Category Archives: Computers

Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things

The PolyBlog
August 17 2016

If you have read any of the earlier blog entries about my site (Version 2.0 of my website…, Version 2.1 of my website…, Version 2.2 (alpha) of my website…, Version 2.3 of my website…), you’ll know that I struggle with some of the features on the sites from time to time. Tweaking this, tweaking that.

Often it is because one feature of the site works REALLY well, and draws me in a certain direction, only to later have that feature either be less important relative to other features, or just stop working well. Sometimes it is an issue with the hosting company.

I didn’t do separate blog entries for version 3.0 where I basically had WordPress all up and running, or version 3.1 where it was a combination of two WordPress sites, one Piwigo subsite for photos and videos, or even version 3.2 where I merged it into 1 WP site and one photo subsite. Things were working pretty well, and I had transitioned over time from Spelunking Web Design (too little bandwidth and storage) to Netfirms (solid for a while until I ran into some config issues with storage) to Greengeeks (which let me host all my pix and integrated well with Google Storage for video). Usually when I have transitioned from one site to another, it has been either my needs outgrowing the basic offerings or the costs associated with my needs being much cheaper elsewhere. Each hoster has slightly different rules and offerings, and as my needs changed, I switched to keep costs down on what are basically personal sites with no commercial value.

This past year though, going back to February, I’ve had a small battle with Greengeeks. Things were going along mostly fine, after I had switched to them last fall (Cutting the cord – Part 5 – Internet hosting). Then, suddenly, things weren’t fine.

The beginning of the end of a relationship

I had consolidated my previous two WordPress sites — polywogg.ca and thepolyblog.ca — into a single site (polywogg.ca and redirected thepolyblog there too), and with the previous focus of what the two sites were about, I was able to more cleanly integrate them. It just made sense at the time for me to have everything together, no need to separate out “personal” from more “professional” musings, and separate menu options to help keep things sorted.

But then I noticed a problem in February with something rather small initially. I was running a “to do” list app on the site…well, actually three of them. One for work, one for personal, one for “other”. Plus a calendar that my wife and I could share. Like with hosting my photos on the site, it seemed to me that if I had a whole site to myself, why would I use other sites, commercial or otherwise, to host my info?

One day I went to do something on the to-do list and the subsite wouldn’t load. Dead. Fatal errors out the wazoo. This was odd, it had been working the week before just fine. Two other lists were also “dead”. And the calendar. WordPress loaded fine, but the look was a bit off. I checked the photo site and it too was acting weird for layout. Connected to the help desk, asked a few questions, and they located the problem almost immediately. They had auto-upgraded my site from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

If you’re a layperson, you might think, “Sweet! Free upgrade!”. If you’re a little more knowledgeable about sites, you might think, “They upgraded you automatically?”. And if you’re way more hardcore than me, you likely are thinking, “WTF??? Why would they upgrade you automatically? Did they tell you so you could test your config? What kind of hoster would change your site without warning, notice or testing?”. Guess which camp I fell into.

The upgrade broke my todo list installs and the calendar as they weren’t 7.0 compatible. WP’s core is 7.0 compatible, but all the plugins apparently were not. Hard to tell, precisely, but WP was a bit off. PiwigoPress, that I was using for my photos, also didn’t completely like the upgrade tweak in the background, but I’ll come back to that.

They switched me back to 5.6, lists seemed fine, calendar loaded, everything else worked, it seemed like “no harm, no foul”. At first. Then about a week later, I started noticing my photos didn’t seem to load properly. The layout screen for a gallery, for example, would load, but not all the photos. Some were just placeholder symbols in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer/Edge. Definitely a server issue if all three were treating it the same. But it wasn’t consistent. Sometimes everything would load fine. Home seemed fine, work seemed more intermittent. Then I tried it on my tablet, worked great. Decided it was a temporary bandwidth issue, moved on.

Then I uploaded a batch of new photos, and all hell broke loose on my site. Pics wouldn’t render at all, any format, any location, any connection. It just did NOT want to load right at all. Then some would, others never. I tweaked, I checked, I tweaked, I checked. No idea what was wrong. I hadn’t changed anything in almost two months, but now, suddenly nothing worked? I went back to Greengeeks support to see if anything else had happened? Nope.

