Zinio down?
Posted on July 30, 2004
Filed Under Misc. | 3 Comments
Is it just me, or did “Zinio”:http://www.zinio.com fall off the face of the earth? I can’t pull up their site or download the new issue of “Macworld”:http://www.macworld.com even though I did get an email about it being ready for download a few days ago. I have a feeling there’s something wrong on their end.
Squeezing out the bandwidth
Posted on July 30, 2004
Filed Under Misc. | Leave a Comment
I wanted to take 10 minutes this morning to get the Tivo on the network, and it ended up being a 2 hour adventure. I had enough of the mountain of cable mess behind my desk. I needed to add a switch because I was out of ports. So this morning, I unplugged *everything* and started over. Still a little wild on the floor but I minimized the mess on top and more important, I can reach the port panel on the wall.
In addition to the new Tivo, we also signed up for “Vonage.”:http://www.vonage.com Our phone bill averages over $100 a month, most of which are services and fees. We’ve been thinking about VoIP for a while, and decided to give it a try. Can’t beat $30 a month for unlimited local and long distance with voicemail, caller ID and call waiting included. I also love that we can configure everything about the service through the Internet. We could have gone with “Optimum Voice”:http://www.optimumvoice.com/index.jhtml but that requires us to change our phone number. With Vonage we’re able to keep the number we’ve had for the past 8 years. We added a 2nd absolutely-no-anything except local incoming/outgoing phone line for $8 a month for our alarm system. Everything else, including Tivo, now goes through our cable modem. I want to be sure I’m getting the most bandwidth through it that I can. I know that the cable wiring from the outside is excellent. We had Cablevision here when we redid the house and it has a dedicated drop that’s never split. The sound quality with Vonage is okay, but not crystal clear. Especially when I’m doing stuff online at the same time. On Monday I’m going to trade out our ancient 3Com “Sharkfin” modem for a Motorola Surfboard which is supposedly much better. Cablevision was very accommodating when I called. The router is a “Netgear MR314 802.11b wireless router & 4 port switch”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005NOKT/002-8249728-6428863?v=glance (so old, it’s not even on Netgear’s site anymore). I just added a “Netgear 8 port switch”:http://www.netgear.com/products/prod_details.php?prodID=132 as Eric’s computer, my G5, my PC, the kid’s Mac & the Tivo make five needed ports. The range on the MR314 is okay, not great. My PDA can’t pick up the signal from the bedroom (more about that later).
Any recommendations/suggestions about wireless routers? I haven’t shopped for one in about 2 years.
A note to my USB peripherals
Posted on July 30, 2004
Filed Under Macintosh | Leave a Comment
Yes Wacom tablet, Apple Studio Display 21″, keyboard, Epson scanner, Logitech microphone, bluetooth adapter and APC UPS, I’m talking to you. Memory stick reader, you’re not plugged in right now but listen up.
Look, I know my G5 is the neatest thing and it has tons of power. But it only has room for 3 of you. Some of you are just going to have to be happy hanging out elsewhere. You don’t think the keyboard is powerful enough but Mr. Mouse here isn’t complaining, is he? Look, I have a gorgeous Apple Cinema Display 23″ who was nice enough to get its USB power without needing a USB port with 2 slots for you to play in. And see here? Even the old Studio Display has 4! How about the nice little Belkin USB hub *with its own power cord.* Why is that not good enough? Don’t look away from me Mr. Wacom! *You* are the worst of them all and won’t even turn on your nice little amber light unless you’re directly plugged into the back of the computer. No, I won’t go and plug you into the Dell computer even though it has 6 slots and I’m only using 3 of them. That’s not the point, is it?
Tivo!
Posted on July 26, 2004
Filed Under Misc. | 4 Comments
So hubby sees my blog and after laughing about it, tells me that of course he got the hint weeks ago (was I _that_ obvious?) and was planning to pick one up this week. We were running errands yesterday and as patience is not a virtue of mine when it comes to technology, we stopped and picked up a 80 hour unit for a decent price. Not as cheap as the refurbished ones, but not bad for a new one I think.
I decided to put it on the bedroom TV. First of all, because installation would be much easier without running wires around the entertainment center and relocating everything. Second, I didn’t want to miss out on something I wanted to record because the kids were watching something else. Cablevision is coming out with a PVR for their digital cable service so we’ll probably get that for the den.
Even though the guided set up warned it would take 4-8 hours until I could set up wishlists, season passes, etc. it was ready in about 3 hours. I set up a season pass for Amazing Race & Big Brother (completely stupid, I know) and Eric set one for Last Coming Standing so now Tivo thinks I want to watch A Simple Life and Extreme Dating. Um no, I don’t think so. 
I found “this page”:http://www.sethb.com/TiVo/ which if you stroll down you can see a tip for enabling 30 second skip. Essential for getting past commercials quickly.
Now I just have to get the USB to Ethernet adapter to put the Tivo on our home network for updates. We’re getting Vonage soon and updates won’t work through the phone once the switch-over happens. I read the “TiVo Community”:http://www.tivocommunity.com forums and learned that if a choice is possible, a wired solution is faster than wireless. When we were redoing the house I made the decision to put cable/RF and Cat-5 Ethernet ports in every bedroom & the den. Very happy with that decision right now.
Furl!
Posted on July 26, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
First I found “Tasks”:http://www.usetasks.com which keeps my to-do lists in a central place that I can get to from any Internet connection, now I’ve fallen in love with “Furl.”:http://www.furl.net
Browser bookmarks are great for those sites that you visit regularly. But often I find my bookmarks are full of articles & quick tips. An article here on how to get around an IE 5 rendering bug, an article there about a TiVo hack, a neat image from a stock photo house that I may want to use on a future job, etc. And then, I have the hassle of trying to keep my bookmarks organized between 3 computers and a PDA. Enter “Furl.”:http://www.furl.net It’s free (for now, at least) and with a Javascript bookmarklet it’s one click and the page you’re looking at is saved. Even better, like IE’s old Scrapbook feature it caches the content at the time the page is saved as well as retaining the link. So if the page is bombarded with traffic or changes for whatever reason, you still have the content that was there when you saved it.
The search engine is fantastic. You can “Google” your saved articles so even if they’re not filed perfectly, it’s a snap to find that article you saved a few weeks ago about how to make better grayscale images from Photoshop.
You can share your “furled” links, generate a RSS feed of them, import/export them or keep them private. I don’t think I trust any pages to it that I absolutely must keep private, but for everyday links that I want to remember but not necessarily visit often (which is 90% of what I want to save) it has been quite a find. No pun intended.
