You are here: Home » Blog

Equipment Malfunction: A Love Story

Posted for your edification on · Leave a Comment

Last Sun­day I got up and, like I always do, turned on my iMac to check my email. After giv­ing my pro­grams a minute to load, I returned to find a mes­sage say­ing that my pre­ferred net­work could not be located. Hm.

This type of mes­sage, though not com­mon, isn’t unheard of. My home wire­less net­work con­sists of a Linksys cable modem and an Apple Time Cap­sule. Every once in a while the modem freaks out or locks up which, in turn, screws up the Time Cap­sule. A quick reset usu­ally sets things right. But on Sun­day morn­ing, when I poked my head around the cor­ner to check the sta­tus light on the Time Cap­sule expect­ing to see a flash­ing yel­low light, I saw no light at all. Yup. No happy, steady green light. No blink­ing yel­low light. Noth­ing. Nada.

The first thing I tried was .… OOPS, you’re going to have to click HERE to find out…

Rant: Verizon’s Mis-step

Posted for your edification on · Leave a Comment

Okay, I’m unhappy — as in an unhappy consumer.

No big sur­prise, Ver­i­zon finally announced that they’ll be car­ry­ing the iPhone start­ing Feb­ru­ary 3. I’ve been wait­ing for this day for years. And now that it’s here, I stunned at the cus­tomer ser­vice gaffe Ver­i­zon is mak­ing right out of the gate.

I came to the whole cell phone party a lit­tle late. I’m sure I wasn’t the last sub­ur­ban house­wife to get a cell phone but by no means was I a “first adopter.” I was also a bit of a hold­out in adding tex­ting to our cell­phone pack­age. And here it is, 2011, and I’m still car­ry­ing a dumb­phone (if it’s not a smart­phone, it must be a dumb­phone, right?).

Of course I’ve been cov­et­ing an iPhone, I’m a all-American red-blooded Apple Fan­Boy after all. In fact, two months ago I was all set to pull the trig­ger. An iPhone was clearly in my imme­di­ate future.

Did she or didn’t she? You’ll have to click HERE to find out.

Mac App Store disappointment — iWork ’11?

Posted for your edification on · Leave a Comment

Sure, I was excited to check out the new Mac App Store on Thurs­day (don’t try to tell me it was a coin­ci­dence that the store launched on Epiphany) and like a hard-core Black Fri­day shop­per I knew my intended des­ti­na­tion before the doors even opened — iWork ’11.

We bought my 24″ iMac in July of ’08. It was my birth­day gift that year and it cost us a pretty penny — cer­tainly way more than we’d ever paid for a com­puter before. It was also my first Mac. [We had pur­chased a 1st gen­er­a­tion, lowest-model-possible Mac Mini for the kids a cou­ple of years ear­lier so the iMac was my first Mac but not the first one in the house.]

Nat­u­rally, the iMac shipped with iLife ’08 but in research­ing the pur­chase I had deter­mined that I wanted to buy the iWork ’08 suite with the com­puter. At the time this was a big deal for me — in all the years I owned PCs I don’t think I pur­chased over 1/2 a dozen soft­ware pro­grams (most of them var­i­ous Ulead prod­ucts) and I’d never even con­sid­ered buy­ing the bloated and over­priced Office suite.

A few weeks into explor­ing Pages and Num­bers, I upgraded to the Fam­ily license so I could install the iWork suite on the Mac Mini for the kids. Now I had my expen­sive and incred­i­bly won­der­ful 24″ iMac and the kids, a high school Junior and 8th grader at the time, had their shared Mac Mini and we both had the incred­i­bly ver­sa­tile and intu­itive iWork ’08 suite. Our com­put­ing lives had never been better.