The larger investigation begins

I thought it might be the PHP version, as they were going to phase out lower support. So I transitioned all my lists to a new app/site temporarily and then from there more recently to one called TickTick. Accessible from work, comes with app, updates in real-time reliably between Andrea’s phone and mine (we share shopping lists for groceries, for example, so she can make the list and I can buy the stuff), good toggle options to switch things on and off. I moved our calendar to Sunrise, which then was closing shop, and now to Google, since we can both run reliable apps to synch. So I was down to just WP and Piwigo, and they seem to like 7.0 reasonably fine.

Yet wonkiness remained. Over time, I narrowed a feature down that wasn’t working in Piwigo. Photo conversion wasn’t working right. It didn’t seem to be adjusting the size, and the rendering was taking forever.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the switching from 5.6 to 7.0, and then back, was not a simple switch. The switchback was actually a complete reset of some sort. Features in PHP setup that had been “on”, like one called GDIMAGE and another like IMAGEMAGICK, were now switched off by default. Now that is not something I would ever play with — once I get the initial setup right, there would be no reason for me to go into that extremely technical side of the configuration. It’s almost like going in and editing the Registry in Windows. You *might* have to do it for something specific, but rarely manually. And I found the default change by accident.

Why would they matter? GDIMAGE and IMAGEMAGICK are library functions for PHP (not quite the right term, but close enough) that add image conversion to the list of things PHP can do. Such as enabling Piwigo — I uploaded photos in one size, and it would convert them to other sizes so you have the thumbnail for small viewing on one type of layout, medium for another, large for a third, and then the full image (if you tell it to keep it, which I did). I had unlimited storage, and having those different sizes is supposed to make everything load better/quicker without having to do resizing on the fly.

But with them off, Piwigo wasn’t working right. It was trying, but I configured and reconfigured things out the wazoo before I found the missing libraries problem. Then I tried to put everything back to the way it had been, but things still weren’t quite right.

I started getting warnings that the server load was too high. Too high? How could that be? I had a WP site that had double-digit visitors on a good day, another that had visitors once or twice a year that I host for someone else, and a photo site that might have visitors once a month. No way could I be overloading the server. Yet the logs didn’t lie. 10K hits in a single day, most asking for pages that didn’t exist, lots of redirects, some attempts to log in. Spam attack in some ways, access attacks in others, and just a lot of pic loading. Sort of. Some of it was just Piwigo still struggling with the load to convert graphics sizes.

Greengeeks and I started a series of exchanges as we tried to nail down the problem. They, like any bad hoster, start with the premise that it’s all the user’s fault and that they didn’t do nuttin. Except they had. The original PHP switcheroo. Then, on a regular basis, they would try to help, and they would tweak a setting they thought would help. Except they would do it without telling me. I would be in the middle of testing multiple configs, resetting things, and suddenly one of my changes looked WRONG. Something that shouldn’t have caused that change. I’d undo it but the change would remain.

And I would go down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours or even days trying to figure out WHY that changed with my changes, only to find out it wasn’t my change. It was them changing background settings in the middle of my testing and not telling me. Meaning I would have to go back to the beginning and start the testing all over.

I was getting increasingly hostile about their support. Particularly after they swore it was PiwigoPress causing the problems. I finally gave access to one of the actual developers to check the config directly, something I was floored he was willing to do. I had been all over the Piwigo forums trying to find a possible cause, and then he offered to check since none of the things I was looking for should have been the problem. Everything was set properly. No issues. And Piwigo is being run on literally hundreds of thousands of installs without issue. The problem was NOT Piwigo.

I finally started to figure out what had happened. This is a bit simplistic and misleading description, but basically it was a combination of several features. WordPress liked PHP 7.0 but a security plugin within WordPress did not. Sort of. It basically changed the way it handled sub-directories — since my WP install was at the equivalent of WWW.SITE.CA, and my Piwigo was in WWW.SITE.CA/PHOTOS, the WP security plugin was trying to control the photos site too. It wasn’t designed to do that, but it wasn’t expecting virtual subdomains to be located below the main root. At least as far as I can tell. Equally, the PHP 5.6 to 7.0 to 5.6 switcheroos turned off my image processors, which sent Piwigo into a tizzy. Between the two, i.e. the image processing and the overly active security plugin, I was really struggling to find the source of the reconfiguration issue.

