which is good, because I doubt if ‘n’ is available on that vintage machine.) The only downside is my really ancient machines that use the old Orinoco cards are dead in the water, especially since they can’t support WPA/WPA2 security.

Ces’t la vie. I’ll get some ‘n’ USB dongles and use those where I need them.

The other cool thing is I can travel with it – it’s no bigger than a MacBook power supply (in fact, it looks like the same enclosure.) I can take it with me and have my wireless network, anywhere, without having to configure a machine as a gateway. When I get home, plug it in and, voila! I’m back on the home system in no time.

It seems to be a pretty advanced router – one thing I’ve had troubles with on other routers is they can’t see other machines on the local net, unless I ferret out the (either static or DHCP-assigned) IP address and add an entry to a ‘hosts’ file on each machine (or set up DNS servers on all of the machines.) No need with this – Express’ server is smart enough to elicit the names from the machines. Happy days.

Other features are cool, too: it can run a speaker set remotely, can be used as a printer server, or a net extender. A small handful sprinkled around the house would give me access to whole bunches of things. And all as easy as (Apple) pie.

This one’s a hit.

rickb