When iWork ’09 was released about 4 months later I was famil­iar enough with Num­bers to be envi­ous of the upgrades in the pro­gram but still suf­fer­ing sticker shock from the iMac and extra soft­ware pur­chases. Then, by the time I was in a posi­tion of really wish­ing I owned Num­bers ’09, I fig­ured iWork ’10 couldn’t be too far away. Since I was fairly new to Mac and even newer to Mac’s soft­ware, I was dis­ap­pointed to find out that Apple didn’t offer upgrade pric­ing on their soft­ware pack­ages. Fig­ur­ing that with my luck a new ver­sion would be released just out­side of the grace-period for free upgrades, I decided bide my time but be the first in line to buy a new release.

But Jan­u­ary of 2010 came and went and no new iWork releases were announced. What the heck?! At this point there was no way I was going to spend the money on iWork ’09 — after all, it’s not like I cre­ate spread­sheets every day. Sure, the few times I have cre­ated spread­sheets I inevitably want to do some­thing that Num­bers ’08 couldn’t do but Num­bers ’09 can — but that’s noth­ing that a lit­tle pity party wouldn’t cure. The dis­ap­point­ment was never large enough to jus­tify actu­ally spend­ing money.

Finally, in Octo­ber, iLife ’11 was announced. I ordered my copy on Octo­ber 23rd. I was think­ing, any day now.… And there were plenty of rumors to fuel my burn­ing wish for an iWork upgrade includ­ing the cer­tainty that iWork ’11 would be part of the big new Mac App Store.

That’s why on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 6, after get­ting Ignatz to school and spend­ing the morn­ing at the Toy­ota deal­er­ship wait­ing for my third key to be pro­grammed, I dashed home and plunked my middle-aged butt down in front of my iMac and went straight to work. First step, upgrad­ing to 10.6.6. The first time I ran the update check my com­puter told me I was all up-to-date. Ugh! I was work­ing on a time-limit here; I didn’t think that Ignatz would be par­tic­u­larly happy with me if I was late in pick­ing him up because I was try­ing to update my com­puter so I could access the new Mac App Store. I tried the updater again and this time it worked. But every Com­cast cus­tomer within 100 miles must have been updat­ing at the same time — I prob­a­bly could have down­loaded the updates faster on a dial-up.

Finally, finally I had 10.6.6 installed and I could get into the Mac App Store. I imme­di­ately went to Num­bers. I was a lit­tle sur­prised when I didn’t find any men­tion of the changes of this new ver­sion and I was a lit­tle sur­prised that there wasn’t a lit­tle more splash sur­round­ing the new iWork suite. But there it was, clear as day in the right hand col­umn: Release date: Jan. 3, 2011. What more proof did I need? I clicked the “buy” but­ton, entered my user­name and pass­word, and true to my promise to myself, Num­bers ’11 was my first Mac App Store purchase.

But wait, what’s this? I opened Num­bers and it very clearly said Num­bers ’09. WTF!?! I imme­di­ately turned to my Num­ber 1 source of Apple info, TÚAW, and found this arti­cle. Sud­denly I didn’t feel quite the numb­skull but I did still feel quite taken advan­tage of. Where’s my Num­bers ’11, Mr. Jobs? And if I have to pay another $19.99 for it I’m going to be an awfully unhappy Apple FanBoy.

New Purchase: Brother HL-2270DW Laser Printer

Posted for your edification on · Leave a Comment

I’ve been research­ing and prepar­ing to buy a laser printer for about 5 years now. I finally pulled the trig­ger on Mon­day and bought a Brother HL-2270DW along with an extra toner car­tridge from Ama­zon. Using Baby Doll’s Ama­zon Prime account (she signed up this fall dur­ing their promo offer­ing free Prime accounts to col­lege stu­dents), I received the printer on Wednesday.

My old printer, a HP PSC 2200xi All-in-One, has seen bet­ter days. My step­son man­aged to break off the lit­tle tab that keeps the print­outs from shoot­ing across the room as they exit the printer. The flatbed scan­ner has long-since been aban­doned in favor of a Canon Canoscan 8800F. As for fax­ing, well I haven’t sent more than a dozen in all the years I’ve owned the PSC 2210xi and I don’t recall ever being in the posi­tion of receiv­ing a fax.