Adding in multiple changes without Greengeeks telling me they changed something, the problem was impossible. I couldn’t be sure my “testing” was working, and frequently it wasn’t — cuz they changed something in the middle of my efforts.

Ratcheting up to a governance issue

This seems like an odd way to describe it, but I was now dealing with a governance issue. I explicitly told them they could do diagnostics if they were helping, and identify things I might look at, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were they to make any further changes to my actual setup. They did anyway.

So I opened a ticket of complaint. Someone deleted it. Literally, it disappeared out of the tracking system. I opened two new ones — one with the same info and one to find out what happened to my original ticket. Both were deleted.

At this point, the relationship was basically toast, but I’ve paid for three years worth of hosting to get the lowest price, and while I’m willing to eat that cost (decided that upfront when I paid it), I wasn’t willing to go gently into the night. I tweeted a couple of their major customers who provided testimonials on the “greatness” that was Greengeeks, I tweeted their CEO, I tweeted their IT specialist. Suddenly people started paying attention to my tickets.

I didn’t get any better service, but they were at least paying attention. Now, separate from the pain and frustration, many of you might jump to the obvious two solutions:

  1. Kill the account, move on;
  2. Delete everything, reinstall from scratch.

I was hoping for (2) still, but there’s a small problem with that plan. I had no way of knowing that if I got it all working and installed right, another change from GG wouldn’t come along and swamp my setup. So I wanted to know how to mitigate that risk. I started asking a series of Qs of the tech group that I wanted answered sequentially so I could get to the point where I would say, “Okay, if I blow off WordPress, and reinstall, AND I blow off Piwigo and reinstall, how do we do this in the least painful way possible?”.

Backups were fine for WP as I could “reload” the database options i.e. import all the content again. However, Piwigo was now so corrupted in the install that I had no confidence the backups wouldn’t produce the same result — I needed a brand-new fresh install. And reuploading of 7000 photos! With descriptions re-added for albums, etc. Now, I have a good setup for sorting pics at home, it was easy to reupload, and I could have done a DL and new UL of the existing structure, but I figured going nuclear on my install would be easier.

About this time though I realized that I no longer trusted the host. I had transcripts from the same guy, the one I complained about, where it said “A”, then “not A”, then “A”, then “not A”, then “A” and finally “A because you told me it was A”. The guy was a lying sack of excrement. And I still had no accountability response from GG to say how the guy was allowed to delete my complaints in the system, nor were my outstanding issues addressed.

It was time to break up

I started shopping for a new host. I talked to a few, explained some of my problems / frustrations, told them what I needed, and what I was willing to spend. I zeroed in on WebHostingCanada, partly as when I asked some technical questions, they jumped immediately to the problems it took me 3 months to solve on my own. The guy told me up front that one of their cheaper options wouldn’t be enough as the hosting industry didn’t always truly tell the right stats on certain things, essentially telling me that while it says “x”, it’s partly throttled (which isn’t advertised). The exact problem I seemed to be having with GG and which 3 months of testing had revealed but they wouldn’t admit. He even made me laugh at one point…I told him the specs for something technical in my current setup and he said, “Oh, that’s so sad” i.e. that the setup was so limited.

The transition didn’t go completely smoothly, but it did “go”. But that’s the basis for another post.

In terms of Greengeeks, I left my hosting account active for the remaining 2 years — I’m hosting another site through there, bare minimal load, and if their server has problems, it won’t affect me. At the end of the two years, I’ll transition to a site I already have.

While I’m now on my fourth hoster in 18 years, and my third one in 3, I’ve made some other config issues which should help. And I’m still paying less than I was previously, and getting more power. I can (hopefully) live with that.

A guy who should be on Kick Starter

The PolyBlog
April 17 2016

I see lots of posts around the ‘net about the power of the Raspberry Pi. People who have turned it into a TV turner, remote control for a 100 different things, powered robots, tons of things out there. If you don’t know what a Raspberry Pi is, it’s basically a little tiny computer. It has the power of a high-end IBM AT, maybe a little further than that, but you can add just about anything to it. And it’s tiny, runs on batteries, so it’s the perfect toy for someone who wants to design a DIY device at home. Robotics and/or hardware courses in tech colleges often use them for early coursework by students to go crazy on their own inventions.

