Category Archives: Computers

Posts that have something to do with our computers and networking technology.

2014/06/06 (F) Chapter Business

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I spent a good portion of the day working on the membership and financial records for the FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter.  My work as VP/Secretary of the chapter is sporadic.  Weeks-to-months go by where there is very little that needs to be done, but when something pops up I have to take care of it in a timely manner and it often takes half a day to do it.  This usually involves updating the roster and notifying the members and FMCA HQ when a new member joins.  It also involves updating the financial reports as people pay their dues.

We have a chapter treasurer who handles the money and maintains the checking account but I maintain the membership records, which include keeping track of how much members have paid in dues and what calendar year those dues are for, and prepare the financial statements.  The busy times of the year for me, however, are September and October, when we prepare for and hold our annual meeting, and December through March, when I have to certify our roster to FMCA HQ and most members pay their dues.

Linda had more work to do for the bakery today but was able to do it at home.  She heated up an Amy’s Roasted Vegetable Pizza for lunch.  This is now my favorite pizza and cheese, vegan or dairy, would not improve it.

When I bought the Apple TV unit last night I also bought a Logitech wireless (Bluetooth) t630 optical Touch Mouse that I have been considering since I got my ASUS laptop.  I let it charge overnight (USB port) and today paired it with the computer, which was very easy.  There are some things about Windows 8/8.1 that I like and this is one of them.  I downloaded Logitech’s software package and installed it, which was also very easy.  Besides the usual cursor movement and left/right click functionality this mouse supports “touch” movements for vertical/horizontal scrolling and single/double finger soft taps for switching between the Start and Desktop screens and for switching between apps.  It’s very thin, but large enough to fit my hand comfortably, and feels solid and substantial.  So far I really like it.

Linda made a one pot dish for dinner with potatoes, black beans, kale, onions, and spices, including cumin, and probably some other ingredients.  It was delicious and healthy with lots of dietary fiber.  Earlier in the day we watched the latest NutritionFacts.org segment on the typical protein-rich, fiber-deficient American diet.  Most Americans, including vegans, consume way more than the recommended daily average of 42 grams of protein, but very few come anywhere near the recommended daily intake of fiber.  Vegetarians and vegans are the exception as dietary fiber comes only from plants, and the more whole-food the plant-based diet, the better.

We watched Season 2, Episode 1 of Doc Martin before turning in for the evening.  As with any TV series it has a formula, but it’s a formula I like.  I’m waiting for the episode where Doc Martin finally accepts and embraces the dog.  The dog is very loyal and will obviously win the day in the end.

 

20140605 (R) Apple Roku

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Linda had to go into the bakery today which left me to catch up on phone calls and errands.  I made more phone calls to contractors this morning and had better luck than yesterday reaching people or at least leaving messages.  I rescheduled with Gary from GM Construction to come discuss the pole barn project.  I also got hold of Bratcher Electric and determined that the annual maintenance on the whole house generator could wait until we are ready to do the conversion from propane to natural gas, which they can handle.  In talking to Mike Bratcher I also determined that we can install a main panel in the garage just after the transfer switch and then run power directly from there to the pole barn rather than from the main panel in the basement.  While we are at it, we could redo the sub-panel in the garage, feeding it directly from the new main panel rather than the main panel in the basement.  The basement panel is very crowded and we have wires carrying electricity back and forth unnecessarily.

I got a call from Butch with an update on the negotiations of the sale of the major portion of their business assets.  Linda has been advising them relative to valuation, accounting, and tax issues and we have been helping them with purchase agreement language.  It looks like they are in the final stages leading up to a closing of the deal.  Their big annual event is coming up in early July and they will likely be busy with the transfer of inventory and training of the buyer during and after that event.  I need to get our bus down to their place to work on some projects and help Butch work on getting their bus conversion done enough that they can live in it this winter in the southwest.  Based on things going on at both ends, it looks like the window for that work will be mid-September to sometime in November, weather permitting.

Our converted coach friends, Pat and Vickie, have some older Motorola GMRS handheld radios that they like but the charger bases have disappeared.  My ham radio friend Scott (AC8IL) is in the commercial mobile communications business so I checked with him to see if chargers were still available.  They were and he had a couple of the drop-in style charger/bases in stock!  Scotty is just that kind of guy.  I picked them up this morning and will deliver them to Pat and Vickie at the GLAMARAMA rally.

Apple Roku sounds like an interesting dessert, but it’s not.  It might be an either/or situation, but it could be a both/and.  John Dewey was a both/and kind of guy, so I favor that approach.  We were intrigued by Steve and Karen’s Roku Internet TV streaming device last night so I stopped at Best Buy today on my way home from running my errand to see if they had them in stock and if so at what price.  Not only did they have them, they had three different models.  The “stick” was $50, the Roku 2 was $70, and the Roku 3 was $100.  (The Roku 3 does not have A/V connectors like the Roku 2, only HDMI, but it has a five times faster processor.)  But that was not all, oh no.  They also had the Apple TV device for $100 and two other similar products, one of which looked like an Amazon/Kindle thing and the other one a WD thing, whatever that is.

The Roku units (2 and 3) have access to a lot of content on a free, subscription, and pay-per-view basis.  The Apple TV unit has access to content on the same basis but the selection may not be as extensive; it’s hard to say for sure as the devices are not easy to compare directly.  The Apple TV unit, however, has one huge, unique feature; it can mirror anything on an iOS device, such as our iPads, to a TV/monitor.  The iPad can also be used as a control panel for the Apple TV device.