All that said, my intent was not so much to replace the HP All-in-One. After all, it still works. The biggest con­sid­er­a­tion in buy­ing the Brother was the astro­nom­i­cal cost of keep­ing the silly HP in ink.

Sure, the HP prints in color whereas the new Brother only prints in B&W, but the truth is I haven’t been able to bring myself to buy a new color car­tridge for the HP beast in well over a year. And when I do buy a color car­tridge, all it does is sit there dry­ing up. In all the time I’ve had the HP, no less than 99.999% of what I’ve printed has been in B&W and I’d guess that a good 75% of all color print­ing that was done — it was done in error.

Printer Specs

Model: Brother HL-2270DW The “D” des­ig­na­tion refers to auto duplex which means that the printer is capa­ble of two-sided print­ing (a big bonus to any­one con­cerned about the price of paper and/or envi­ron­men­tal issues). The “W” des­ig­na­tion refers to the fact that the printer is wire­less; it can be hooked up to an exist­ing wire­less net­work as a stand-alone periph­eral. No cables nec­es­sary (other than the power cord, of course). That means that prox­im­ity to a com­puter or router is not nec­es­sary; you can locate the printer any­where within wire­less range as long as you have access to a power out­let. Gotta love that! [If wire­less access isn’t avail­able or desired, the printer can also be con­nected via Eth­er­net cable or tra­di­tional USB cable.]

    Other fea­tures:

  • 250-sheet paper capac­ity (that’s half a ream)
  • 27ppm (pages per minute)
  • prints up to 2400x600 dpi (dots per inch) for high-quality printouts
  • straight-through paper path via man­ual feed slot for thicker paper

The Printer Arrives

The USP deliv­ery guy came while I was out but Ignatz was at home so I found the pack­ages in the front hall when I got home. I imme­di­ately unpacked the printer and went to work get­ting every­thing all set up. The process was incred­i­bly easy and straightforward.

Like all print­ers, the unit shipped with only a power cord; no USB cord included. I did end up buy­ing a 10′ Belkin USB cable even though I intend to take full advan­tage of the printer’s wire­less capa­bil­i­ties. Mostly I bought the cable because of the incred­i­bly low $3.85 price tag and because, you never know, I might need it some­day. Also, I admit, I was kind of on autopilot.

I also pur­chased a high-yield replace­ment toner car­tridge — mostly because a few Ama­zon review­ers warned that unlike ear­lier gen­er­a­tions of the Brother laser print­ers, the 2270 ships with a smaller, demo-sized toner car­tridge. I have no idea of how long this ini­tial car­tridge will last but I fig­ured I might as well be pre­pared. The replace­ment toner car­tridge did not arrive with the printer and USB cable; I should receive it sep­a­rately in another cou­ple of weeks.

Set Up

Fol­low­ing the pic­to­graph instruc­tions, it was pretty easy to fig­ure out how to open the unit, remove the plas­tic brace designed to keep cer­tain parts sta­ble dur­ing ship­ment, and remove the toner car­tridge and give it a good shake (I assume to shake up and spread out the toner), and then replace the cartridge.

Next I moved on to the Quick Setup Guide book­let that was sur­pris­ingly coher­ent and easy to fol­low. I was leery at first to use the included instal­la­tion disk (I haven’t done much of this type of instal­la­tion on my iMac but back in my PC days, instal­la­tion discs always con­tained all sorts of extra “bonus” (read: bloated, inva­sive, and unnec­es­sary) soft­ware. To my great plea­sure, this instal­la­tion disc did not try to install extra­ne­ous soft­ware — just the nec­es­sary printer drivers.

The instruc­tion book­let described three dif­fer­ent means of con­nect­ing the printer: via USB cable, via Eth­er­net, and via Wire­less. Even though the plan was to be wire­less, I did the ini­tial net­work setup using the Tem­po­rary USB cable method as described in the Quick Start man­ual because it looked the least com­pli­cated method.