One thing that pops up frequently is someone who has used it to run an emulator program for old game console games — Nintendo, in particular, is the popular one with games from the original NES, Nintendo Cube, N64, and the whole series of Game Boy versions. The emulator software basically runs what used to be loaded on hardware in the console systems, and thus you can “load” game modules (called ROMs) into the emulator and it’s as if you popped the hardware cartridge into the original console. A software emulator of the console + the software of the game cartridge = brand new form of retro-style gaming.

Emulators have been around for years, and over time they started to “merge” into some key versions. Some died out just with the original designer losing interest, other times it’s because someone came along with a better version. However, one of the big developments in retro gaming was the ability to create a “governance” emulator that loads sub-emulators — which meant you could have ONE software program (like Emulation Station, shown in the video, or RetroArch, another popular one) and once you load it, you can add a bunch of sub-emulators for all the different systems. It’s still a bit tech heavy, i.e. the novice user might have a challenge, but there are walk-through videos and tip guides to tell you how to configure it all. Most people run the emulators on PC desktops, but there are versions that run on other gaming systems, some that run on Raspberry Pi, Android, iOS; you name it, there’s an emulator version.

This guy? He put it all together into a retro-style Game Boy, upgrading and tweaking as he went:

  • Raspberry Pi;
  • Original Game Boy box;
  • 3.5″ composite display;
  • Added two extra NES buttons (for X&Y functions — later games needed more buttons to differentiate commands);
  • Original headphone jack which still disables external speaker when plugged in;
  • USB port for keyboad, mouse, whatever, because why not, really?;
  • Micro-USB for charging;
  • Mini-HDMI to go out to the TV;
  • Added two small buttons on the back to handle Left-Right sub-toggles (again for the later games);
  • Kept battery compartment;
  • 2000 mAH lithium polymer battery;
  • USB hub inside had two ports, and he was only using one, so he added Bluetooth; and,
  • Screen buttons for contrast.

Now that’s pretty impressive, all on its own, and then he went to the genius level. He took an old Nintendo Game Boy cartridge that used to slide into the back for the games, broke it apart, adapted and modified it, and now it works with an SD to MicroSD card adapter! Which of course meant he had to then modify the cartridge reader in the Game Boy itself to read the SD card too.

Now he has a cartridge that goes in the Game Boy with the ability to load anything he wants off an micro SD card. In this case, Retro Pi, Emulation Station, and a bunch of emulators under the Emulation Station system. Voila, instant portable gaming system loaded with hundreds of retro games across multiple platforms.

If it wasn’t for the fact that ROMs exist in a semi-grey zone for legality, this guy could be rocking Kickstarter. He’s freakin’ brilliant. Lots of people are doing pieces of this, but he pulled it all together and rocked the house with awesome quality and design.

Photobook fun

The PolyBlog
February 1 2016

So I’ve been spending a lot of time uploading old photos to my website, and now that I have a healthy base to work with, I’m working on some photobooks. Nothing too “fancy”, mostly just “year in review” type books.

I’ve used Shutterfly before, and while it puts out a decent book, I have two reservations with it. First, because they aren’t produced in Canada, you end up spending a heavy chunk of cash on shipping. Not exorbitant, just enough to notice. Price goes higher the faster you want it, as it would be anywhere.

Second, and a little more vague, the photo places often ship them overseas for production to Asia, and there is little regulation for either labour or the production methods used in a lot of the hot spots. We recently had a canvas print shipped from Malaysia (by Photobook Canada, not Shutterfly) and it came in smelling like musty canvas — turned out it was a lacquer they used on the finishing. There’s no way it would be allowed to be shipped in that condition in Canada, would never pass the sniff test, literally. The print stunk bad enough I had to put in the garage for a few days to air out. It’s relatively fine now, but not the most reassuring of experiences. And Shutterfly uses the same printing options/places.

On the plus side, they are reliable, they have regular sales, their coupons are stackable (i.e. 30% off for a sale, $10 off on books, free shipping etc. — most sites would make you choose one, Shutterfly usually lets you apply all of them to your order at once). I recently did a full year in review book with them, haven’t received it yet, but it has a LOT of extra pages (80+, when standard is 40) and price is about $75 in the end, including shipping, etc. Not great, not horrendous. None of the extra bells and whistles. And their software has a couple of painful omissions (an ability to duplicate or move pages, for instance). A solid 8 / 10 for sure on quality, software and price.

