29 December 2013

I decided it is time for a new cable modem. We were early adopters of Internet by cable so there have been lots of improvements. I also decided to purchase one and not pay the rental to Comcast. I set it up and called Comcast to activate it but they could not see it so I reverted back to the old one. They sent someone out about 5:30 PM who took a look, then plugged it in directly to the line and it worked, He checked the cable from the splitter and saw that it was a “suck up”. that is, the dielectric was sucked back into the cable. That was still working on the older modem but could not provide the extra bandwidth for the new one. NOTE: The center conductor was making contact, but discontinuity in the connector where it went from dielectric to none was sucking off signal, like a trap. For those of you know what that is.

Works fine now.

12 December 2013

Seems to work.

9 December 2013

Making progress. I gave up on getting the printer to work on the new/old machine and went to reconnect it to Serrano and then when I gave it a shove to turn it around to change the cables it printed! Just a bad connection. Now it works.

I tried pulling the AMD video card out and now I can get good video VGA on Serrano2. Not sure if I need the fancy one but should buy a cable and try it

Also found that machine has a parallel printer port on it. But since it is Windows 7 it probably will not install the HP Laser Jet.

9 December 2013

I spent a lot of time yesterday, Sunday, struggling with two issues. The first is to get the old HP LaserJet 5P accessible by other computers since I have moved it to dvgibson2old. I resolved the problem of the fire wall by turning it off. No matter what settings I did it was not visible until I did. But then it would print a test page, but every time I printed from another computer it said that the printer was out of paper!

And I tried to fire up the M82, new Serrano2. No video and I do not have any of the right sort of cables for the video card. Now what?

24 November 2013

Later: I found just drivers, with out their nuisance center on their web site and downloaded them, then I found that you can also do the same from their CD by choosing the not recommended custom install option of just the drivers.

6 November 2013

A few days ago I thought it would be cool to get a mobile app from TD Bank and deposit some checks electronically.The app installed fine, then the first test to get the account balances seemed fine. So yesterday I got around to doing the deposits. Once I got the username and password right and got in it kept telling me that the web site was not available. I tried reboots of the phone, stuff like that. Takes a long time and then still the same results. Everything else was working? What? So then I remembered the old trick, restart the wireless. Sure enough, it worked. Now I get in. One check deposited without a hitch, but it is hard to find a good place to take a picture where you don’t get shadows and you have to do both sides which is a pain. But the second would not go. I would get through the whole process then at the end it would say go to you bank, Just before I left for the bank I decided to see if I could out smart it once again. The check was attached to a full sheet. I tore it off and went though the process again and Viola! it worked this  time. Did not realize how easy going to the bank was. And the tellers are really nice.

Started off this morning to see what I could do about the TiVo Desktop problem. It stopped working on Serrano; it picks but it does not download. And you spend a lot of time finding out that it is going to fail in the end. I installed it on Ajhi but it has never found the DVR. So… cannot connect to network…wasted more time “fixing” that, and rebooting, then restarted the wireless access point and now it finds it.

But it turns out I need Bonjour from Apple to make TiVo Desktop work. That does not come with Windows, so why doesn’t TiVo provide that? Silly me. Downloading and installing Bonjour now. Actually, many programs use Bonjour. But only Rocket Scientists understand that.

Did all of that, rebooted both Aji and TiVo shut off firewall, I think. What is the firewall now, Network Threat Protection? Does it have a new name so you don’t know what it is when they say your firewall is blocking? This industry has lots of speed bumps. Marketing comes up with new names for familiar concepts, and lets 1-800-HELP deal with it.

The Bonjour service is running, and Tivo Desktop is on the network but its not find anything. So a lot of time spent, doing necessary stuff but still not functional.