We do not have to choose between a Roku and an Apple TV unit, of course, we can get and use both if we want; it’s just a matter of money.  Between the two TVs in the house and the two in the bus it could be a lot of money if we wanted dedicated units of both types on all four TV/monitors.  We always have the option of moving things back and forth, but in general I prefer not to do that.  To the extent we can afford it I prefer to have the house and the bus set up so that the only things we move between them are the things we have to, such as ourselves, our food, our laundry, our computers, our cats, and some of our ham radio gear (at least for now).  The best solution, however, may be to get one of each device and move them around as needed.  That would give us the best cost/benefit ratio, but not the most convenience.

When Linda got home from her day at the bakery we finished the Egri Merlot we had opened the other night and caught up on the day’s events.  We decided to try the Apple TV device first and see how it worked in our situation.  Linda made an onion, mushroom, tomato Ragu, and served it over the leftover power grains.  It was very tasty.  After dinner I went to Best Buy to get the Apple TV device while Linda prepared fresh strawberries for dessert.  Fresh strawberries are a favorite treat of ours.  She served them with small pieces of Dandelion Small Batch Chocolate made from 70% Ambanja Madagascar 2013 Harvest beans.  The chocolate was excellent and unique.  It was a thank you gift from our son and daughter-in-law for Linda’s babysitting services while they were in San Francisco, California.

We connected the Apple TV box to one of our HD TV/monitors and went through the setup procedure.  We decided to test it on some PBS content, which required us to set up an account with PBS and enter a validation code that the Apple TV box provided.  We also downloaded an app onto Linda’s iPad2 that allowed it to mirror whatever was on its screen to the Apple TV.

We used the mirroring feature to watch Season 1, Episode 5 of Doc Martin, but it proved to be unusable.  The image was fine on the iPad2 but the Apple TV could not keep up.  I found that to be odd as our home WiFi network should have more than enough bandwidth to deliver the data stream between the devices, but maybe not.  I presumed that the limiting factor in our network was the data rate coming into our DSL gateway from our AT&T landline, but that was obviously fast enough to deliver the content from the gateway to the iPad without buffering hesitation.

We turned off the mirroring and finished watching the episode on the iPad.  Still, the content delivered directly from the gateway to the Apple TV looked great, and the mirroring will be useful for showing photos and anything else on our iPads.  We may reconfigure the Apple TV to use one of our other wireless networks and see if that helps.

 

2014/05/30 (F) Outlook Contacts

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I have had a Palm PDA for most of the last 13 years, and for most of that time it has been a Palm Tungsten T3.  While I was still working at Wayne RESA it was synced to their GroupWise e-mail and calendar system but also synced to the Palm Desktop software on my laptop for Contacts and Tasks and my Passwords Plus program.  I did not use the Tasks list much, but I did keep all of my personal contacts, and some of my business contacts, on the Palm along with all of my encrypted passwords.  Linda also had a Palm PDA for a while and had it synced to Outlook on her office computer.  Her PDA quit working years ago and never got replaced.  Once she was settled in at the bakery she did not have a need for a PDA.

When I retired I reverted back to using the Palm calendar, which I always liked.  I even installed a new Lithium Ion battery, which was no easy job, to prolong the unit’s life.  But three things have converged to finally spell the end of the Palm era for me: 1) the unrecoverable failure of the Passwords Plus app on the Tungsten T3;  2) the porting of our home Outlook Express information into Outlook 2007 after the loss of our twmi.rr.com e-mail address, and;  3) getting a new laptop computer due to the end of support for Windows XP.

Over the winter we were able to purchase an updated version of Passwords Plus (CS 2.0) that synced through the cloud.  Versions were available that ran on our iPads, Linda’s Samsung laptop, and my then current Win XP Dell laptop.  It is also available for Android (I think) but so far we have not installed it on our phones.  The new PWP apps allowed us to successfully migrate all of our passwords from the old Palm version and make them available on four devices with back-up and synchronization via the DataViz cloud servers.  Just this past week I installed PWP CS 2.0 on my new Win 8.1 machine and got it synced with the other four.  When the passwords are available and secure, life is good.

When we moved from the previous house to the current house last year we lost our long-time home e-mail address.  I took that as an opportunity to export our home address book and all of our personal e-mails from Outlook Express and import them into Outlook 2007 on my Win XP Dell laptop.  Since that time I have continued to build out the address book with contact information, but I still have and use my Palm Contacts.  Yesterday I learned that I could export my Palm contacts in a vCard (.vcf) format.  Further research suggested that I could convert the file to a comma separated value  (.csv) format and then import it into Outlook 2013 on my new laptop.  It would be a lot more work than it sounds as the vcf –> csv conversion would require me to review each entry, but it would still be a lot less work than re-entering everything by hand.

I figured I would need the better part of a long day to accomplish this task, so before rushing into it I decided to do more research.  Today I discovered that there are add-ins available for Outlook that will take my single .vcf Palm output file and import it into Outlook directly, as long as I am willing to pony up the $$.  The idea of spending $20 -$25 for a program I will use once does not sit well with me, but the idea of sitting all day reviewing entries one at a time does not sit well with me either.  If I want to clean up duplicates, I can do that semi-automatically for another $25.  I’m thinking about it.

The calendar is another matter.  The Palm calendar can be “archived” but not exported.  My Palm calendar goes back at least a decade, and this history may just have to remain in the Palm Desktop on the old laptop.  On the upside, once I start using the Outlook calendar I may be able to set it up so I can access the address book and calendar on my Android phone.  That would be nice; I have long enjoyed having my contacts and calendar information “in my pocket,” or “on my belt,” depending on my clothing choices that day.

It was yet another beautiful day today; when Michigan weather is nice, it’s the best.  Linda decided to do some weeding in the front planting beds and I decided to install the new rear-view mirror on the bus.  You just can’t let a day like this go by without doing something outside.  After a little break we decided to work in the back yard.  We had several large pine trees that had large limbs broken over the winter.  I used our pole saw to cut those loose and dragged them over near an old burn pile.  I cut the small branches off, cut up the larger central limbs, and made a pile.  We gathered up some of the dried grass clippings from Tuesday and stuffed them under the limbs and twigs.  We added a few old, large logs to the pile that were laying around in the yard and soaked everything in diesel fuel.  Forget gasoline and charcoal starter fluid; let the diesel fuel soak in (it does not evaporate like gasoline) and put a match to it.  You will get a sustained fire.