Mixbooks is the big blogger darling in the U.S. at present, with lots of people saying it is 10/10 for quality and software, maybe 8/10 for price. They are competitive with the other companies, but coupons are not stackable and their sales are not as frequent or as deep. I found the software good, but unwieldy at times. In the end, I bailed before completing an order.

Photobook Canada is one that everyone likes to say is better because it is supposedly Canadian, but the stats on their production in Canada are extremely limited. Most of their cheap stuff they farm overseas, maybe they used to do their stuff and prints here in Canada but looks like it is all off-shore now. The smelly canvas came from Malaysia, two calendars came from Malaysia. A small astronomy book I did awhile ago came from Asia somewhere. I’ve just ordered a small book as a gift, and I suspect it will also come from Malaysia. Software is not as good as Mixbooks or Shutterfly, but functional, and their cheap options are good for price at least, if not enduring quality.  Their other fantastic feature, in my view, is that their software is 100% downloadable. You can build the entire book on your own computer and just connect when you’re done. It takes a while for everything to upload at that point, but it’s better and faster than working in the cloud the whole time. I used them for the calendars (and make a rookie error with them) and the canvas print (that was initially smelly and is okay now), but I should also give them credit for the fact that my vouchers had expired (I didn’t realize they did that when I bought them last January), and they extended them with no trouble at all. Nice.

I checked out a bunch of other sites this week too.

Shoppers Drug Mart has a good basic option, software seems a little limited, and prices are okay but competitive. Their big “savings” offering is that it is free shipping to their local stores (I discovered their options earlier this week when sending some simple prints to a remote store). However, the software crashed completely in basic options working with both Firefox and Microsoft Edge. I’m not willing to invest any time in buggy software.

Uniprix seemed okay, nothing flashy. Basic software, prices were okay, seemed more geared to the pamphlet-style softcovers than some of the other bigger companies. I don’t know that I gave them a truly adequate test though.

Loblaws was a surprise for a couple of reasons. First, I didn’t know they had a photobook option — it strikes me if they were kicking butt, everyone would know about them. Second, their software is the SAME as Shoppers Drug Mart. Whoever is their backend supplier has given them the same front-end interface, with only minor differences. Seemed good, not as big and powerful as Shutterfly, Mixbooks or Photobook Canada, but decent enough. I even found some default templates I liked. But here’s the weird part…I chose a special template with some contemporary features i.e. not everything was blocky, squared designs. About half the default pages had a bit of a scrap-book feel to them, a common design feature. Except when I then went to the layouts feature to see what the options were for additional pages, none of those scrap-book layouts were available to select. All the rest were blocky, perfectly squared line ups. No obvious option to copy the existing templates either, unless I wanted to copy a page element at a time. But then it got even weirder…I chose a default template, added it to a page, and the photo sizes were completely wrong. I had the book set for 9×12″ size, and it put photos down as if they were going in a 6×6″ book. In other words, just part of the page…and no option to drag them as a group to make them bigger. You could manually adjust each and every photo individually. Nuh-uh, no way. That would be incredibly time consuming if I add some 50-60 additional pages, all of which required custom layouts. However, I have discovered that you CAN duplicate the original pages, just a bit of extra manual work to do it, kind of counter-intuitive.

Lots of people have used Costco and while I admire their commitment, the software was the worst one of all. Slow, few options, etc. If you had, say, 75 photos, and you wanted it to pre-populate them into a book template, it might be okay. But 10 minutes in and I’d already found 3 things I couldn’t do in the format. Not an option. Most importantly they had a lower limit on number of pages allowed. I was two-thirds of the way through a photobook when I came to a screeching halt — I couldn’t add anything else, and couldn’t copy the project to another project (I would have just split it into two books).

Henry’s has a site that has the same back-end as Loblaws and Shoppers Drug Mart (same themes, etc.) but a completely different interface. Looks okay, but it won’t actually let me load any photos from the album into the layout to try it. It didn’t want to sync with other sites either. Kind of hard to do a photo book if you can’t get photos into the layout! Fail.

I think I’m going to give the Loblaw’s one another go. We’ll see if it works out. Might try UniPrix after that, based on a friend’s recommendation. In the end, I’m likely to end up back with Shutterfly, but it won’t be for a lack of trying to find a Canadian supplier.

