Saturday, May 07, 2011
More chatter about Mac Wifi Roadrunner Software
I was able to get all my computers attached via wifi to the new Time Warner Roadrunner.... and the main goal behind that was to get this donated Macbook online since it does not like the 10 year old Westell modem.
I am typing this on the Macbook right now and accessing Dorothy with Logmein. It is advantageous for me to have some fluency in Windows, Linux, and Mac. It is really not a big deal since one does the same sorts of things in all three operating systems... so the only difference is a slight difference in the user interface and in some instances a different set of control keys. The only machine that will not connect to the new wifi is my stepsons old college Compaq XP which is service pack 2 and not service pack 3 which was the final upgrade of XP before support was discontinued. So, I have resolved to back up all useful files from that Compaq and install Ubuntu Linux on it. IF it is stable under Ubuntu and connects to the Wifi then I will get a lot of life out of it. I have one old Gateway tower that I put Ubuntu on and it connects to the wifi via Belkin USB adaptor just fine, but I think the Gateway is flaky because I always have to boot it 10 times to get it into Ubuntu.... so there is somethng unstable about the hard drive.
My wife is a gung-ho Roman Catholic from the Philippines and she wants to have the Macbook on her lap in bed so she can listen to all these online prayer services at divineoffice.org .... which has The Liturgy of the Hours... and it changes each and every day to have the correct readings, PLUS one can hear music and readers.... and then she listens to some kind of Catholic TV on the internet... her health is quite precarious so if she is at times bedridden then a laptop is a good thing, and God forbid she spends a long time in the hospital (she has been there for weeks at a time on and off for the past 10 years) then I can bring the Macbook to her and she can probably connect to the Hospital WiFi or we can get one of those USB wifi subscriptions (They go for something like $130 for the device and then $100 per month with a 5 gig per month bandwidth limit and any overage is TWENTY CENTS A MEG (not gig) and 1000 megs to a gig and it is not hard to go over 5 gig a month...
It is good for me to finally get my hands on a Mac because so many jobs ask for mac proficiency and I feel like a moron not knowing it. The great thing about google is you can say "how do your cut and paste on a mac" or "how do you kill a task in mac" and bingo it tells you.
Perhaps you are already a Mac user and I am boring you with what you already know. I have installe some software already on the Mac. I installed every known browser, Chrome, Firefox, Safari (which comes with Macbook), Opera, Windows Explorer, just to see what the differences are. Chrome works best for Logmein and the others dont like Logmein. On mac there is a little magnifying glass symbol in the upper right and whatever app or file or anything you want, you click on the magnifying glass and type CHROME or GIMP or AIRPORT or whatever you want and bingo there it is... you do not have to crawl through the disk and remember some obscure folder name or make a shortcut to the desktop... also, software installs seem simple...
Everyone says that Mac does not have virus problems, but I found a free mac antivirus with good reviews and installed it... Sophos (in Greek this means Wise) and I ran a scan, but the Mac came up clean.
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I dont like to snoop.... A Roman Catholic priest from the Philippines, my wife's friend... gave me his Toshiba Satellite laptop (Windows 7) for an entire weekend to install a $130 pen scanner... took me TWELVE HOURS of fiddling, uninstalling, reinstalling, but I got it to work. Of course the thought passes through my mind to snoop at his documents.... and see what he is up to.... but I avoid that temptation.... My impression of him is that he is clean as a whistle (he is in his 50s) and if he is NOT then that is his business and I do not want to know about it... I finally got the pen scanner working. You can run it across any test in a book or magazine and it will do OCR (optical character recognition) into an open document or spreadsheet. I requires such a steady hand and has a high enough percentage of typos that it is easier to just type the damn stuff in by hand. I brought the Toshiba back to his room in the church. About 10 priests live there because it is near Wall St. so it is big important church with large congregation. His room was IMMACULATE and chocked full of books about religion.... so I could tell what a high quality person he is.... I gave him a demo of the scanner with a book he had on one of the popes. It happened to work flawlessly during the demo. I never told him any negative criticisms about the pen scanner but a week later my wife told me that he decided it was too much of a pain. One thing I taught him.... he showed me a printout of an article that he wanted and I said "just find any unique sentence of 10 words and search in google and chances are the article is on line and you can just copy and paste. He was amazed... his eyes bugged out like I had just walked upon water or raised the dead... ha ha....