After the fire had burned down to a smolder we moved some of the blocks from the rear retaining walls and laid them around the burn pile.  We’ve decided to use some of them to build a fire pit and wanted to see how many it would take to make a circle of the appropriate size.  We plan to build the pit 2 or 3 courses high on the low side.

Kimber, from GM Construction LLC (GM Decks), called to let me know that Gary had taken ill and would not make it out to the house late this afternoon to discuss our pole barn project.  We will try again next week.  Village Landscape Development also did not show up or call today.  I will give Steve a call tomorrow and suggest that we set a firm start date for Monday June 16.

The afternoon mail brought a Jury Summons for Linda for a two week commitment for U. S. District Court in Flint, Michigan starting Monday, June 30.  That interferes with some travel plans we have and will now likely have to adjust.  She won’t be able to find out if she needs to report on the 30th until 5 PM on Friday the 27th.

 

2014/05/26 (M) Memorial Day

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This is what I think about on Memorial Day.  For most Americans Memorial Day, or rather the Memorial Day weekend, marks the beginning of the summer “play” season; time to prep the cottage or the get the RV out of storage, get out the summer “toys”, attend summer camps (or summer school), and take vacations.  It has a much more serious and official meaning, of course, which is to remember those who served and died in the defense of our country while on active duty.  It is not necessarily a day to honor “all” veterans, although it seems to have turned into that.  We have another holiday for that purpose; it’s called Veteran’s Day.

Regardless, there is no doubt that each citizen owes the existence of our nation, and the freedoms we enjoy within it, to those who served to build it and defend it, and especially those who paid the ultimate price.  It a shame that some of those lives were wasted in the name of foolish nationalism, but the shame is not the soldier’s, it is the government’s.  And the government is merely a political manifestation of the will of the majority.  In our system the majority rules (or is supposed to) but that does not always make its actions right.  Those who served did so with a sense of duty without which we could not have a functioning military.  My father survived the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.  He was one of the troops who took Omaha Beach.  His unit suffered 90% casualties.  He was barely 19 years old at the time.  He was wounded on the drive inland through France and received the Purple Heart and almost 50 years later a unit commendation for the service his unit rendered that day and in the days that followed.

My cough subsided enough that both Linda and I finally got a little sleep last night.  She made her yummy vegan pancakes for breakfast and my sense of taste had returned to the point that I enjoyed them.  I still wasn’t feeling up to much physical activity, but managed to pull up all of the stakes for the pole barn and mark the location of each one with green marker paint.  I was feeling well enough to work at my desk and spent a good portion of the rest of the day downloading and installing apps on my new ASUS laptop.

I was working at my computer this afternoon when I had one of those associative moments where I suddenly remembered something I was trying to recall a week ago.  As a young pre-teenager in the early 1960’s there were three things that I had set as “life goals” but I could only remember two of them, although I was clear that I had accomplished all three.  I was looking at the support thread for the Participant’s Database WordPress plug-in, where there was a lot of detail on “coding,” when I recalled that the missing goal was to “learn to program a computer.”  Duh!

These “life goals” were not career goals; they were just ideas that sounded interesting and “out there” at the time.  I actually ended up “programming computers” for a living for a while and did some very fancy FORTRAN programming for my electrical engineering Masters Degree project and again to create the Monte-Carlo simulations that were the foundation of my doctoral research and dissertation.  My other two goals where to “understand nuclear energy” and “learn to fly an airplane” both of which I also accomplished, at least to my satisfaction.  I never made a living in aviation, although my dad spent almost his entire adult working life in the aerospace industry, both defense and space.  I did end up studying physics as an engineering student, and teaching it at the high school level, so in a sense understanding nuclear energy also touched on earning a living at one point in my life.  As an Air Force ROTC cadet from 1973 – 1976 I was a pilot candidate.  If not for the sudden end of the Vietnam Conflict, I would have made my living in aviation, at least for a while.

Perhaps these seem like strange life goals for a pre-teen, but they were very forward-looking and exotic notions in the early 1960’s.  The fact that I accomplished them does not mean my life is complete or that I have accomplished everything else I attempted in the last half century.  Nor does it mean that I ran out of things to do or the motivation to do them.  I simply find it interesting that I accomplished them and find a certain satisfaction in that.  To this day whenever I see an airplane fly by I wonder how many people see that same plane and wonder what it must be like to fly it or are mystified by how it is able to stay in the air?  I also wonder how people manage to make sense of a world connected together by technologies about which they have no real understanding, or how they understand a universe ruled at its most fundamental level by randomness and chaos.  Downloading and installing software leaves me a certain amount of time to think, and I downloaded and installed a lot of software today.

Linda made a wonderful vegan potato salad this afternoon and we had it for dinner with jumbo vegan hot dogs, with mustard, onion, and relish, of course.  And grapes; but no adult beverages as they are contraindicated for my medications, and frankly are not the least bit satisfying when ill.  I know I’m getting better when my appetite starts to return.  I will know I am fully recovered when I once again look forward to a glass of wine with dinner.

Technomadia did a one hour live video chat at 8 PM with RVillage founder/CEO Curtis Coleman.  It was a good, relaxed chat with enough questions from the audience to keep it moving.  I think they had 45 people online at one time.  They use UStream for these live video events and were interrupted three or four times by commercials.  The first one I got was in Spanish, but someone else got one in French.  The problem was that the hosts do not get a heads up that UStream is going to cut them off, so they keep talking until someone messages them that they are not on the air.  But it’s a “free” service, and of course almost everything in life that’s free has a hidden cost, especially if it involves the Internet.  Somewhat ironically the RVillage website went offline during the broadcast.  The head of development was monitoring the chat and got right on it as soon as it was reported; something about “backend server overload.”  RVillage passed the 7,500 member level just before the video chat went live.  Whatever the issue was they had it straightened out quickly.  RVillage lives on very robust servers run by Amazon.