Since I am the household’s IT Depart­ment, I was already in pos­ses­sion of the nec­es­sary Net­work Names and Net­work Key pass­words. Hook­ing the Brother HL-2270DW up to my password-protected Apple Time Capsule-powered wire­less net­work was as easy as select­ing my network’s name from the list of avail­able net­works and typ­ing in the Net­work Key. Bada-bing, bada-bang, bada-boom and done.

The final step was to take the instal­la­tion disc upstairs and install the dri­vers on My Love’s new Mac­Book Pro and the old beat-up Mac­Book Pro that Ignatz uses.

First Impres­sions

Nat­u­rally, I tested the printer once I had it net­worked. The first thing I noticed was that it’s a bit noisy. I’m par­tic­u­larly sen­si­tive to noise. Luck­ily, this noise I can live with — mostly because it’s not a con­stant noise.

When a job gets sent to the printer, the first thing it does is kick on what sounds like a fan. Then it prints –some­what nois­ily though it’s very dif­fer­ent from the clanky noise of the HP Deskjet. Then, after the print­ing is done, the fans stay on for another minute or two. After that, the HL-2270DW goes back to com­plete silence.

If I were in a sit­u­a­tion where the printer was going to be under almost con­stant use I’d cer­tainly look for a place far away from my desk in which to keep the printer. As it is, how­ever, even one as sen­si­tive to noise as I am shouldn’t have any trou­ble work­ing in the same room with the printer.

Never hav­ing actu­ally seen a laser printer in action, much less one capa­ble of duplex print­ing, I was sur­prised at how the duplex­ing was done. I sent a two-page print job to the printer and left the duplex print­ing default checked (see screen­shot). The printer pow­ered up, sent through a sheet, printed one side, and then rolled the paper out onto the dis­charge tray. Then it grabbed the same paper, sucked it back inside, printed the sec­ond side, and once again rolled it out onto the top dis­charge tray. I don’t know why but the interim step of send­ing the paper to the top tray sur­prised me; I expected the duplex print­ing to hap­pen as one step.

In Con­clu­sion

I’ve had the printer for two days and, so far, have printed one 2-sided doc­u­ment. To rec­om­mend this printer right on that info alone would be silly (and you’d be equally silly to base to make a deci­sion based on such flimsy expe­ri­ence, but so far I’m very pleased with my pur­chase. I plan to check back in after a month or two after I’ve put the printer through a few paces and let you know who things are going. In the mean­time, if you’re try­ing to decide whether or not to pur­chase a Brother LH-2270DW printer for your­self, I’d rec­om­mend you check around for more informed opin­ions. Amazon.com had quite a few prod­uct reviews; indeed those reviews are a large part of what helped me decide to finally buy a laser printer.

A Bee in My New (Corolla) Bonnet

Posted for your edification on · Leave a Comment

I’ve got a new four-letter-word in my vocab­u­lary: Vais. As in Vais Tech­nol­ogy. It’s their stu­pid $200 iPod Inter­face Kit that is screw­ing up my enjoy­ment of my new Toy­ota Corolla and my gen­eral sense of all-is-well-in-the-world.

I’m not an audio­phile. My stereo is a relic of the ‘80s com­plete with turntable and a set of Baby Advent speak­ers. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy music; it’s just that I don’t con­sider it a high pri­or­ity in my life and it’s def­i­nitely not some­thing I’d spend any large chunk of dis­pos­able income on. So when I was car shop­ping I could have cared less about the watts or the volts or the amps put out by the stereo sys­tem; I didn’t care how many speak­ers the car had; and I cer­tainly wasn’t going to spend an extra penny on a 6-CD changer.

