With the new Bell Fibe system comes a new wifi network and password. I could set up a guest network for visitors, but opted again to follow Matt Haughey’s instructions to make a wifi QR code.
Thanks to Peter for first sharing this tip. His advice to get your own domain for your email prompted me to do just that, and start this website. Then I started blogging after his 2019 unconference. My advice is to follow Peter!
OK, I get it now. “Streaming something” means it flows like a clear fast-running stream, not oozes like snowmelt into a mud puddle. When you press play on something, it plays right away, doesn’t buffer. Someone emails you a 6 MB photo from their phone and it pops right up, not stops your other emails from coming in for minutes. Want to download a movie? Whoomp, there it is!
Yes, in case you didn’t hear the cheers from Lot 11 and see the pigs flying over the frozen lakes of hell, we got fibre optic cable installed today at our house here in the boonies. Fibre To The Home. FTTH. For real. I honestly never thought we would ever have a wired high speed internet service here. I assumed something like Starlink would save us, or that super 5G with 20 Gbps that is said to be coming. Even five years ago FTTH out here was laughable.
A very helpful Bell Aliant technician from Nova Scotia spent much of today running the fibre op cable in our 1,000 foot lane, trudging through 3-4 feet of snow to run it from electrical pole to pole, then laid the final few feet over the snow (!) as a temporary measure until a contractor can return after the snow melts and the frost leaves the ground to bury the cable (maybe June?). The electricity to our house goes underground from the last pole, but we never buried a conduit to run fibre. When we built our house nearly 20 years ago, there was not even an inkling that something beyond the copper telephone wire buried along our lane decades ago would be run into our house.
In quick time the technician set up the modem and wireless television receivers. We kept a landline phone, and with a few taps on his mobile phone app, our phone was connected and ringing.
By coincidence, I had more coffee today than usual, so I was already very wired, but being able to zip around on devices gave me a different kind of jittery magical buzz. I downloaded MacOS Big Sur 11.2.3 on my new M1 MacBook Air in just a few minutes, in the middle of the day, no less, while lots of other things were running in the house. Knowing that the fast connection was coming my way, I had ignored the update as it would take hours, and then usually stall.
We got Fibe TV because that is my mother’s entertainment. We’ve had ShawDirect satellite television (and its predecessor StarChoice) for probably around 25 years. It was fine because we had no other option, but every few years the dish had to be upgraded and then the television receivers, and it was expensive and not a very advanced system, so won’t really be sad to say goodbye. The Fibe TV is so fast, and live tv can be watched on any device, recorded, rewound, video on demand, and on and on. I especially won’t miss trying to clean off the dish during a raging snowstorm so my mother can watch The Price Is Right!
I was even able to get my old Apple Airport Extreme and Express to hook into the new system, so that is acting as a janky mesh system for our non-WiFi printer and some other devices.
As long as we don’t mangle the very delicate cable on the ground (I have covered it with a piece of wood until I can fashion something more ramp-like for the furnace oil delivery man to drag his filler hose over), we will be connected to the modern world in a modern way. I see what you’ve all been talking about. It’s pretty nice to be zipping around with you.
While searching on a big box retailer’s website for a binder that comes with preprinted tabs for corporate records, everything but the desired binder popped up, including, for some strange reason only known to the algorithmic gnomes, this pleasing bit of plastic:
The description assures me it is well weighted for easy dispensing, and it sure looks like a fun bit of kit, but as I’ve decided I’ve contributed far more than my lifetime’s allotment to the non-biodegradable burden on Mother Earth, I will just appreciate that someone thought of it, and also chose the perfect catalogue number to boot.
I’ve used this Instructable a few times to revive temperamental remote control buttons, and it is a very satisfying and easy job. Getting the plastic case apart is usually the most difficult part and just takes a bit of patience.
I fixed our DVD player remote yesterday and was surprised to see the original batteries from 2006 were still installed. They feel very light (7 grams less than a Duracell), and look like cheapies, but must be the best batteries ever made.
Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7 screwed up my ability to use our HP LaserJet 1200 printer last fall. Using it as a generic printer was fine until yesterday, when I wanted to print envelopes and no amount of reformatting worked.
Seems Apple revoked certificates at HP’s request (whatever that means, other than trouble), thereby screwing up lots of other printers. Thankfully a solution was found.
New printer drivers are available here, but make sure you run the HP Uninstaller first or scary popups will continue to haunt you.
I’ve been using the OS version of the RSS feed reader Reeder for a long time. I probably would have used the iOS version more if I could have easily synced the feeds between devices, but I would have had to set up another account to do that and I just couldn’t be bothered to figure that out.
The latest version of both apps now support iCloud syncing, and it works perfectly. Reeder was stuck at version 3 for a long time and it looked like it might just fade away, but there have been two updates in the past year or so. A lovely simple app.
As our home internet is through a Bell Aliant wired connection, location services on websites can be either scarily accurate (right over our house) or humourously wonky (Kensington, Summerside, Tignish, all dozens of kilometres away).
Today the weather widget on my iPad shows me as being in Halifax Parish, which is true, but I would guess 99% of Halifax Parish residents would not know that’s where they live. Samuel Holland divided Epekwitk into counties and parishes on his 1765 map, and Lots 8-12 were Halifax Parish.
My guess is you would have to go back to the 1800s to find this term being commonly used for this area, so how did the bots grab onto it and thrust it into today?
I printed some meeting minutes on our HP LaserJet 1200 printer last evening. This faithful 16-year-old workhorse sits in Steven’s office and has printed 39,592 pages, with only 110 mispicks or jams. l gave it more RAM a couple of years ago, clean and dust it, sing it lullabies.
This morning I had to print a poster for a bake sale. Same MacBook Pro, same network, same printer, same same same…but no printing. The print job would go to the queue, show it was printing, the job would disappear as if it had printed, and nothing would happen, no lights, no movement, nada. I plugged the printer directly into my MBP and still no luck. Meanwhile, Steven’s older MacBook connected as normal. Well.
I opened every setting I could find and fiddled in dark corners of my computer I had no business being in. An online search leads me to believe that no one in the history of the online world seems to have ever had this exact thing happen, or perhaps they expired with frustration before they could write about it. Given how many different types of printer/computer configurations are out there, and that this is ancient tech connected to current tech, it’s not a surprise I had to find the answer on my own.
I finally found a pretty simple solution: in System Preferences>Printers and Scanners, I just added the 1200 as a new printer and chose something called “Generic PostScript Printer” settings instead of “HP LaserJet 1200” (“Generic PCL Printer” seemed to work just as well). Hey presto, printing resumed.
I bought my first computer in 1992, along with a 14.4k modem. In those 28 years, I’ve had two desktop computers (a Compaq with a huge 100MB hard drive and a G4 iMac in Bondi Blue) and four laptops (my first computer, a Sanyo without a graphics card, two iBooks and my current MacBook Pro). I have had only two printers: one ink-guzzling Canon inkjet, and now our dear 1200, who has been with me for more than half my computing life. Now that 1200 is a teenager, I guess it’s allowed a tantrum!
I knew my new iPad would take better photos than my ancient iPad 2, but the ease of taking an excellent, well-balanced photo every single time makes using my Canon 6D now seem cumbersome and pointless. Wide angle, portrait, 4K video, it does it all equally well and effortlessly.
I took over the volunteer webmaster position for our community website when the previous person moved back to the US a few years ago. He was a coder and I am not, but he assured me I could learn all the PHP and HTML and ABCs easily enough. He was overly optimistic!
I managed to update the website he created a few times by copying and editing bits of code but, to be honest, the site changed so infrequently I had to relearn each time I made changes, and I wasn’t enjoying the experience.
Last year I figured out how to make a basic WordPress site and built a new community site. Today I messed something up and now need to restore the site using a backup I thankfully downloaded. Unfortunately this is my Internet connection speed right now:
The file is 575 MB, so I think a trip to Summerside (45 kilometres away) to grab some wifi will be in order next week, and fingers and toes crossed the backup works.