 

2014/05/22 (R) Still Resting

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I called Mike (W8XH) last night and we agreed that it would be better for him to wait until I was better to come over and help us with our computer issues.  I finally got up around 8 AM, having spent 11 hours in bed.  I took a nice, warm shower and felt almost human.  Not well by any means, but enough better to have some granola for breakfast and catch up on the blogs I follow in Feedly.  It was a spectacularly beautiful morning and I opened all of the doorwalls and some of the windows.

I planned to take it easy today and maybe just sit on the rear deck and enjoy the weather, the view, and the sounds of the birds.  It got cloudy as the morning wore on and never got as warm as I had hoped so I closed up the house.  I worked at my desk for a while and got badly chilled and started shivering uncontrollably.  I had forgotten to turn the basement furnace zone back on and the temperature had dropped to 65 degrees.  I made some hot tea and some hot soup for lunch, which helped a little, and finally wrapped myself in an afghan and lay down on the couch.  Around 3:00 PM I called Henry Ford Health System Columbus Center in Novi, Michigan to see if I could get an appointment with our internal medicine doctor.  She was off tomorrow and it was too late to book an appointment with anyone else.  I was told to call back at 6:30 AM tomorrow for a same-day appointment.  Duly noted.  I went back to sleep on the couch.  The chills and shakes had left me completely drained to the point where I could not sit up or read.

I was finally tired of lying down, so I examined the printer drivers for our HP CLJ 3600n network printer on Linda’s Samsung laptop to see what was installed.  There were 40 files listed!  Someone has got to be kidding.  A notice popped up on her screen that Windows 8.1 was available as a free download.  I checked with Linda (it’s her machine, after all) and she gave me the green light.  I let it install and then restarted the machine.  I sent a test MS Word document to the printer and it printed just fine.  Great, so the printer can be installed under Windows 8 and then the machine updated to Windows 8.1, put it cannot be installed directly into Windows 8.1.  Microsoft “blames” HP stating that printer manufacturers are solely responsible for their drivers.  Even if true it’s still lame, very lame and there’s plenty of shame to spread over both companies.  It’s a “business class printer” designed for high volume use.  Since our volume is not high, our (expected) use is obviously long.  It’s enough to make my next computer a Linux box or a Mac and my next printer anything but an HP.

Speaking of which, I signed up for a free Intro to Linux course from The Linux Foundation offered through edX.  It starts August 1st.  My friend Steve has been trying to get me interested in Linux for a long time.  My problem has never been a lack of interest but a lack of a good, organized approach into the subject.  There are books on the subject, but I am unlikely to just sit down and read one as an academic exercise.  I have Linux running on one of my old computers (a dual processor Dell Precision Workstation) and Steve has been helping me set it up as a local web-server that I can use to test my WordPress sites, so that provides the needed sense of purpose.

I spent a little time in the evening uploading blog posts and then went to bed.  I can’t remember the last time I felt this bad.

 

2014/05/21 (W) A Twilight Zone

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Linda has been ill since last Thursday with a cold and/or allergies.  Until yesterday I had managed to avoid her symptoms, but in the morning I started sneezing and in afternoon I developed a cough.  It wasn’t a response to a tickle in my throat from post-nasal drip, it was the deep raspy cough that comes from the lungs and makes them hurt.  By evening the cough had become productive.  I have not been sick in a very long time and the one thing I try to avoid getting is pneumonia, which I have had three times in the same spot of the same lung.  The scar tissue there makes me more susceptible to re-infection, and I take my nasal spray and allergy pill every day to avoid sinus problems which can settle into my lungs.  Until Tuesday this had been very successful.

We both had a very poor night’s sleep last night and got out of bed feeling like we were in a twilight zone.  Instead of coffee I had a big cup of Tazo Ginger Spice tea.  The warmth and ginger taste were soothing and I figured it could not hurt to stay hydrated.  I put a load of laundry in the washer (I only have two loads to go) and then had a large glass of orange/grapefruit juice.  Linda also had some tea and then gathered up clothes for the next five days.  She will be watching grand-daughter Madeline around the clock until Sunday when her parents return from San Francisco, California.

I checked on my new laptop and the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop (ACCD) app showed that Photoshop had been successfully installed; at least it showed that in one place, but in another place it said I had no apps installed.  Hummm?  I did not see the icons at the bottom of the screen but the one thing I have learned about Windows 8/8.1 is that I can go to the Start (Metro) screen and start typing and I usually get directed to what I am looking for.  I noticed a little arrow in the lower left corner of the screen that said “4 new apps.”  I clicked on that and it took me to the screen where all if the installed programs are listed and there they were!  I opened Lightroom and registered it and then opened Photoshop; twice.  It appears that I have a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version.  I’m not sure why, as my new laptop has a 64-bit processor, but they are both listed.

I got out my iPad2 but did not have the energy or interest to even play a game and lay down on the couch to take a nap.  Linda had a couple of hours before she had to leave for Ann Arbor, and made a batch of her super special granola.  I got a call from Kimber at GM Construction letting me know that Gary would not be able to stop by the house today to look at our pole barn project.  He had to go up north for family reasons.  Given how I felt it was for the better.  He will stop by on Friday or sometime next week.