That said, I am a prag­ma­tist. I’ve got two teens and if there’s one thing I’d bank on it’s the fact that they’re going to be lis­ten­ing to their iPods in the car. That why I insisted that both Sub­arus had iPod Inter­face Kits installed imme­di­ately after pur­chas­ing them. The built-in Aux­il­iary jack? Come on. Let’s be real, please. Have you ever seen a teenager in action with their iPod attached to the Aux­il­iary jack? Why not just build in a wet bar and cut out the seat belts? Their hands leave the wheel, their eyes leave the road, and their hor­mone soaked brains are even more dis­tracted than usual because well.… where is that darned thing.… I know it’s here some­where… oh, I’ve buck­led over it and it’s fallen down between the seats… wait, I can almost reach it.….

Yeah, not a pretty picture.

To me an iPod Inter­face Kit — one that hooks up through the glove com­part­ment and shows the iPod text dis­played through the stereo head unit and can be con­trolled through the stereo but­tons (or, bet­ter yet, with the audio con­trols on the steer­ing wheel itself) — that’s the most impor­tant piece of safety equip­ment a car can have.

As I men­tioned, I’ve pur­chased two such iPod Inter­face set-ups before — one on each of our Sub­arus. I know that the tech­nol­ogy is far from per­fect. In the Impreza we went with an after-market prod­uct from Car Toys. It was an entire in-dash stereo replace­ment and it had it’s quirks (like the fact that when you turned off the car your iPod kept right on play­ing and play­ing until the bat­tery was gone) but it worked. When we bought the Out­back, which had the newer one-piece dash­board that didn’t lend itself to sim­ply remov­ing a stereo and stick­ing in a new one, I went instead with Subaru’s own Inter­face Kit. This one had some quirks too, though not the same ones: turn­ing off the car also turned off the iPod but if you were look­ing for a spe­cific artist or album, for­get about it. If you had less than a dozen artists in your iPod it might have been fea­si­ble to scroll through them but on my iPod I never even made it past B.B. King, there was no way I’d ever make it to War­ren Zevon. Still, it worked.

There­fore it should come as no sur­prise that I had an iPod Inter­face Kit installed in the new Toy­ota before we picked it up. But I made a huge mis­take; I didn’t do my research. The sales­man I was deal­ing with said he could have an after­mar­ket Kit installed for $250 and it was much bet­ter than the Toy­ota Kit. Sure, I said, do it.

Explain to me how or why any­one in their right mind would design an iPod Inter­face Kit that does not allow “hot swap­ping.” Pic­ture this: you’re in your car and for one of a thou­sand dif­fer­ent rea­sons, you dis­con­nect your iPod and either hook up a dif­fer­ent iPod or recon­nect the same iPod. Well you can kiss your iPod plea­sure good­bye for the dura­tion of the trip because once you remove that iPod, baby, it ain’t work­ing again until you turn off the car and restart the engine. Oh, and bet­ter make darned sure that it’s hooked up again when you do start the car because, yup, if it wasn’t you’re S.O.L.

Sure, all of you bach­e­lors out there are think­ing what’s the big deal? Here’s the big deal: teenagers change their iPods more often than they change their minds. Get four 18-yo girls in a car and there are going to be 5 iPods. I can just pic­ture Baby Doll on a road trip: a friend says, hey, let’s lis­ten to my iPod for a while. Baby Doll, some­where on the high­way zoom­ing toward Vegas says sure, let me just pull over so we can switch. Yeah, right, like that’s gonna hap­pen. Want a more every­day sce­nario? Ignatz and I will be shar­ing the Toy­ota for the next 2.5 years. While we cer­tainly have over­lap in our music tastes (we’re both Death Cab for Cutie fans), just how far would you expect this over­lap in tastes to go between a 16-yo boy and his 46-yo mother? Sorry, but I can lis­ten to about 30 sec­onds of Nelly’s Ride Wit Me before I start feel­ing another gray hair grow­ing in.

An Ipod Inter­face that can’t be “hot swapped”? Come on guys, what in the world were you thinking?

Bot­tom line: if you want my opin­ion, you’ll stay far, far away from Vais Technology’s SoundLinQ2 SL2i iPod Inter­face Kit. I can’t speak to any of their other prod­ucts but in my mind this bone-headed over­sight doesn’t bode well for any­thing Vais designed.