Windows 10, networks and printers

The PolyBlog
January 24 2016

I’m not usually against free upgrades, but Windows 10 has been a costly one, albeit only partly in money. Awhile back, I ran into a problem with printers after the initial Win 10 setup and it took me 2 hours of trial and error, and a sudden inspiration / brain fart to try something that worked. The simple explanation is I have a router, 3 computers, and 3 printers. Two were running Win10, 1 was running Win7. No big deal, except the printers are all wired to 1 computer. If that sounds odd, it shouldn’t — one was an old laser printer that only had a parallel port style connector, one was a newer colour model but couldn’t connect to my old router by USB or Ethernet (the router didn’t support it), and a label maker that works best when directly connected to a single PC.

With the upgrade, all hell broke loose. I could get the 3 PCs to talk to one another, and for awhile the main PC could print, but nothing else could. Then the others could, but not to the laser printer, just the ones connected by USB (that should have been a bigger clue). After fiddling for 2 hours, I was about to throw in the towel when I realized if the printer wasn’t the problem, and the printer driver wasn’t the problem, could there be a problem with the PORT driver? Not usually, that’s a pretty basic driver of input and output, but I searched in the bowels of my setup, found the problem and voila! My parallel printer started printing, and everyone could print. Great!

Then after another Windows update in early December, I lost my laser printer again. No problem, I thought, I knew how to fix it. Three clicks later, I found out that everything was still already set properly. Another hour or two, no more success. I couldn’t print to that printer no matter what. Didn’t help Andrea was in the middle of finishing her courses, but we muddled through and I was trying to figure out what to do.

One of the “saving” graces when I upgraded to Win 10 was that it said, quite clearly, that if you didn’t like it, you could downgrade back later. So once Andrea’s courses were all done, I proceeded to try the downgrade. Not an option. WTF? Apparently, buried in the small print was a note that it was an option for 30 days, but users were told to note that keeping a second copy of everything on their system was using up a lot of extra disk space so Windows helpfully deleted it after 30 days. You know, to help free up space. Would have been nice to have some sort of question or prompt at that point to say, “Hey, it’s been 30 days, and after this, downgrading won’t be an option anymore, are you sure?” Because I would have said “NO! I’m not sure! Ask me again in 30 days!”. But no, it just deleted it. On both systems. Now, sure, I have legit copies of Win 7/8, so I could wipe everything off, reinstall from scratch, put everything back the way it was, but I’m going to get forced to upgrade at some point anyway when MS Office or some such program doesn’t work on the old Windows anyway, and at the rate Microsoft is actively trying to kill old versions, that won’t be as long perhaps as most users hope.

So I accepted that the 20-year-old work horse of a printer was probably headed for the scrap heap and ordered a new network-compatible, double-sided, laser printer. Decent printer, decent price, free shipping with Amazon (I’m really enjoying the free shipping from them on my Prime membership). It arrived, and I hesitated to hook it up. I just knew there was every possibility that it wouldn’t go smoothly, and if it didn’t, I might take a hammer to it. My coping energy has been down, and is only slowly building back up since Christmas with some careful internal techniques.

However, in the meantime, just this past week in fact, Andrea upgraded her PC to Windows 10. And suddenly I couldn’t see her PC anymore, she couldn’t print, blah blah blah.

I found the problem right away, and it is the same problem that I think has underlaid some of the challenges from the beginning. When I upgraded my PC, my PC’s “name” was in the form of “Joe” (as in Joe Computer). Windows 10 however has a much stronger tie to the Microsoft online accounts, so the upgrade changed my PC name to “Joe Computer”. Now here’s the fun part — Windows 10 apparently doesn’t seem to want to admit that Joe Computer and Joe are the same computer or that Joe ever existed at all. Occasionally, when I try to do something deep in the bowels, Windows tries to tell me that Joe Computer doesn’t have the rights to do that because Joe didn’t give JC the rights. I over-ride, we keep going, all good. Except when it comes to networks.

From the beginning, Windows has told me that I’m connected to something called Network 7 i.e. a network created with Windows 7 by Joe. And that Joe created a Homegroup on said network. That I can join if I know the password. Here’s the thing — I *do* know the password, but when I try to connect I think it wants Joe to say Okay, but Joe doesn’t exist anymore. Or rather Joe Computer is asking itself, and it gets confused. It works for Andrea’s computer and the laptop, but it tells me I’m on the network already and I can join but it won’t confirm me. I followed all the helpful/unhelpful advice on Microsoft’s community forums, and nada.