I didn’t feel like sitting up but I was tired of lying down, so I had some granola, sans soy milk, and worked at my iPad2.  I have been keeping up with writing my blog posts, but not with posting them.  I want to select a few photos from the Escapade to include in the posts but have not felt like going through them.  I shot over 2,000 images during the event.  Linda keeps suggesting that I only write weekly posts when we are home.  It seems like that would be easier, but I have tried that and it’s not.  For one I lose track of details, and sometimes even the day/date something happened.  I also found that the weekly posts just ended up being very long.  What I really need to do is focus on writing shorter posts.  But as a weblog, the blog is first and foremost an online diary, so the details I include are there because they are important to me at the time.

Although I did not feel like doing it, I forced myself to select a dozen photos from the 15th and 16th and post process them.  I have everything I need to upload my posts for the last week except the energy and desire.  UPS showed up around 5 PM with the mirror from Prevost.  I spent most of the day lying down on the couch and finally went to bed around 9 PM.

 

2014/05/20 (T) Software Redemption

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Linda was off to the bakery again this morning, but not as early as yesterday.  She had a mid-afternoon meeting which put her return trip at the worst of the evening rush hour.  She is still under the weather, so the last two days have definitely been more work then fun.

I was disgusted enough with my experience yesterday trying to download and install the Adobe Creative Cloud  Desktop app (ACCD) that I decided not to work on my computers this morning.  I had, however, left my new ASUS laptop on all night in the hope that the ACCD app would finish downloading and install correctly.  Sometimes you have to just step away so I started a load of laundry and made a list errands.  Sometimes the best way to step away is to literally get out of the house (or bus) and since errands have a purpose, and provide a sense of accomplishment, they are always good therapy.  I got the laundry out of the dryer and left just after noon.  I got back around 4 PM with bags full of essential but inexpensive stuff; think “TP” and you will have the right idea.

While I was out I got Mike (W8XH) on the S. Lyon 2 meter ham radio repeater and arranged for him to help me with my e-mail issues on my new laptop.  I started another load of laundry when I got home and then checked on my computer.  ACCD had finished installing correctly!  I have no idea how long it took; the progress bar did not move when I sat and watched it.  I started up my old laptop to check e-mail and discovered that we appeared to have a very slow Internet connection.  All of my online programs worked fine yesterday (except the ACCD installation), and they were all working today, but not very fast.  The difficulty I had installing ACCD may have been an Internet connection issue rather than an Adobe issue, but I will never know.  We have an AT&T High Speed Internet (HSI) landline.  The only thing slower is dial-up.

ACCD was open and showed me a list of apps.  Most of the apps had a “Try” button, which is an attempt on Adobe’s part to inflate our monthly bill to gigantic proportions.  Lightroom (Lr) and Photoshop (Ps), however, had “Install” buttons, a good sign that Adobe had the correct details for our ACC account.  I clicked the Install button for Lightroom and went upstairs.  I was feeling progressively worse through the day and after Linda called with her ETA I decided to take a nap.

Linda reheated the leftover pasta from Sunday’s dinner.  After dinner I checked on the progress of the Lightroom download/install.  It was done and showed the status as “Up To Date”.  Today was turning out to be a good day, so I clicked Install for Photoshop, finished editing some blog posts, answered a few e-mails, and turned off my old computer.  With no other devices trying to use our Internet connection I was optimistic that I will find it downloaded and installed in the morning.  Linda tried to install Microsoft Security Essentials on her laptop earlier today and suddenly had programs she did ask for or authorize as best she was aware.  Thanks Microsoft.  Attempting to remove them brought up additional vendor dialog boxes so we let it be for now.  We were both too tired and feeling to poorly to think carefully or do online research to figure out what was going on.  With any luck Mike can help us with this on Thursday.

 

2015/05/19 (M) Software Frustrations

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Linda had to go into the bakery today and left early this morning before I even woke up.  I wasn’t all that hungry when I got up, which us unusual for me, so I started a load of laundry and got to work at my desk.  I have had my new ASUS laptop for a couple of weeks now, but I do not yet have it set up for use.  I’ve lost track of the exact count of updates, but it was somewhere between 70 and 80 when we left for the Escapade and 25 more got installed yesterday.  The only software I have added so far is Microsoft Office 2013, but the computer came with quite a few “apps” already installed.  The salesman at Best Buy had alerted me to expect quite a few updates initially so this has not come as a big surprise.

At one of the Geeks On Tour seminars we attended at Escapade they suggested that laptop computers may eventually disappear.  I doubt that desktop or laptop computers will ever completely disappear from the market, but we know from recent experience that the selection is narrowing and there are fewer companies making them.  Perhaps someday I will be creating documents (text and spreadsheet) and editing photos on a tablet, but if so, it will be with a large external monitor, full-size keyboard, and a mouse.  It’s not that I am “old fashioned” or resistant to change, it’s that some tasks are more easily accomplished in certain ways.

On the other hand, I write most of these blog posts on my iPad2.  It’s small and light and I can work on the couch, the deck, outside our motorhome, at Panera, in bed, or pretty much anywhere, and I have worked in all those places and more.  Before they go into WordPress, however, I e-mail them to myself, copy and paste them into Word, edit them, and insert captions as markers for the photographs.  I select and process all of the photographs on my computer.  The post is copied from Word and pasted into the WordPress editor where I make some final changes and then upload and insert the images.  I often review the post on my iPad to make sure it formats OK and if I find a typo I will log into our site from my iPad2 and make the correction.

This morning I purchased, downloaded, and installed the password program we use on our other devices.  The process was easy and it sync’d up with our Cloud account as soon as I activated it.  This is one of those cases where the Cloud really makes a lot of sense to me as the amount of data that gets moved around is small.  We now have this same app on three laptops and two iPads.  The original password program was on my Palm Tungsten T-3 and was sync’d only to my old laptop via a USB cable.  We were able to install the new version of the program on that laptop, capture all of the existing password information, and store it in the Cloud account that was included in the price of the app/program.  From there it was a simple matter to put the app on other Windows laptops and install the iOS version on our iPads.  We can add/change the information on any device and it updates the Cloud database (if we are connected to the Internet) and then updates all of the other devices the next time they are online.

