My (Early) Review of the Kindle
A couple of weeks ago I got the Kindle 2 (Affiliate Link FTW
Looking for wireless suggestions
I have to say - I love "abusing" my own blog for technical support. I get the best help here so I hope folks don't mind me doing it again. Yesterday my MacBook Pro started having issues connecting to my wireless network. It couldn't connect to the signal at all. My wife's MacBook though had no trouble. This has happened before - and typically a reboot and a power cycle of the router does the trick. This time though it didn't work. My MBP hasn't been able to connect for 24 hours. I tried removing the wireless security - no go. My wife's machine is still connected - but what is odd is that about every ten minutes or so the signal gets real weak. (The router is about 10 feet away, no walls in between, etc.)
So - this sounds like the hardware is just about to die. Right? Should I just pick up a new one today? Have I said before how much I hate networking?
Speaker recommendations?
So my Altec Lansing THX speakers which lasted 10 years seem to be dead. The LCD is blinking and the power button refuses to turn the speakers off. And of course - no sound is coming out. I've double checked the connections, rebooted, and unplugged/replugged in the speaker/subwoofer, but I think they have gone off to the speaker graveyard in the sky. 10 years is pretty good so I'm not too disappointed, but I'm going crazy without hearing my tunes.
Can someone recommend a brand name I can pick up at my local Best Buy/Circuit City? My old set were fully surround sound with a subwoofer, even THX certified, but to be honest, I really don't need anything high end. Just something nice and simple.
p.s. And before someone recommends me opening up the old speakers - please remember I'm a hardware wuss. ;)
HP Printer and the Tone of Death
Now this is a weird one. (It must be a week for hardware issues.) Last night we had a particularly violent storm roll through. At one point there was a bolt of lightning that either hit the house, or hit pretty darn close. I did a quick visual inspection (inside of course and peering through a window, I'm a big chicken when it comes to storms), and saw nothing amiss. After checking on my kids I then checked on my office. Nothing at all was wrong. Everything was working just fine.
About an hour later I was going to bed when I heard a "tone" from upstairs. Almost like a loud dial tone. I thought that maybe the lightning strike had caused a surge and broken my UPS. I didn't understand why I had not heard the tone earlier, but shoot, what do I know about UPS devices.
Turns out though it was the print. The status message in front was going crazy, and it was emitting a loud, very stable tone. At one point the status message on the LCD mentioned self test, but I just yanked the power out and everything went quiet.
I checked the UPS again - no problems. My Mac? No problems. So I went to bed. This morning I got up and plugged the printer back in. The tone returned immediately. This time the status message wasn't going crazy, it was going through a normal self test. I thought maybe the tone was just a warning, so I let the self test finish up, and when it was done, it went back to normal.
Except for the tone.
I turned the printer off - but the tone stayed on. I turned it back on (and again, the printer seemed perfectly happy), but the tone stayed. I can only get rid of the tone by unplugging the machine. I didn't try - but I'm convinced a print job would have worked fine.
So I did a quick google, and everything I search for seems to find results about the noise of printing, not some random high volume tone of death.
Anyone seen something like this before with a printer?
Installing Windows on a Dell machine with SATA? Check this tip...
Just a quick post to point out a link to tech spot:
Error Message:Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your system
This finally solved my problem of Windows not being able to find my hard drives. Specifically this post. I'm still not 100% sure why this fixed things, but I was able to get Windows Server 2003 installed at least. (Now I just need to get some drivers for my Ethernet card.)
Recommend a good UPS?
Well, I just lost an email I had been working on for the past 2 hours due to one second power outage. (Louisiana's power grid is made of swiss cheese.) Can someone recommend a good UPS?
p.s. And yes, Thunderbird does have an auto-save option. I would have assumed it was turned on by default. Guess what - it isn't. :)
Network Help
So, my readers know that I'm not the best hardware guy. The same can be said for my networking skills. I have (what is to me) a complex network setup here at my home. It begins with a cable modem upstairs. This is connected to a simple hub. One of the ports goes to a powerline ethernet bridge. Downstairs, I have another powerline ethernet bridge that is connected to a wireless hub. Why the bridge? Wireless simply doesn't work well when it's directly connected to the cable modem upstairs.
In general, this works just fine. My wireless is capped by the powerline networking, which has a top speed much lower than my wireless, but the point is I have great coverage where I need it - in the living room and the back yard.
This worked great for many months. In the past few weeks though, something odd has happened. All of a sudden my laptop, or my wife's, can't use the Internet anymore. The connection to the wireless hub is perfect. When my laptop is down, I can still ping her laptop. In fact, this morning, when my laptop stopped connecting, hers was working just fine. I thought maybe I had accidentally used the same IP (I'm not using DHCP on either of my hubs), but that wasn't the case.
As far as I can see - the issue is totally random. I'll get knocked off for anywhere from 10-30 minutes, and than all of a sudden it works again.
Any ideas? I can say that I've done one thing "wrong" according to the docs for my wireless router. When it talked about connecting it to another hub, it said two things. First - change gateway mode to router mode. I did that. Secondly, it said connect the ethernet cable to the Internet port. I did NOT do this. Instead, I hooked it up to one of the ports. However, as I said above, things worked fine for many, many months. When I "fix" it by changing the ethernet port, it doesn't help. Although maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance.
Anyway, does this sound familiar to anyone?
Death Wish for a Printer
So, I'm about to ready to take a hammer to my HP OfficeJet 600. For all of the following:
1) After printing 2 or 3 times, you start getting smudges. Not horrible smudges, but you NEVER get a perfect print out. The official docs at HP has like a 10 step process involving water and coffee filters.
Yes, coffee filters.
I've never heard of a printer needing coffee filters to clean itself.
2) My color catridge was low on ink. On startup, the printer DEMANDS that you insert a new cartridge. You can't say no. You can't say don't worry about it. You can't say, "Hey, all I plan on doing is a bunch of simple text pages with no pictures, it's ok that it's not in color." No, you have to physically remove the cartridge and place it back in.
3) And then trick #2 stops working. Now I can't print. Period. Even though I have plenty of black ink, I can't print.
So... can someone recommend a good fax capable printer?
My new toy: Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra
Well, after waiting for a few weeks, my new MP3 player (err, my FIRST MP3 player), the Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, arrived yesterday via UPS. So far, I'm pretty darn happy. The sound quality is excellent, even with the ear buds, and it's even better with the nicer Sony headphones I had in my office. The UI is a bit tricky at first, but I think I will get used to it. I also had a few quirks transferring files, but now things seem ok. (I'm got about 60% of my 40+ gigs already transferred.) Sometime later I'll test it in the car with the radio broadcaster and see how nice it works.
IPod's Dirty Little Secret
Gizmodo has an interesting post about IPod's main drawback - the battery. Apparently they only last a year and a half, and Apple charge 225(!!) for a replacement. You can get a whole new player (well, non-IPod) for that. I'm happy I decided against the IPod in favor of one from Creative (which I'll blog about as soon as it arrives).
Edited - So it looks like the situation was a bit overblown. You can get cheaper replacements elsewhere. See some of the comments in the link.