Tonight, I went drastic. I disconnected from the network. I removed all the network settings I could find. It told me to do this for all three PCs, and then reconnect just 1 and create a new network + homegroup. Except that when I went to do Andrea’s PC second, it said, “Would you like to create a homegroup?”. Wtf? It wouldn’t let me do it before…oh right, my PC is now off. Joe and Joe Computer are both GONE. And her PC knows the proper name of my network, not “network 7” that I’m not sure exists anymore (it does, but I’ll get to that).

So I create a new homegroup. Looks perfect. Go to the laptop, and there is Andrea’s homegroup. Which I join, no problem, also set perfectly for the same network. Come back to my PC, turn it on, and voila! I’m still connected to Network 7 dammit.

I read something online that suggests it could be a “sticky” ID name and that it is still the right network. There’s an option to join a HomeGroup, which I do. Except this time I enter the new password from Andrea’s computer. And wait.

The computer whirs.

The icon spins and twirls.

It whirs some more.

More spinning.

Then it says, “Congrats, would you like to do something else now like….”.

Hallelujah and pass the ammunition! We have ourselves a network.

I quickly try to print to the parallel port to see if my some miracle it also fixed that but no. So I kill it, unhook it, and set up the new laser printer.

That can connect wirelessly to the router, and anything on the router can print to it. For some odd reason, it doesn’t ask me for a password, I am not sure why. Maybe because it is a printer and not a storage device. Odd, but I’m going with it for now. Bears further investigating, but not now.

I tweak a few things on my PC, and there is the new laser printer already in my setup. I love plug and play and auto discover — when it works.

I find an email I want to print, choose double-sided, and press SEND. And miracles of miracles, it prints just fine. No issues at all.

Andrea’s PC can’t print to it yet even though it can see it, but I think it is just delayed setup. Should work fine once she’s rebooted. I think. I hope. We’ll see. But *I* can print to it, and Andrea can print again to the colour. Plus all our machines are networked so files can be moved around more easily (particularly photos when I’m trying to amalgamate them all to one place for processing and backups!).

Stay tuned! But I’m hopeful I’m nearing a fully working network…

Defining an e-reader device…

The PolyBlog
January 19 2016

I posted earlier about Michael Hyatt’s article about ebooks, and why he was switching to paper for 2016, and now there’s a semi-related post from The Ebook Evangelist (How do we define an e-reader? | The eBook Evangelist). In it, the blogger references how popular vernacular talks about so-called “e-reader” device problems:

  • small screens (they mean like phones, which are not e-readers but rather phones that also have e-reader apps);
  • large screens (they mean like tablets, which are also not e-readers but rather tablets that also have e-reader apps); and,
  • blue-light, back-light problems (generally meaning phones or tablets, as most e-readers are e-ink devices without backlighting of that sort, although some e-readers DO now come with a different form of backlight).

Mostly though I’m sharing the link above as she has the same reaction I do — the articles are “confusing” (as she puts it) and “worthless” (in my vernacular) as they frequently throw apples, oranges and a few internet devices into the same basket, and then hope to draw some common issues with all of them by reviewing only one. A one-size-fits-all that really often fits none. and it hopelessly confuses the debate. Some other things bother me too:

  • people who are passionate about ebooks over paper or paper over ebooks — personally, I don’t care about format, I only care if people read;
  • people who argue that reading retention is less on e-devices vs. paper and that this is bad (first, we need to quantify those metrics, because they also include the person who switched from reading to playing a game, and the real problem with their retention isn’t retention but that they got distracted doing something else and didn’t read it in the first place; and second, before we decide it is bad, can we also revise the metrics to also measure engagement with the passive books vs. active e-devices, the opportunity for greater engagement with e-devices if they are actually used effectively, not just dumping raw text onto an e-device, not formatting it for an e-reading experience, and finding people don’t remember it as well as the nicely formatting paper book? People also retain books better than they do loose-leaf hand-written pages, the same medium in different “format”, so medium isn’t the problem); and,
  • writers who claim an ebook is devaluing the work if it is sold for less than $10 or something.

But maybe that’s just me…