I still have a lot of contact information and my main calendar on my Palm, and it is still sync’d with my old WinXP laptop via a USB cable.  I plan to “move” that information to Outlook on my new computer, but in this case “move” may mean “manually enter.”  If so, I am not looking forward to that process.

Prevost’s U. S. parts center in Elgin, Illinois operates from 7 AM to 7 PM Central Time, Monday through Friday.  I called them a little after 8 AM EDT and talked to Aeleen.  They had the mirror assembly in stock in New Jersey so I ordered it.  It should be here on Wednesday or Thursday; 2-day shipping is almost always included in the price.  She is also going to have the home office in Quebec mail me an updated CD with the CatBase Viewer program/database to install on my new laptop.  This program/database has diagrams and parts lists for almost everything in the bus for all models back to the early 70’s.  It filters the diagrams and parts lists to our VIN numbers and I have found it enormously helpful in figuring out what part I need before calling the Elgin parts center to place an order.  Prevost also has an online ordering system and using it would save us 3%, but I often find that I am not quite clear on the part I need, or the part has been superseded by a new one that is not shown in (my version of) the CatBase Viewer.  The telephone order desk folks are usually very helpful.

I had sent a text message to Chuck earlier and got a return phone call.  We talked at length about bus projects, pole barns, and recent travels.  Having gotten the bus mirror ordered and my password app installed/operating I was feeling like it was going to be a fairly productive day.  As an “expert” on data I was aware that two data points do not establish a trend, and so it was that my winning streak came to a halt when I tried to install our HP LaserJet 3600n network printer and the Adobe CC Desktop App.

I had my laptop search for network printers and it found the 3600n.  I downloaded and installed the Win 7/8/8.1 printer installation wizard and ran it.  When I tried to install it I was taken to the list of manufacturers and models to select the appropriate driver.  Alas, the LaserJet 3600n was not on the list and the wizard told me that our printer was not currently supported by the wizard.  It seems that the printer wizard has something in common with the Wizard of Oz.

I tried Windows Update, but no luck there either.  I went to the Win 8.1 “metro” screen and searched for “install printer” and “install network printer” which led me to various web pages on Microsoft’s and Hewlett-Packard’s websites.  I eventually found a driver for Windows 8.1 USB, but I am not trying to connect to the printer through a USB cable, I am trying to use it through our Ethernet LAN.  The odd thing is that Linda’s Windows 8.1 Samsung laptop prints to the LaserJet 3600n over our LAN just fine.  Unfortunately I have no recollection of how we got her machine to do that at year ago.  This took up at least an hour of my morning, without success, for what should have been a 3-minute task.  Being retired does not make this waste of time any less frustrating.

In late December (2013) I subscribed to Adobe’s Creative Cloud (CC) Photography Program.  For $10/month we get to download and use Lightroom (Lr) and Photoshop (Ps) on two computers, with updates whenever they are available, and access to training materials and forums.  We can also add other Adobe products (apps/programs) to our subscription for an additional monthly cost.  We installed Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop, Lightroom, and Photoshop on Linda’s Samsung laptop right away to make sure the subscription was set up correctly, but could not install these programs on my old 32-bit Win XP Pro machine (even though I specifically asked the pre-sale consultant if it would run on Windows XP and was told “yes”.)  One of my main reasons for getting a new laptop (besides the end of support for Windows XP), and for selecting the one I did, was to be able to run these two programs.  Alas, I was able to download the Adobe CC Desktop installer, but the installer was unable to install the Adobe CC Desktop App.  The Desktop App is used to install and update the other programs, so my Adobe installation efforts ended for the day shortly after they started.  Or should have; I plugged away at this several times before giving up.  I did notice in a news feed that Adobe had a 24-hour outage recently, and on one attempt to download I got a screen saying the site was down for maintenance, so I am hopeful (but not optimistic) that the next time I try this it will work correctly.  If not, I will find out how helpful Adobe Customer Service really is.

Linda got home around 5 PM, having spent almost 1.5 hours in rush hour traffic.  She was tired from a long day and the effects of a cold and/or allergy, so dinner was a simple salad and vegan brats on a hotdog bun with the rest of the fresh fruit from last night.  She headed off to bed and I returned to my ham shack/office where I responded to e-mails and updated three of my four WordPress sites.  I then configured my e-mail accounts in Outlook on my new computer.  I sent test messages for each account and got them all working after correcting a couple of typos.

To set up the e-mail accounts I copied all of the “.pst” files from my WinXP machine to a folder on our NAS.  I copied the folder from the NAS to the ASUS in a place where I could find it easily.  I then configured and tested each e-mail account using the corresponding pst file.  Everything appeared to work except I did not have my address book.  One of the pst files was named Outlook.pst, and that file was associated with the Personal Folders entry on my WinXP machine.  That folder was moved to Outlook from Outlook Express where I only had one e-mail account, and that account went away last May after we moved.  Since I was not setting up an e-mail account to go with this pst file, I decided to import it into Outlook.  It showed up in my list of e-mail accounts and I appeared to have all of my contacts when I clicked on People at the bottom of the screen but I was not able to select them as recipients for a new e-mail.  Ugh.  So close and yet not right.  I e-mailed Mike (W8XH) to see if he could assist me with this as he has in the past, and then went to bed.

 

2014/05/05 (M) Towering Heights

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It dropped into the upper 30’s early this morning.  Although I did not really want to go outside and work, it was the perfect time to adjust the pressures in the bus tires and reset the baseline pressures on the Pressure Pro TPMS.  I had a 10 AM service appointment for my car and wanted to take care of the bus tires before the air temperature warmed up or some of the tires sat in the sun.

I took the Honda Element to Brighton Honda for the 85,000 mile service which consisted of an oil change and multi-point inspection.  A quick trip to Best Buy to look for a case for my new ASUS laptop computer did not result in a usable case but I did discover a new Logitech mouse, the T630; very thin and stylish but unfortunately not in stock.  They printed out a sheet for me to take along.

I called Wayne (KD8H) and arranged to go see the Heights Tower he had for sale at 2 PM.  Mike (W8XH) came along to help me inspect it.  Mike has a Heights Tower so he is very familiar with them.  The tower was already down and disassembled into sections that were stored horizontally on saw horses.  The fold-over mount (FOM) was made of steel rather than aluminum and was rusty but very substantial.  Wayne had the motor for the FOM but no longer had the threaded rod.  The top tower sections had the mounting plate for a Ham II rotator and the bearing plate for the rotating mast.  He also had the Ham II rotator, and was willing to include that in the deal.  I wrote him a check and arranged to come back later in the week with a truck or trailer to pick everything up.  After I dropped Mike back at his QTH and returned home I e-mailed several SLAARC members to see if they might be have a truck and/or trailer and time to help me retrieve the tower parts.

I had been doing research on cases for the ASUS G750 series (ROG) laptop computer and found two on Amazon Prime from Everki that looked promising as they were designed to hold up to an 18.5 inch (diagonal) computer.  The Advanced was a padded top-load zipper case with a slender front zipper pocket.  The Lunar was also a padded top-load zipper case but had a larger zippered front pouch and a slender zipper pocket in front of that.  It also had a slot across the back that allowed it to be placed over the extended handle of a roller case.  The Lunar was 3x the price of the Advanced, but the Lunar looked like it would better accommodate the AC power adapter and other accessories I tend to haul around.  I had checked the ASUS ROG forum (Republic of Gamers) previously and the general opinion was that these two cases were both of good quality and big enough to hold my computer and related stuff.  I ordered one for delivery on Wednesday (2-day), no extra charge with Amazon Prime.

 

2014/05/04 (N) Northwest Winds

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The weather yesterday was mostly cloudy with occasional light rain and the winds came up strong starting in the afternoon.  They tapered off by bedtime but resumed a hard blow this morning with low, puffy, white clouds streaming in from the northwest and making the trees dance.  It was a brighter morning than we have had most of the week as the sun played hide-n-seek with the clouds.  The temperature remained cool, making for a brisk day, but it was a nice change from the cool, overcast dreariness of the past week.  Except for Thursday, when the high temperature is supposed to hit 80, the daily high temps will be around 60 all week.

Linda made her scrumptious blueberry pancakes for breakfast and then went for a walk.  She had barely left the house when she returned, very excited, to tell me she had just seen a young albino deer running through our yard.  By the time I got outside it had moved on to the woods west of our property.  We often see the same deer day-after-day as they travel their circuit, so I also hope to see this one someday.

After checking in on the blogs I follow using the Feedly app on my iPad2 I made a couple of corrections to a recent blog post, approved a comment from our daughter-in-law (the first one has to be approved), and deleted the 59 spam comments that the Akismet plug-in/service trapped since last night.  I put a load of laundry in the washer and then spent some time looking online for a padded case for my new laptop computer and a replacement for one of our APC SmartUPS units that has failed.

With the move to tablet computers, the choice of laptops is diminishing, especially those with larger screens, and along with that fewer choices for accessories such as cases.  In the past 14 years I have always purchased larger roller cases, with separate cases for the computer that fit inside, as my laptop traveled with me every day everywhere I went.  I had the most recent of these cases with us in Florida and, after getting the computer/case and accessories out of it, I stored it in a closet (where it tended to be in the way).  The next time I touched it was when I unloaded it from the bus to bring back into the house.

It was clear from that experience that I do not need another roller case.  I do, however, want something that will protect my new laptop computer.  I think I have narrowed the choice down to the Everki Advanced or the Everki Lunar, both available through Amazon Prime.  The Advanced is very reasonably priced at under $40 and has generally favorable reviews, mentioning the ASUS “Republic of Gamers” (ROG) models in particular.  The Lunar has more storage space, and also has generally favorable reviews, but is over three times the price at just under $130.  Posts on the ASUS ROG Forum seem to favor one of the Everki backpack models, but I do not want a backpack style case.

Our failed APC uninterruptible power supply is a Smart-UPS SUA1000.  By trading it in on a SMT1000 we can save $75 off the retail price.  I need to confirm that the discounted price includes return shipping; the SUA1000 weighs 48 pounds.

I revised the RVillage Quick Start doc I created for the GLCC, CCO, and FTH RV clubs, making it generic for use by Bus Conversion Magazine or anyone else.  I then uploaded it to a new RVillage page on our website and revised a couple of other pages to link to the new one.  I then uploaded blog posts for the last three days.  I set up my new laptop in my office and installed seven more updates.

At breakfast yesterday I got a tip from Paul (N8BHT) on a used tower.  He e-mailed me the owner’s contact information later.  I called the owner, Wayne (KD8H), this afternoon and got a little more information about the tower.  It is an aluminum Heights Tower, 80 feet, with Fold-Over Kit (FOK) including the drive motor, a rotator and antenna mounting plate.  It is already on the ground and disassembled into sections.  Wayne is retired and I will likely go look at the tower tomorrow afternoon.  I e-mailed Paul (N8BHT), Mike (W8XH), and Steve (N8AR) to see if they were available to go with me.

Linda made lentil loaf for dinner with baked yams and fresh asparagus.  After dinner I drove to South Lyon for the May meeting of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club.  SLAARC usually meets on the 2nd Sunday of the month but pulls the May meetings forward a week to avoid Mother’s Day.  Our topic of discussion this evening was the upcoming ARRL Field Day operating event, which takes place the last full weekend in June.  We had a couple of new hams at the meeting and afterwards several of the guys helped Christine, KD8VEA, get the PL tone set correctly on her radio so she was able to participate in a group QSO with Steve (N8AR), Mike (W8XH), Fred (AC8VL), and myself on the drive home.  In spite of what many people think, including some older/former hams, amateur radio is alive and well in the North America and all over the world.

 

2014/04/29 (T) A Family Visit

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Our son decided to bring his daughter to visit with us this morning.  They arrived around 10 AM and left around 1:30 PM.  This was the first time I have seen her since December 16th.  Linda got to see her when she was back in Michigan in late February and early March.  Madeline was one year old when I last saw her and was crawling.  She is now 16 & 1/2 months and walking like she invented it.  She seems to take great pleasure in her independent mobility for its own sake; pure joy.  She also loves to go up and down stairs (with adult supervision, of course).  She is curious about everything and took great delight in exploring the main floor of our house.  It was an excellent visit.

I made a run to the post office and used my 2m mobile ham radio while in transit.  Mike, W8XH, came back to my call and we had a nice QSO.  It was good to finally be back on the air.  I stopped at Teeko’s and ordered 2 lbs each of our two custom blend coffees for pickup on Thursday.  These are half regular, half decaffeinated blends that Jeff roasts right in the store from his amazing assortment of green beans.  Sweet Seattle Dreams is 1/2 Seattle Blend (reg) and 1/2 Sweet Dreams (decaf), and we were the first customers for whom Jeff ever made thus blend.  It’s a blend of two blends, so it has at least four different coffee beans, maybe five or six.  He told me once, but I have forgotten.  The other blend is all Ethiopian Yirgacheffe.  Both are excellent.

I did some research on laptop computers while Linda pulled together something for dinner.  She got a Samsung ATIV Book 8 a year ago.  It is a fabulous machine: 64-bit Intel Core i7 (Gen 3) microprocessor, Windows 8.1 (64-bit), a 15.6″ diagonal touch screen (16:9 aspect ratio), backlit keyboard, and lots of ports including USB3.0 and HDMI, but no internal optical media drive, so we bought an external one.  She especially likes the touch screen as it makes the computer work more like her iPad2.  I decided to get the Samsung ATIV Book 6 which had very similar specifications to the Book 8.  After dinner we went to the Best Buy store in Brighton to see if they had either of these machines.  When I went to the Samsung website and looked for a store near my location the only thing that came up in SE Michigan was the Best Buy chain.

Best Buy in Brighton has some people in their computer department who seem fairly knowledgeable.  I asked about the differences between Win 8 and Win 8 Pro and got a fairly technical answer.  The Best Buy chain also has small Samsung stores-within-a-store staffed by Samsung employees.  The bottom line was this:  Best Buy did not have, and could not order, the Book 6 and had one Book 8 in the store.  It had the Gen 3 processor but the Gen 4 has been available for a while.  It became clear from the discussion that Samsung has not released an updated laptop in a while and may be getting out of the laptop business.  We also found out that Sony has sold off their computer line to someone, and that Dell has not released or announced new products in many months following a private equity buyout and their continued presence in the laptop market is highly questionable.  I had Allen, the computer sales associate, show me what they had and it came down to a choice between a Lenovo (formerly IBM) and an ASUS.  ASUS actually makes the own computers as well as the excellent Nexus tablets.  I opted for the top-of-the-line model G750JM notebook computer.  At least it was top-of-the-line in terms of what Best Buy carries in their stores.

The G750JM has a 17″ diagonal HD (1900 x 1080) matte finish screen.  It is not a touch screen, which was fine with me.  The size is big enough that I can work with spreadsheets and edit photographs.  The matte finish screen means it will work well in the bus where there is a lot of light during the day and reflections can be a problem.  While the newer 4K (retina type) displays are stunning, they are only available in the smaller 13″ screen size and are often packaged with smaller capacity, but much more expensive, solid state drives (SSD).  The G750JM has a 1 TB HDD.  The HDD includes a 16 GB SSD that is primarily used to buffer the OS.  It has 8 GB of very fast RAM that is upgradable to 32 GB should I ever feel the need (and the price of 16 GB RAM modules comes way down).  It was the only laptop in the store that could be upgraded to that much RAM.  A maximum of 16 GB was the norm.  The video/graphics is powered by an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M with 2 GB of VRAM.  The computer has built in WiFi, of course, four USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, a LAN port, a bunch of other ports, and a built-in CD/DVD player/writer.  Basically, this machine is aimed at high end gamers, but that also made it well-suited to the things I need to do with it, and it was only $50 more than the Samsung Book 8.

We unboxed the machine as soon as we got home and plugged in the battery and AC power adapter/charger to bring the battery up to full charge.  Unlike older laptop computers the new ones do not require the battery to be installed in order to operate.  I would never run it without the battery, however, as the battery provides a built in UPS in the event of a power glitch.  We powered it up and it found our various home WiFi networks.  We selected one and proceeded with the initial configuration, personalization, and registration steps.  Part way into this process a fast moving storm front brought intense lightning, thunder, and high winds so we wrapped up what we were doing, shut down, and unplugged.  Ditto for all of our sensitive (read data storage) devices.

Based on my limited exposure to the computer thus far I am very satisfied with the purchase.  It will take me some time to get it fully configured and switch over to using it as my primary computer, but with the end of support for Windows XP I need to get it done sooner rather than later.  Truthfully, setting up a new computer, especially one with a (radically) new operating system, is not at the top of my list of really fun things to do.  It is inevitable, however, and always yields significant rewards once I get over the initial hump in the learning curve.  It is also an opportunity to start clean and exercise moderation with the objective of having a more streamlined and efficient operating environment that allows me to focus on the things I really need to do.